Bimbo met her monster on Bumble.
Tall, charming, read books,
prayed with her every night,
and in a year, they were picking venues.
Then she found the second phone,
with photos of Sandra, his memory foam,
and Mariam, his summer bunny,
and Bisi, his sugar mummy,
and two secret kids in Benin.
She broke the betrayal in stories and reels,
and captions and hashtags and Twitter Spaces,
started a podcast on spotting red flags,
and how these monsters will stain your white.
—
Ade met his saint on an aisle in Aldi,
but found the texts, two full years in,
of the male ‘cousin’ she showered with,
which she insists is normal in her family.
Besides the 2am stares at the ceiling,
and a new romance with the gym treadmill,
he called off the wedding, and that was it.
—
When men bleed, they buy new trainers.
Women bleed? They buy a loudspeaker.
So just one side shares horror stories,
and just one side takes all the heat.
Men are white rice when the water boils.
Women are yam when the pestle falls.
With white rice, you get a low hiss.
With pounded yam, the whole street knows.
There’s no shortage of stories painting men as villains in relationships. Scroll through social media and you’ll find detailed accounts of betrayal, deception, manipulation, abandonment. These stories are valid, and many are deeply painful. But they’re also loud. And the louder a story is, the more it becomes the truth. Or at least, the only truth anyone hears.
The idea for this poem came from that imbalance in storytelling. It’s not that women don’t get hurt. They do. Deeply and too often. But men, when hurt, often go quiet. They don’t record voice notes. They don’t start podcasts. Most don’t even tell their friends. Their heartbreaks vanish into silence. They show up in deleted playlists, late-night ceiling stares, and new gym memberships.
And that silence creates a one-sided archive. If only one gender speaks up when they are wronged, then the other will always look like the one doing the wrong. Over time, men become monsters. Women become saints. Not because that’s the full truth, but because one side tells their story and the other buries theirs.
But this goes beyond romantic betrayal.
I watch a lot of real-life crime interrogation videos. Not for entertainment, but because they remind me what the real world is like. And if there’s anything I’ve learned from them, it’s this: evil has no gender. I’ve seen husbands shoot their wives for life insurance payouts. I’ve seen wives poison their husbands with antifreeze. Sons killing parents over inheritance. A 13-year-old girl manipulating a boy on the autism spectrum into murdering his own father because he wouldn’t let them be together.
Men are evil.
Women are evil.
Men are good.
Women are good.
Same with the young and the old.
Evil doesn’t care about your gender, your age, your background, or your Instagram bio. It just wants to exist. And I believe that one of the ways it thrives is by hiding behind the assumptions we make about what evil looks like.
Recently I saw a deeply upsetting thread. It was a post where men shared their experiences of being sexually abused as children, often at the hands of female relatives, house helps, neighbours. Some of these men were five, six, seven years old when it happened. And most had never told a soul until that post.
Why? Because the face of sexual abuse, in our collective imagination, is male. We picture a man when we hear the word “abuser.” And that bias lets some women who commit the same evil walk right through the cracks, undetected.
Think about it. If a man is left alone in a room with a little girl, there’s tension. Someone will check in. People will be on edge. Even the man himself might feel uneasy. But if a woman is alone with a little boy, it’s seen as nurturing, even safe. And that false sense of safety is where some of the worst things happen.
When we assume evil only looks like one thing, we stop looking anywhere else. And when we don’t look, we don’t see. And when we don’t see, we can’t stop it.
The poem and this note is not about blaming women or defending men. It’s not about flipping the narrative or courting pity. It’s about asking for balance. Because balance is where truth lives. The real world is full of people who love and people who lie. People who heal and people who harm. They are not all men. They are not all women.
If we want to fight evil properly, we have to stop thinking it always looks like someone else. Sometimes, it looks exactly like the person no one suspects.
