Fatima Zahra Umar
“Mariya, I have been faking my orgasms for 30 years. Every single one.”
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The words, heavy with a lifetime of deceit, hung in the air of the Maitama living room. Binta, with her silver-streaked hair, traced the intricate floral pattern on her teacup, her knuckles white.
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She couldn’t meet Mariya’s gaze.
Mariya, a woman who had built her life on straight lines and solid foundations, blinked. “Thirty years, Binta? Since you and Hamza were married?” Her voice was soft, laced with disbelief.
”In the beginning, it was fear,” Binta confessed, her gaze finally lifting to meet her friend’s watery but steady eyes. “Fear of disappointing him. He was so proud, so sure of himself. I couldn’t bear to be the one to burst his bubble.”
She recounted their early days in Garki, building a life as Abuja grew around them. As Hamza’s career as a government official soared, Binta’s secret became heavier, a silent accomplice to their public success.
“It felt like I was living a double life. The woman everyone saw—the hostess of elegant dinners, the mother who chaired PTA meetings, the wife of a powerful man—was a lie. The real me was so much smaller, so much less fulfilled.”
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Mariya took her hand. “Why now?”
Binta’s lips curved into a small, sad smile. “I saw a young couple at the new art gallery in Wuse last week. They were so open, so free.
It made me realize how much of my own life I had kept closed off. Hamza, is a good man. He deserves better than a ghost in his bed. And I deserve more than this silence.”
The sun began to set, casting a golden glow through the windows. Mariya, ever the pragmatist, helped Binta map out a plan. She would choose a quiet weekend moment to talk to Hamza, not with accusation, but with a vulnerable confession.
But the plan fell apart the moment Hamza walked in. The quiet resolve Binta had built crumbled, replaced by a fierce, long-simmering rage.
”Hamza, I’ve been faking it for 30 years,” she said, her voice trembling. “Every single time. I’ve endured bad sex for years, sex that felt empty, like a performance. But you know what’s worse? I think you’ve been getting what you want from someone else.”
Hamza’s face was a mask of confusion. “Infidelity? Binta, what are you talking about?”
”The perfumed scarf in the car? The late nights you ‘work’ and the phone you keep locked away?” Her voice rose.
“Don’t lie to me. I’ve lived with lies for thirty years—yours and my own. And do you know how many times I’ve looked at other men and felt a spark? The CEO of that tech firm, the younger architect who worked with Mariya—I’ve seen men I wanted. Men who looked at me like I was a woman, not just a wife. But I never acted on it. Discipline and commitment kept me faithful.”
A chilling silence descended. The man who had always been so composed was now a portrait of wounded fury.
”You think you’re the only one who’s been suffering?” Hamza’s voice was a low, dangerous whisper. “Thirty years of you lying there like a mannequin. I thought it was me. I tried everything to make you feel something.
I came to believe that you were just naturally cold. You talk about discipline, but what about passion? You starved me of it, Binta. You wonder why I look at other women? Why did I need to feel alive?”
He stood up, his tall frame looming over her. “Yes, I’ve had affairs. Not because I didn’t love you, but because I needed to feel like a man. I needed to feel a woman’s desire, her pleasure. You were so busy being ‘disciplined’ you didn’t even notice you were killing us.”
His voice was a hollow whisper now, filled with a bitter confession. “Do you remember the day I came home late from that government contract signing? It was with a construction firm. The lead architect had a young apprentice.
A young woman named Samira. She was just 20, fresh out of university, and she looked at me like I was the most fascinating person in the room. Not a husband, not a father, but a man. For an hour, in that quiet office, I felt alive. I felt seen.
We talked about architecture, about art, about life. And she just… she looked at me with such genuine awe. I knew it was wrong, but it was like a drug.”
Hamza’s eyes, filled with a mix of shame and a raw, honest pain, finally met hers.
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“I’m not proud of it. But when I came home to you, and you were just there, in the same silent way, it just made me angrier. It made me feel like I wasn’t just faking my orgasms, but my entire marriage.”
