Four months to our wedding! Hurray!
December 13th has always seemed far away to me b4 now. But suddenly, it feels like tomorrow. This whole ‘Mrs’ thing is so much realer to me now. It’s not my fantasy (& i fantasize a lot!) or my imagination doing over-time. This is actually happening! U betcha am excited as hell, but am also scared shitless. It’s crazy really. Me, Florida. I am really going to be married to a Nigerian man! A naija who’s never been abroad @ that! I mean, am told dat am so frigging emancipated that only an oyibo or oyiborized man can manage me! How did i wind up with MM & to the point that i feel like it’d be ordained to be like this. Doesn’t it just show you that a lot of times God’s ways r so different from what we envisaged. So, how did we meet? I have this very good friend, Nonie, who works @ Zenith Bank with MM. She and MM just recently got jisting. They used to be nodding acquaintances, till something brought them to a closer friendship.
7th Feb. 2008, MM goes to her and says he’s looking for a wife, does she have any recommendation. Nonie said yes, me. Then, she contacted me and warned me not to fuck up oh. She marketed him so well that i, who hadn’t wanted a relationship for the next 6 months to 1 year, said fine. 1 hour later, MM sends me a text introducing himself and says he’d call later. I replied that it was ok. But, work and all made me not to save his number. Thus when he called, i didn’t know it was him. He reintroduced himself and we talked briefly. He said he’d call back, i said ok and we ended the call. Truthfully, i wasn’t impressed! First and foremost, his English was below my usual standard and my standard is pretty astronomical. Secondly, he sounded stiff and too business-like. I was like, does this man realize that he’s wooing a woman and not closing a deal?
In the evening of that day, MM called back as he promised (and majorly scored a point for keeping his word). I’d slept then, but in the morning i sent him a text apologizing for not answering his call. He called again in the day, we talked. I think he called again in the evening, but i can’t quite remember now. Anyways, what i know is that on Val’s day he sort of told me what he wanted. I say ‘sort of’ cos i honestly can’t say now that there was a proposal. My reply: i told him i just wanted friendship. It’d been barely 3 months i walked out of a relationship that wasn’t going anywhere no matter how badly i’d wanted it to, and i felt i needed time to heal properly. MM says if it’s time i needed, no problem. However, one week after that he wanted to know what’s up. It was really funny, cos it’d only been one week! The man knew what he wanted, i tell you. He tried to reassure me that he wasn’t going to be a bad husband and all. I have to admit, i liked hearing that. I told him about my parents and my fears about marriage, but it didn’t deter him. So, i said alrighty. That was the 21st of Feb, 2 weeks on the dot from the first day we spoke to each other!
Was i excited about being engaged? Hell no. I was frightened. I tot i’d just done something really crazy. I mean, am nuts but this was simply over the top. I was afraid of what people would say, so i didn’t want to say anything initially (when i finally started telling, i pushed the date backward so it’d appear that we’d known for a longer period). Nonie, when i did tell her what i’d done, was alarmed. She was like ‘this is too fast, this is too fast’. My mom too! I was really surprised about my mom, cos isn’t she d one who’d been bugging me to consider someone? I guess what stunned her the most was that i hadn’t seen MM face 2 face, (and i was supposed to be so into looks eh) so how can i be so sure he was my Mr Right. All those reactions made me wonder if i’d done the right thing. For starters, am not ur regular fairy-tale meeting kind of girl, so how could i be d one doing this things that sounded like something out of the movies? But the doubts were only for a short while. There was this connection i felt with MM that was incredible. Even though we’d only just known each other, i felt so much @ home with him. I told him loads of things about me, the good, bad and terrible. I tot now he knows i don’t fit into the mould of a ‘good’ girl/wife, that should make him think twice. Nada. He wanted me and that was it.
