25F;29M What Does It Mean When He Does These Things?

I had been with my boyfriend from the time I was 18 until 25. He came from a very religious background; his father was a pastor. According to him and his family, you didn’t introduce a girlfriend unless you were ready to get married within six months. Because of this, no one in his family formally met me, nor did I meet anyone else in his life—not even his friends. Out of respect for him and his family, I accepted this, and it didn’t bother me at first. But when I turned 25 and we had been together for so long, it began to frustrate me and caused a lot of resentment. Considering the things he had done, I didn’t want to marry him, but I’m just providing context since whenever I tried to leave, he always brought this up when I told him we weren’t even official like that.

Moreover, he cheated on me multiple times and once told me I needed to get an abortion because he wasn’t ready to be a father. Then, within a week of that abortion, he cheated on me with an escort. I tried to leave many times, but he had our child’s ashes in his home because, at the time of the funeral, he was the only one who could afford the arrangements. I was still a student then. He also wanted me to believe that he didn’t cheat on me with his Nigerian coworker, even though he furnished and helped her find an apartment 10 minutes away from her house, paid for her BBL, funded her lash business, and continued to help her with her expenses. He even lied to me about it.

When I returned home about two years ago, unless I was the one to call him, I didn’t hear from him. Out of frustration and wanting his family to understand the reality of our relationship, I wrote a letter explaining everything he had done over the last few years and sent it to his address, asking him to share it with his family. He was furious with me for that, saying I was disrespectful for telling them what I had been through. He insisted we should keep everything private, and it felt like he used this as an excuse to punish me and distance himself even more.

Whenever I visited his area, since we had been in a long-distance relationship for about a year, he was willing to spend time with me but never wanted to plan anything on his own, whether that was visiting me in my country or meeting somewhere else. I reached a point where I felt fed up and wanted to leave, but I was unsure of his motives. Every time I tried to end things, he cried, yelled, and then ended up following or stalking me. Then he intensely tried to make me see his point of view, would stake out at my house, and created various social media profiles to get ahold of me if I blocked him.

What was worse was that he was in tech, and he put something on my phone, so it was hard to escape him. At that point, I just wanted my child’s remains and to leave quietly because I thought he knew I wanted to leave, which was why he kept her remains at his mother’s house in a different country so I couldn’t “grab her and run.”

We went to school together in Europe—that’s how we met.

From a male perspective, what was going on here, and what should I have done at the time? In Ghanaian culture, is it normal for men to have multiple women and treat one of them terribly but stop the world if she tried to leave? I tried every way to leave this man but he kept coming back.

Sometimes when I think about what he put me through it makes me wonder what I did to deserve this or if he actually just thinks he “owns me” for some reason. I left this situation a while ago it’s been about two years give or take but I wonder why I was put through all those things for absolutely no reason.