How I met my wife…
In other words, how the forces of the universe conspired to find me a wife.
It’s 2017, and I was a young blood at Obafemi Awolowo University, OAU, moving through my fourth year as a boy who had already made peace with his transcript. My grades had died somewhere around year two and never recovered, so by year four, I had stopped pretending to care. I went to class like once a week, and spent the rest of my time chasing the bag, freelancing.
OAU was a strange place, slow-paced and fast-paced at the same time, depending on who you were. For most students, life revolved around CGPAs and carryovers. For me, life revolved around making money and trying to grab a C in every course.
I lived off-campus, in a place called Cooperative Hostel. A tiny room with two floor beds and two other guys. Three grown men sharing a space sounds absurd now, but it was big boy living back then.
I was in my early twenties, confident in ways that only twenty-somethings can be, and absolutely certain that I understood how the world worked.
I did not.
There was this other girl…
She was in year one. Nineteen years old, maybe. As fresh as they come. The kind of fresh that year-four guys like me assumed we had automatic jurisdiction over.
Her birthday was coming up. Around mid-July. And I had a plan.
I bought her a pair of shoes. A black Adidas.
It was fake Adidas.
I mean, I didn’t know it was fake. Or maybe I knew but chose not to care. It looked exactly like the original, or at least it looked like what I imagined the original looked like. It was around 30K naira. A significant investment for a young blood like me.
The plan was simple: give her the shoe, and somewhere in the flow of her gratitude, smoothly transition into asking her out. Sharp guy.
Her birthday arrived.
I sent her a message. Something smooth and creative, cos’ you know, I’m a god when it comes to writing.
“She will love it”, I said to myself. I don’t remember the exact words. But I know the message was bait. I was waiting for her to respond so we could “link up” and I could execute my plan.
I was lying on my bed in that tiny room, refreshing WhatsApp.
Then I checked her status.
She was at a restaurant. Someone was filming her; that much was clear from the camera angles. She was smiling, laughing, and giving the kind of vibe that suggested someone else had gotten there first. I didn’t see the guy. But in one of the videos, just for a second, I spotted a hand. A male hand. The fingernails confirmed it.
I studied that video for almost two hours, analysing every frame. By the end of my investigation, the verdict was clear.
A guy had carried her out for her birthday.
It was 4 pm on what was supposed to be my day of triumph, and instead, I was lying on my bed, pissed off, staring at the ceiling, thirty thousand naira poorer and no closer to having a ‘babe’.
My ego had been touched. I had lost to the ops.
I stayed angry for some days. Then, slowly, I forgot about her.
The abandoned Adidas shoe…
A few weeks passed. Life moved on. But the shoe remained.
It sat at the top of that worn-out wardrobe, in a position where I had to stand on my toes just to reach it.
Every now and then, I’d catch a glimpse of it up there, gathering dust, and I’d feel a small sense of embarrassment, or just the particular sadness of wasted intention.
Then… I had a random idea.
At the time, I was doing some informal marketing for a restaurant called Foodie (I think that’s the name), an online food ordering and delivery app that also had a small spot in New Buka, inside the school. It wasn’t paid work, not really. Just me helping out and being supportive of a friend.
One day, I looked up at that dusty shoe and thought: “How can I get rid of this thing?”
Then a more interesting thought came: “Can I get rid of it AND get something out of it?”
Now… because I’m a genius, or at least I was convinced of this at the time, I came up with a plan. A marketing activation. A way to turn my romantic failure into brand awareness.
I created a promotional design for the restaurant. And I posted on my WhatsApp status: “Post this promotional flyer on your WhatsApp status. Whoever gets the highest views within 24 hours wins this shoe.”
Funny how back then, having a lot of WhatsApp status views was a flex.
Before I knew it, FOODIE flyers were everywhere. People I didn’t know were posting. The challenge had taken on a life of its own.
I had no idea that somewhere in that chaos, a stranger was about to enter my life.
