Marriage was a gay man’s shield. Exposure forced him to start again
LGBTQ+ Nigerians benefit from the support provided by volunteer counselors via the Qtalk app, which is supported by this site and by the St. Paul’s Foundation for International Reconciliation. Download Qtalk from Google Play or the Apple Store.
This series presents their stories. For Qtalk users’ security, they are identified only with pseudonyms.
When Kenechukwu first tapped the “Start Session” button on the Qtalk app, he was already trembling. He was 29 years old, the only son in a family that had pinned so many of its hopes on him, and for the last six years he had worked quietly as a cashier with a microfinance bank, counting other people’s fortunes while his own life felt like a ledger he could never balance.
“I married her because I thought that was the only way to protect everyone I loved,” he typed in his opening message. “Every day I wake up and pretend I am someone I am not.”
His counselor read and waited. What followed were days of sessions that peeled back years of fear and grief. Kenechukwu had grown up knowing he was gay, but he held that truth deeply, closer even than joy. In his family, expectations were a form of currency, and he had little of his own. Marriage, he believed, would keep peace at home and allow him to keep his secret.
“It was never about love the way people understand it,” he told the counselor. “It was about survival.”
His wife, Ada, was bright and affectionate in her own reserved way. At first, she believed in their union. But a few months ago, while he was at work, she picked up his phone. She had asked simply for his password. He gave it, trusting that the heart of what he hid would stay hidden.
What she found were messages, photos, and affectionate exchanges with men he had loved in his early twenties. Nothing public. Nothing dangerous. But to Ada, they were enough.
“I saw the pieces of him that were not mine,” she told him when he returned home that day.
For a time, she kept it to herself. Kenechukwu left work early and stayed quiet, hoping it was something they could weather together. Then the unexpected happened. Ada discovered she was pregnant. And with that discovery came a shift he hadn’t seen coming.
“She didn’t cry,” he said in one session. “She told me she had loved me in the way a woman loves her partner. But she said I belonged to other men in ways she could not ever be.”
She gave him weeks to explain, to plead, to promise change. When nothing satisfied her, she made a decision that broke him open. She told his parents. She told his manager at the bank. “She said they deserved to know who I really was,” he said.
His mother cried for hours. His father stopped speaking during dinner and stared at his plate. At the bank, a senior colleague cornered him in the staff kitchen, eyes wide with accusation. “People talk,” the colleague said. “You should have kept some things to yourself.”
Kenechukwu felt hollowed out.
“What hurts most,” he told his therapist, “is that I thought I had given someone honesty in the space where honesty was possible. And yet there was no room for it.”
In the early weeks of therapy, the counselor asked him to slow down, to give words to emotions he had locked away. He spoke of guilt, of the constant ache of being inadequate, and the fear that he had lost his chance for a life that could have been different.
“I want to be real,” he said one afternoon. “Not for them. Not for her parents. Not for my colleagues. I want to be real for myself.”
The counselor guided him through grounding exercises and gentle reflections. Gradually, the conversation shifted from shock to evidence of persistence. He described how, after the initial breakdown, Ada had insisted on a divorce and that she intended to raise the child alone without him involved. He said, “At first I wanted to fight her, to make her see how much I could change. Then I understood she was fighting for a life of dignity for herself and the baby.”
Towards the end of the documented sessions, he talked about his first tentative steps toward rebuilding. He began to set boundaries around contact with his parents and at work. He sought out one close friend he trusted with the full truth. He started to practice saying to himself, each morning, “I exist outside fear.“
“I don’t know what love looks like yet,” he wrote in his final logged session. “But I know this: I will not hide in fear anymore.”
His situation has not been resolved in a simple or clean way. He is no longer married. The relationship with his parents is cautious. At the bank, the air remains strained. But through the therapy, he learned to see his experience as part of a larger struggle many queer Nigerians face — the negotiation between personal truth and survival in families and workplaces that demand conformity.
In the quiet hours after his last session, he sent one final note to his counselor: “I’m not healed. But I have begun again.”
The work of living honestly, he now knows, will take longer than any app notification. But for the first time in years, he believes he has the space to try.
