Dear Diary,

No one can accuse me of ditching relationships without giving them a good go. As a doctor, giving up easily isn’t a choice. Before you give a patient the ultimate bad news, you have to turn every possible stone.

There was a time, right after college, when I thought I might give cohabitation a try. Well, I didn’t call it a try then. I was all in. I’d met a nice girl in a bar where some friends and I had gone for a drink after a gruelling day of medical residence.

She was an accountant working with a firm in the city and she and a friend were there to celebrate the friend’s promotion. We hit it off almost immediately. They say hindsight is 20/20 and now I know why we had such a strong connection.

Anyway, after three months of a whirlwind romance, she moved in with me. Everything was great. Every day was like a honeymoon without the stress of a wedding.

But I think there’s a reason why honeymoons don’t last too long. Six months into our living together, she began disappearing. I’m getting ahead of myself.

It started with a theft. One day I came home from work and there she was, curled into a ball in the one corner of the room, bowling her eyes out. She had been crying so hard she’d practically ran out of tears.

“What’s the matter?” I said, rushing over and holding her in a tight hug.

She didn’t have to say anything, only looked sadly over my shoulder. I turned around and saw why. We had been robbed clean.

The damn robbers had even taken the toilet paper. She hadn’t been home either when it happened, but I understood how such a violation would shake her so. A short while after that, she began disappearing, sometimes for days at a time.

“Where the hell have you been?” I asked her once after a two-day stint away.

“At my cousin’s,” she said flatly. Then she began to cry, saying sometimes memories of the break-in affected her and she had to take a break.

At first, I thought she was genuine. I even offered to move to a new place so she didn’t have to relive the terrible ordeal. She insisted she couldn’t put me through such bother, we would learn to cope with it. She only needed time. But even with time, things didn’t improve much, and there was only one explanation. She was definitely seeing another dude.

Then one day I ran into her friend at the hospital where I worked. We began exchanging idle chatter but I noticed she looked withdrawn and didn’t want to maintain eye contact.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Hospital visit making you uneasy? It happens to more people than you might think.”

“Nah,” she said. “It’s not that. it’s… Never mind. I’m okay.”

Another thing you get good at as a doctor is getting people to talk about things they naturally don’t want to. I mean, try getting a macho guy to tell you he can’t perform in the bedroom. It’s like prying a tooth. But when I got the truth from this woman, it was nothing to sneeze at.

Apparently, my live-in girlfriend was disappearing into another flat that wasn’t her cousin’s. I coaxed the friend to tell me where and she did. The next time my girlfriend didn’t come home in the evening, I made the short trip to the house. I knocked, she opened and imagine my shock when I walked into a house that looked exactly like the one I owned before we were robbed!