Every week, Naijaonpoint spotlights the unfiltered stories of women navigating life, love, identity and everything in between.
What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way.
Kemi* is a 30-year-old tech sis and real estate investor split between the UK and Nigeria. She talks about meeting the woman she thought was her person, building something real across countries, and the moment a hack exposed a double life she never saw coming. This is What She Said!
My name is Kemi, and I’m 30. I work in tech, I have a remote role in the UK, and I take contract and consulting gigs in Nigeria as well. I also run real estate in Nigeria, so I’m constantly in and out. Lagos, Abuja, London, sometimes elsewhere. It’s a life I’ve built deliberately, and I love it. My family are mostly in the UK. I’m close to them, and they know I am a proud lesbian. In Nigeria, I’m more careful, but I’m not hiding. I also just ended a 2-year relationship.
It means I don’t make public announcements. Like, if I don’t tell you myself, you will never know. The people in my life know me. I’ve never been someone who lives in shame about who I am; I just pick my spaces carefully. Nigeria requires a different kind of navigation, and I’ve learned how to do that without losing myself in the process. Also, the queers back home are constantly creating safe spaces for all of us to feel welcomed, loved and accepted for who we are.
Sure. I was in the UK, give or take two years ago. I was out just having a good time, and this woman walked up to me. Just approached me with this confidence that I immediately respected. We started talking, and about twenty minutes in, I caught the Nigerian accent in her voice, and I asked where she was from.
We both just lit up immediately, you know how it is when you find your people somewhere unexpected. Turns out she was on vacation. We spent the rest of that evening talking, and something just clicked.
She went back from her vacation, and I eventually got back to Nigeria, maybe a month after that interaction. I called her. That’s how it started, just a phone call that turned into something neither of us was fully planning for.
She’s 28, but then she was about 26, I believe. She’s very creative, and she’s into photography, videography, and DJing. Very talented, very magnetic. She makes any room feel more alive just by being in it. She’s pansexual, which I knew from early on, and that was never an issue for me. I’m polyamorous by nature, though I’ve never been the type who needs or prefers multiple relationships. I am often very content and happy with just one partner, but I am just aware that I am able to love and be with multiple people at the same time. So, I’d been very happily monogamous in this relationship. She was enough.
Electric. It started electric and became warm, and that warmth is what made it feel real. We were building something, not just a relationship but a whole intercountry life. She’d come to me, I’d go to her, we had our rhythm. It felt genuinely good.
We were both present and invested. I have more financial resources than she does; that’s just the reality. I work in tech and real estate, and I’ve built well for myself. I am also considered a “nepo baby”. I am aware of my privilege. She earns from her creative work, and it’s good money for what it is, but it’s not the same level. I spent millions on her over the course of our relationship, and I did it because I wanted to. Because she was my person, and that’s what you do for your person.
I did notice things, though. She was consistently able to afford certain trips, certain things that I couldn’t fully account for on a photographer and DJ’s income. I’d wonder sometimes. But she didn’t like discussing money, and she showed up in other ways, so I let it go. I told myself I was being ungenerous, that maybe I just didn’t fully understand her finances.
What She Said: My Husband Wants a Child. I Don’t
About a year in, I started getting calls and texts. Things were being sent to me that were clearly meant to alert me to something. A lot of it was this person implying that my partner was cheating, but not in so many words. I noticed. I wasn’t blind, but I also didn’t have the full picture yet, and I loved her, so I kept moving. Which I now understand was me not wanting to see what was right in front of me.
She was hacked this year. Her social media, her contacts, everything. And whoever hacked her used that access to send out her nudes and photos of her in compromising positions with various men, to her entire contact list. And posted publicly on her socials. I was among the people who received them.
I can’t fully describe it. It was like the ground just disappeared. You’re looking at images of someone you love, someone you’ve built with, someone you trusted completely, and you’re seeing a version of them that was apparently always there and you just never knew.
And the thing that hit me hardest wasn’t even the betrayal in isolation. It was the volume of it. It wasn’t one person, one mistake, one moment of weakness. It was a whole parallel life. A string of men who had been consistently financing her trips, things, and lifestyle, and she had been paying them back in kind. This had been happening the entire time.
That’s the part that still makes me feel sick when I think about it. One of her close friends, someone I had gotten close to myself over the course of our relationship, someone I considered part of my circle, was one of them. I had welcomed this person. Sat across from this person and had genuine conversations. And the whole time…
I haven’t fully processed it, if I’m honest. The intimacy of that betrayal is different. It’s one thing for there to be strangers. It’s another thing entirely for it to be someone you yourself had let in. That requires a kind of audacity that I’m still wrapping my head around.
This is the part I keep coming back to. I am polyamorous. I had been genuinely, happily monogamous in this relationship because she was against anything open or poly. She made that very clear early on; she wanted monogamy, and I respected that because I wanted her.
But here’s what I now know. She wasn’t living monogamously. She was living a version of the life I would have been completely open to, multiple partners, different connections, except she was doing it secretly, funded by men, while telling me she needed exclusivity. She knew I was poly. She knew I would have been open to a conversation. She chose deception anyway.
I would have said yes. If she had just been honest, I would have said yes. That is the thing I cannot get past. Not having other people. It’s her choosing to lie about it when she didn’t have to.
I ended it.
She’s not really letting it be over. She keeps reaching out, keeps trying to find a way back in. Which I understand on a human level, two years is two years, and feelings don’t just stop. But I also know what I know now, and I can’t unknow it.
And on top of that, get this. The bitch is pregnant. She doesn’t know who the father is. And she wants me to stay. She’s asking me to make it work. I have been laughing since I found out, again through social media. What does she want me to say?
I genuinely don’t have words for what it is to be asked that. To be asked to stay by someone who maintained a whole secret life, whose nudes were sent to your phone, who let a man you considered a friend be part of her deception, who is now carrying a pregnancy she cannot even attribute. And to be asked to make it work.
I loved her. I really did. I’m not going to pretend that’s disappeared overnight because it hasn’t. But love is not the only thing that matters. What you do with someone’s love matters too. What she did with mine is something I have to sit with every day right now.
That’s one of the most disorienting parts of a betrayal like this. You start reviewing everything. Every comment she made that you laughed off, every time money appeared from nowhere, every moment where something felt slightly off, but you chose to believe in her instead. And you realise you weren’t oblivious because you were stupid. You were oblivious because you were in love, and you were happy, and you trusted her. And she knew that, and she used it.
The male-centredness of it is what gets me the most on reflection. Because looking back, there were signs. Things she said, ways she operated around men, certain dynamics I clocked but didn’t sit with long enough. She was very comfortable with a particular kind of male attention, and I understand now what that was funding. I just couldn’t see it because I was too busy genuinely enjoying what we had.
Trust yourself. That’s the only thing I know for certain right now. When something doesn’t add up, when your body is telling you to look closer, when the little things are quietly accumulating, trust that. Not in a paranoid way. Just in a self-respecting way.
I was happy. Genuinely happy. And I don’t regret that happiness because it was real for me, even if it wasn’t fully real for her. But I also wish I had given more weight to the things that didn’t sit right. I wish I had asked the questions I was afraid to ask.
You can love someone and still demand the truth from them. Those things are not in conflict. I just forgot that for a while.
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