The Nigerian experience is physical, emotional, and sometimes international. No one knows it better than our features on #TheAbroadLife, a series where we detail and explore Nigerian experiences while living abroad.
Tobi (24) was a girl’s girl until she moved to Canada and had five painful fallouts with the women she befriended. In this story, she shares how male-centred women have hurt her and made life in Canada lonelier than she thought it would be.
Where do you live, and when did you move from Nigeria?
I live in Canada. I left Nigeria in January 2023 to start a university program.
How has life been since you moved to Canada?
I’m honestly not enjoying the experience. It’s so cold and lonely, and the weather particularly affects everybody’s emotions. I’m almost in my third year of university, and nothing has changed.
Have you tried making friends?
I’ve tried, but most of the friends I’ve made in Canada are male-centred. When they are single, we are okay and enjoying our friendship, but they become distant when they find a boyfriend. This isn’t something that has happened to me only once. I’ve experienced it with at least five friends, so it’s become a continuous pattern.
The entire thing has drastically reduced my desire to make female friends because I’m always wondering what will happen once she gets into a relationship. What if she finds a boyfriend and suddenly starts ignoring me? Or what if she starts accusing me of being a jealous friend if I offer relationship advice she doesn’t like? I think I’m done making friends with women here. I never experienced this in Nigeria.
Do you think this problem is just a Canadian thing?
I’ve tried analysing it but haven’t figured it out yet. Maybe they’re this way here because Nigeria is conservative, and people are not usually allowed to fully and freely express love. So now that these girls finally have a chance to date without any constraints, they are allowing their whole lives to revolve around their men.
The thing is at the end of the day, a man is just a man. It makes me sad to say this, but I finally understand why some women say they don’t want female friends. I’ve always been a girl’s girl, but female friendship in Canada has been too problematic in general.
How have these experiences affected your stay in Canada?
It has made me more paranoid. Somebody recently tried contacting me to ask if we could be friends, but my heart wasn’t in it. I don’t know how to love in bits and pieces. If you’re my friend, I’m giving you all my love. I can’t afford to do that with someone who will throw our friendship away for a man again.
I know I can’t always predict where new friendships can lead, but these days, I don’t even try finding out anymore. I used to be such a high-effort person. Now, I’m a low-effort friend. It might sound like an exaggeration, but I’ve had painful experiences.
One of my recent awful experiences has been with Maria, a friend I met in my school hostel. We bonded and formed a beautiful friendship and it remained so until she met a guy and decided to ghost me.
Before the guy came into the picture, we hung out all the time, spent time in each other’s rooms, and ate together, but she ghosted me for him, even though he wasn’t even her boyfriend.
Whenever she gets into a fight with the guy, she returns and acts like we are friends again, but once they resolve their issue, she starts ignoring me all over again. Even the times she comes back, we only talk about her and her boy problems. If I try to talk about my life, she somehow interrupts and makes it about herself.
All the time she has come back after ghosting me, she only did so to ask me for relationship advice, and whenever I gave my honest opinion, she got annoyed. When they reconcile, she’ll accuse me of trying to cause problems in her relationship. There’s no way I’ll see a guy treat my friend poorly and support that she remains in that relationship. If I tell her that the guy is manipulative, she’ll accuse me of being jealous.
Now, I’ve stopped indulging her. This trend of her ghosting me when she and her boyfriend are on good terms and returning when they are fighting has been going on for months. And it hurts me because Maria and I were inseparable. Now, we can’t even hang out anymore if the guy isn’t joining us.
She doesn’t like to hang out with you without her man?
Yes. There was a thing we made plans to attend together, but then she changed plans and said she’d prefer the guy to accompany us. On the day of the event, the guy got upset with her for some reason and cancelled. You’d think that Maria would still come with me to the event, but she cancelled too, saying she wouldn’t feel comfortable going out without her man. It’s always high and low, and it’s not even just her. I’ve had too many experiences like this with the Nigerian girls in Canada. Maria, for example, has been on good terms with her man for a few months and has ghosted me again. The guy will do her dirty again, and she’s come running back to me, but I’ll no longer indulge her. I’ve mentally tapped out of the friendship.
Have you tried telling her how you feel?
When I tell you there’s been zero communication on this girl’s part, I mean zero. This girl doesn’t even message me to find out if I’m alive. There’s no point trying to work on a friendship she doesn’t seem interested in, and it’s disappointing because she was a good friend before she became so male-centred.
I’m so sorry about that
Thank you. I’ve cut off all my friends here. I don’t understand why everybody is so crazy about men. I held them in high regard, but them constantly making me look bad when I try to ensure the men in their lives do not exploit them is insane to me. I’ll no longer be interfering in anybody’s love life moving forward. Even if I make new friends and they ask me for advice on relationships, I’ll take them to a professional rather than give them my honest opinion.
What did your friendship circle in Nigeria look like?
I made the best friends of my life in Nigeria. There were never any dramatic fights. Even when we were dating other people, we made time for each other and prioritised our friendship.
Would you recommend Canada to other Nigerians?
Not at all. I wanted to stay in the UK because there’s a better community for Nigerians there, and my friends in the UK seem happy with their lives. But moving to the UK was more expensive than Canada, so I ended up here. To be fair, Canada isn’t a bad place to live; it’s much better than Nigeria. I haven’t struggled to get a job since I moved here, but in Nigeria, I could submit my resume to twenty different places and get twenty rejections. It’s a clean country, and electricity is constant. It’s just the loneliness and weather that make it hard to live in.
On a scale of one to 10. How happy are you in Canada?
Seven. It would be higher if I weren’t lonely and had better friends.
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