From Zimbabwe to Ireland Melody Chadamoyo brings her own experience and education to the table when she helps women to find what they need and want in their relationships.
Chadamoyo is a relationship expert – not entirely the career she planned on when she first moved to Ireland from Zimbabwe with her husband in 1999.
“My husband got a scholarship to study for a PhD in UCD. That’s way back in 1999,” she explains. “He was very, very intelligent. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2008.”
“I have a daughter who is now 21 and I also am a mother to my sister’s daughter because we have co-parented the two girls. I live with my sister; I was living with my sister even when my husband was alive. We had a weird family, but it worked for us,” she says.
“I think I would have lost my mind if my sister wasn’t here,” she adds.
Chadamoyo’s background into becoming a relationship expert started with her own marriage. She was married only two years when they came to Ireland to study. After the move to Ireland, she began to feel very differently about the relationship, the wheels were coming off.
“All of a sudden, I just didn’t like him anymore – I felt overwhelmed,” she says. “I actually would tell him; I don’t love you anymore. Which wasn’t true, obviously, because if I really didn’t love him, I would have left. But I think I thought if I told him enough, he would change to be that amazing guy that I used to know, and it wasn’t happening.”
She actually began thinking she needed to divorce, until her mother pointed out a few practicalities to her current situation which made sense for her to stay.
“I told my mum I think I should get a divorce and my mum said, Okay, I understand, but what are you going to do about the baby?” she said.
At the time she had a baby and was studying for her masters and wouldn’t be able to afford childcare unless she worked full-time so her mother gave her some advice to stay.
“She said, why don’t you just stay, I know you’re not having fun with him, but he’s not abusing you or anything. Why don’t you stay and finish your masters, at least then you can get a job and be able to afford childcare?” she says.
Chadamoyo decided to stay, care less about what was going on with her husband and what he was doing, and just look after herself.
“I started focusing on myself and looking after me, and began going out with friends,” she says.
Remarkably the more she invested the time into looking after herself and less time focusing on why she was not happy with her husband the more they began to communicate with each other.
“Slowly but surely, we started talking to each other, we were even smiling and actually having a conversation. And slowly but surely, we became intimate again and then our relationship was back on track – it got stronger and stronger and stronger,” she says.
When her husband did pass away in 2008 it really hit her hard and she began reflecting on her marriage and how they had turned it around.
She realised that from the point where she had wanted to divorce him, she began investing more time and energy on herself, reading books to help improve herself and help with her confidence and self-love.
This realisation prompted her to start learning more about men and how their brain works and how they try to improve themselves which led her to trying to help couples find their way back to each other.
Not long after her husband passed away Chadamoyo began her relationship advice business. You can check out her Passionate Heart Institute services here. She also works as a librarian.
“I work with women, mainly, I’ve had a couple of men that have approached me,” she says.
“The most important thing is you need to be your best self, first. And most of us are not our best selves, because we’re carrying stuff from our past or maybe from this current relationship, that hinders us from actually opening our hearts fully and loving the other person or even receiving the love from them.”
“So, I start with healing, removing all the gunk, I call it, you know, removing the weeds – then we start looking at so who do you want to be in this relationship? What type of person do you want to be? And then you start working on your own, your own self love and your own self-worth and your own confidence,” she explains.
“And then when we do that, then we say so what kind of relationship do you want to have?” she adds.
Melody also deals with people who are not in relationships but would like to be but need to do a little self-discovery in order for them to become open to accepting a new relationship.
She says there is a lot about how to speak to each other in a relationship. How you can inspire each other and bring out the best in each other.
“Most of us usually expect that if he loves me, he will know what I need. He will know that I need flowers today or a hug when he comes home from work. What’s stopping you from hugging him?” she explains.
“He comes home, you go you hug him the first time and the second time, third time and by the fourth time he is the one coming hugging you – how is he going to know you need a hug if you don’t tell him?”
“If you say you never give me a hug, he’s not going to give you a hug because now he has to be defensive and say, ‘well, if that’s how you asked me, I’m not going to give it to you’,” she says.
Chadamoyo has used her life coaching and relationship coaching qualifications to help many women over the years but at the heart it she always finds that the woman needs to learn a little self-love.
“And that can include energy work and meditation,” she says.
She has kindly agreed to share a few questions we need to ask ourselves to help us get our own relationships on track.
“The most important thing is look at how you look at yourself. Do you value yourself? Do you love yourself? Do you see yourself?”
“And then look at do you ask for what you need? – I think most of us don’t ask for what we need – Western women, especially, even when they are offered, what I have noticed is they refuse what they need.”
So come on ladies, it’s time to go and get what we really want.
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@MelodyChadamoyo