One of my biggest fears growing up was married men, as funny as it sounds, I really had a heightened fear for a man once I knew he was married.

I’ll give you the background story and tell you the point of this post.

I grew up very quickly physically, puberty came early and so when I was 13/14, I looked like I was 19, my mum still teases me till now about how she really thought I was going to be so much taller than I am, but thankfully, the growth stopped at a certain point, but I still had to deal with having not looked my size while I was young.

I would go out with friends, or just be walking down the road to get something from the store and men with wedding bands would stop in their cars in an attempt to speak to me, or they’ll approach me at social gatherings and try chatting me up when I was so young, so it made me scared of them, I don’t know how my brain interpreted it but I harboured a phobia from such a young age.

To crown it, in high school, when I even started getting mentally mature enough to handle these things, I remember some guy who I met at a camp befriended me, he was one of the resource persons there and he was so young as well. He would chat me up whenever I was on holiday after the camp and we were really cool, till a lazy scroll on Facebook one day brought me to a post of HIS WIFE wishing him a happy birthday, with his picture plastered across my screen, raahh, that was the peak for me, I mentally decided never to say more than a greeting to a married man, so long as I didn’t have a sensible reason to do so.

I’m older now, my own friends and peers have started getting hitched, which is placing me more in the midst of the crowd of married men every once in a while, there’s the uncomfortable feeling I sometimes get but I’m reminding myself that all is fine and they aren’t threats to me.

Still speaking on the background thing from the last blog post, some people aren’t even able to recognise some of the baggage they’ve carried from growing up, some of the fears they have that was fed by an experience they had growing up, it ends up playing out in a more negative way than they intend because these things are first in your mind before they even become actions, if we don’t tackle the things that hold us back as a result of the experiences we’ve had, we’ll become monsters unintentionally.

Some of us need to go back and confront fears, re-think ideologies and just explore our minds to see why we see things the way we do, and if you don’t get a cogent enough reason, it might be worth doing away with that ideology, like how I harboured thoughts from so young that all married men were monsters and liars.

To finish my story, young as I was I was actually savage, I confronted him back, I remember I text him and I said “You didn’t tell me you were married”, and you won’t even believe what he replied back!!!

ROTFL

He really said “I have a twin brother”. Like this man really underestimated my student female brain and because I can be such a pusher, I asked him to send me a picture of himself and his brother and for about 2 days he kept giving excuses, until the third day I went back to the picture I saw on Facebook that his wife posted and commented “Happy Birthday, God bless your Family”.

He never text me again, cause he probably realised game was over but he scarred terribly my perception of married men when I already wasn’t even comfortable around them in the first place.

We have to deal with past hurts, pain, fears and ideologies. The way we’ve learnt to survive might not be the way we want to continue to live.