Her Separate World…
In the same universe, but on the other end of the university (haha, see what I did there? 😂), there was this random girl named Mimiejay.
She was also a year-four student studying Agricultural Economics. A degree I considered ‘weird’. Why would anyone go to school to study farming? 😂
While I was skipping classes and posting flyers, she was doing weird stuff like going to an actual farm, daily, for practicals, they called it “farm year“. I’m still not entirely sure what they were planting on that farm, but she would show up every day, like farming was her calling 🤣
She was quiet. Laid-back. The kind of person who observed more than she spoke. She wore glasses, the serious type, and had a face that seemed to default to smiling.
She was a church girl. That was “word on the street”, as they say. The type who probably had many contacts on WhatsApp because she had preached the gospel from coast to coast, saving souls and their corresponding phone numbers along the way.
She had an older brother named Yhemolee, who was popular on campus. He and I had crossed paths before, and ended up on each other’s WhatsApp, but we didn’t really know each other.
And that was about to change.
Then… Yhemolee saw my WhatsApp status.
The one about the shoe challenge.
As heaven would have it, he forwarded my story to his sister.
Maybe she needed a new shoe. Maybe she thought it was original Adidas, lord knows I had thought the same thing when I bought it. Maybe she was just bored between farming activities. Whatever the reason, Mimie saw the challenge, and something about it caught her attention.
She posted the flyer.
The next day, a message appeared in my DMs from a number I didn’t recognise. The profile said Mimie_Jay.
I recognised the name instantly.
First thing I did, before reading the message, was check her profile picture.
She’s cute, I said to myself.
Then I read the message:
“Hi, my brother forwarded this to me. I heard you’re doing a challenge. I got 424 views.”
She had attached a screenshot as proof.
My first thought, genuinely, was: How do you have 424 people on your WhatsApp? You have the energy to save 424 contacts? It seemed like a lot of admin for one person.
Sadly, she was too late. Plus, someone else had already won, a random guy who ran a WhatsApp TV with over 700 views. I have no idea what he did with a female shoe, but there was no gender restriction in the rules, so technically, he won fair and square.
But I was not about to let a fine girl slide into my DM and slide back out.
So I pivoted.
“I don’t have the shoe anymore,” I typed, “but guess what? I can do you something better. How about I send you some food from the restaurant that’s being promoted?”
Her response was immediate and unromantic:
“Sure, I don’t mind.”
I asked what she wanted, which further made the conversation more nonchalant:
“Beans and plantain”, she said.
I sent her the beans and plantain.
She got her beans and plantain.
Funny enough, she doesn’t even eat beans anymore. I’m not sure what she was going through in 2017 that had her craving beans, but whatever it was, I’m grateful for it.
And that was it…
We didn’t meet immediately after the beans. What followed were days of chatting. Then calls.
She had has a sense of humour that matched mine. That was the thing that got me. I even called her a “farmer” and she counter-called me a “computer repairer”, because I was studying computer science; the score was 1-1.
Now, how she went from eating beans to becoming my wife is a longer story for another day.
But here’s what I think about sometimes, when I’m feeling philosophical:
A ridiculous number of things had to align for this to happen.
I had to buy a shoe for a girl. That girl had to break my heart by posting a WhatsApp status she forgot to hide from me. I had to be petty enough to let the shoe gather dust for weeks instead of just giving it to someone else. I had to be doing free marketing for a restaurant. I had to have the idea to turn my failure into a promotion. Yhemolee had to see my status. He had to decide, for no particular reason, to forward it to his sister. She had to care enough about a shoe to participate. She had to lose the challenge but message me anyway. I had to be smooth enough, or desperate enough, to offer her food as a consolation. She had to want beans.
If any single one of those things hadn’t happened, I might be single today.
Today is Mimie’s birthday, and this is one way for me to reminisce about how we met, because, to be honest, she’s actually the best thing to have happened to me.
Happy birthday, Mimie.