Who Will Marry Adetutu – Episode 1

A 23 year old’s guide to love, longing, and life.

Journal Entry 1 

1/1/2025

It’s 12:10 on a Thursday night— or rather, Friday morning. ‘Deep calleth unto deep’ by Nosa and Abbey Ojomu is playing loudly from my laptop.

 I am listening. No. I am charging my environment. Preparing my spirit.

My mind? It’s somewhere else. 

I am thinking. Daydreaming. Creating my husband. My perfect man. My person. My partner. The one.

It doesn’t help that I spoke to my best friend today. My best friend, Dayo, the man that I loved for eight years. Eight. I don’t love him anymore though. I outgrew loving him. 

Actually, I grew in Christ and my desires changed. Now, I want someone different. My perfect man has changed, and he is no longer picture perfect. 

The problem is, I do not know how to tell him this. I do not want him to hate God or think God is the reason he is losing me. Already, he has a fragile relationship with God, and I do not want him to question God’s love even more. 

His relationship with God has always been a concern to me, because I love God. I love God a lot and I loved him too. 

But now, I love God more. Thankfully. 

It took a while for me to get here. For me to get to a point where God was all that mattered. To accept the model of man God prescribed. It took eight years. Crazy. 

But I am here now, and I couldn’t be happier. 

Except, he is moving to Nigeria after years in the U.S. And I might be forced to have the conversation — the one where I tell him my heart is no longer where it used to be. But I’d rather face this difficult conversation than have to explain to God why I let a man I do not love kiss me. 

You see, this is the part I really love about reigniting your relationship with God. The childlike conscience. The childlike love. It’s truly exciting. Everything matters, everything counts and all I want is to make God proud. 

I pray I always feel this way. 

It’s 12:22 now. I have some work to do, so I should get to it. Deep calleth unto deep is still playing. It’s a pretty long song. I like that. 

That’s it. That’s all for now dear journal. I hope I have the energy to write to you tomorrow night. 

In the meantime, that’s all the tea from the life and times of a 22-year-old trying to figure out life—life with Christ. 

Till tomorrow,

Adetutu

——————————————————————————————————————

I met Dayo during my final year in secondary school. 

I’d heard about him long before that, but I’d never seen him. I guess you could say he was popular—or maybe we just had too many mutual friends. Either way, I always wondered, who is this guy sef?

Then, at a friend’s get-together, I saw him for the first time.

I was unimpressed.

 He was tall. That was it. Tall. 

Nothing compared to my first crush in secondary school who was a short king… a medium king but a very stylish medium. Albeit a very dumb, stylish and caring medium height king. 

He was also not friendly. Which went against everything I had heard about him. I expected him to walk up to me and say hi but he didn’t. Shocking. 

I am no snob, so I walked to him instead.

 ‘Hi,’ I said. 

He responded— dryly. 

That was enough for me. I ignored him for the rest of the party and had fun with my other friends. We were all grappling at the moments we could get because graduation was fast approaching and soon, we won’t see each other for the next five years. Some? ten.  

The party ended and I went back to my sister’s best friend’s house where I’d been camping out till graduation day. I was in front of the mirror, wiping off some very sticky absolut lip gloss when I my phone rang.

An unknown number.

‘Hi, I am sorry’. 

I frowned, confused.

‘Please who is this?’ I asked. 

‘It’s Dayo. We met at the party, and I don’t think I greeted you well. I am sorry, I was having a bad day”.

Oh, so he is friendly.

‘No worries, it happens’. I responded. 

We talked for five minutes. Then thirty. Then four hours. 

We talk about everything secondary school students talk about—looming WAEC results, favourite subjects, crushes and bullies.

 By 1:00 am, we finally decided we’d had enough of each other—for that night, at least.

The flow of the conversation, the ease of it, how fast both of us were vulnerable, it felt refreshing. Light. Deep. 

It was the first conversation, but at this point I knew this man—no, boy, was going to be…different. 

Different is such a complex word. Looking back, I do not know if that was a good or bad thing.

‘Wow, I feel like I have known you for years’ he texted after we hung up. 

‘Me too,’ I replied. ‘I do not know which is harder to believe—that you’ve had so many exes in secondary school, or that you told me all about them’.

He laughed and made me promise not to tell his friends he had spilled so much to me in just a day of meeting me. 

‘Cross my heart’, I said. ‘I won’t say a word’.

And I meant it. I’m good at keeping people’s secrets. 

‘Goodnight Tutu. it was so nice to speak with you’.

 The first goodnight of a thousand to come–goodnights that would shape me in ways I wasn’t yet ready to admit.