Binta collapsed onto the sofa, the fight gone from her. She had come to him expecting a monster, a villain who would crumble under her righteous fury. Instead, she had found a wounded man who had been just as lost and lonely as she had been.
Their 30-year lie had finally exploded, leaving them in the ruins of their own making. The perfect life they had built in Abuja was nothing but a beautiful, empty facade, now shattered beyond repair.
The raw emotions that followed the fight were not a storm of furious words, but a silent, desolate landscape. Hamza stood by the window, his back to Binta, his reflection superimposed over the distant, glittering lights of the city he had helped build.
He felt a profound emptiness, a chilling relief that the truth was finally out, mingled with the bitter taste of his own betrayal. He had confessed to his infidelity, not out of guilt, but out of a desperate, wounded need to justify his actions, to show her that he wasn’t a monster, just a man who had been starving for connection.
The image of Samira’s young, adoring face flashed in his mind, and he felt a sharp pang of shame. He hadn’t just cheated on Binta; he had cheated on the very idea of their marriage.
Across the room, Binta sat on the sofa, her body heavy with a fatigue that went deeper than bones. She had prepared for this moment for weeks, but nothing could have prepared her for Hamza’s confession.
The affair with a 20-year-old Samira was a knife twist in a wound she didn’t even know she had. It wasn’t just the betrayal; it was the chilling realization that he had felt so unseen, so unloved, that he sought validation from someone so young. Her own rage had evaporated, replaced by a hollow grief.
She had spent a lifetime protecting a lie, believing her commitment was an act of virtue, only to discover it was a slow-acting poison that had been killing them both.
The discipline she had been so proud of now felt like a cage she had built for herself, and for him. The perfect life they had built together in Abuja now felt like a magnificent tomb, and they were finally suffocating in it.
The next morning, Mariya found Binta on her doorstep, looking as if she had not slept in days. The perfectly coiffed hair was disheveled, and her expensive caftan was wrinkled. Without a word, Mariya pulled her inside, sat her down, and put a kettle on. The easy rhythm of their friendship, built over decades, was a soothing balm.
”He told me everything,” Binta said, her voice a reedy whisper. “Not just about the affair, but about how lonely he was. How he thought I was ‘naturally cold.'”
The words hung in the air, a bitter indictment.
Mariya didn’t offer empty platitudes.
Instead, she asked, “What do you want, Binta? What do you want for yourself?”
Binta looked down at her hands, the hands that had hosted countless dinners and written checks for charities, but had never truly belonged to her. “I don’t know,” she confessed.
“I feel like a stranger in my own life. I spent thirty years building this… this facade. The perfect wife, the perfect mother. I don’t even know who Binta is without all of that.”
”She’s still there,” Mariya said gently. “Underneath the layers of lies you were both living. You have to find her again.”
The journey began with small, almost imperceptible steps. Binta started saying “no.” She declined an invitation to a society luncheon. She didn’t host the weekly family dinner.
The initial shock from her social circle was palpable, but Binta felt a strange sense of liberation. She began taking long walks in Millennium Park, the meticulously landscaped gardens and the sound of the fountains a stark contrast to the sterile quiet of her home.
She enrolled in a pottery class, her hands, once so disciplined and controlled, now molding and shaping the clay with a raw, imperfect energy.
One afternoon, a few weeks later, she called Mariya excitedly. “I made something, Mariya! It’s a bowl, but it’s lopsided. The colors are all wrong. And it’s mine. It’s truly mine.”
Mariya listened, a wide smile on her face. “That’s how you find yourself again, Binta. In the beautiful mess of it all”
Binta’s relationship with Hamza was now a fragile truce. They moved through their home like ghosts, each respecting the other’s need for space. The silence was no longer heavy with deceit; it was now filled with a quiet, uncomfortable honesty.
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They were two people who were once a single unit, now staring at each other from across a vast, desolate landscape. They had been so consumed by their lies that they had forgotten how to be truly human with each other. The question of whether their marriage could be salvaged was no longer the most pressing one.
For Binta, the real journey was just beginning. It was the journey of finally coming home to herself.