Act I

Permission

I got a follow request on Instagram from someone I find attractive.

We’d bumped into each other earlier that evening. We were friendly, the way people are. Nothing happened. Nothing was said. We went our separate ways.

Then the request came through.

Nothing unusual about that. It happens. But I remember staring at my phone for a few seconds, because I realised I had a decision to make.

A small one. Or at least, that’s what it looked like.

I’m in a relationship. That changes the weight of it.

Do I respond the way 23 year old Kevin would have responded? Or do I respond like the person I’m trying to become? 23 year old Kevin wouldn’t have noticed there was a question.

Do I accept, because realistically it’s harmless? It’s only another follower. Another person seeing my photos. Another person occasionally replying to a story.

Or do I sit with the more uncomfortable one. Why do I need to let this person into my life at all?

Accepting a follow request isn’t cheating. It’s permission.

Permission for someone to occupy a small part of my world. To see what I’m doing, what I care about, where I spend my time, and little by little, become familiar with a version of me they were never meant to know.

Maybe nothing ever comes from it. Maybe we never exchange a single message. Maybe it ends exactly where it started.

But relationships aren’t only built on the things that happen. They’re also shaped by the things we quietly decide will never get the chance to.

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Act II

Access

The longer I sat with it, the less it had to do with Instagram. Instagram was just where the question found me.

It could have been a text from an ex. A colleague you find yourself looking forward to seeing. A conversation that starts off innocent enough before slowly becoming the part of your day you stop mentioning.

We spend so much time talking about trust after it’s been broken that we rarely look at what came before it. Trust doesn’t appear the day two people decide they’re together. It’s built long before that, through ordinary decisions about who gets your attention, who gets your time, and who becomes familiar enough to occupy space in your life.

Life used to make those decisions for us. People disappeared because life moved on. You finished school. You left a job. A relationship ended. Chapters closed and, whether you wanted them to or not, they stayed closed. Distance had a way of turning people into memories instead of permanent fixtures.

That isn’t true anymore. People don’t leave your life now.

They just stop talking.

They’re still there somewhere. They know when you’ve gone away. They know when you’ve started seeing someone. They know where you had dinner on Friday night. Sometimes they know more about your week than people you actually see.

At what point did that stop being strange?

Part of the answer sits in the way we talk about casual. We use the word as though it settles something. No title. No anniversary. No conversation about exclusivity. So whatever happened between two people gets filed somewhere it no longer has to be thought about.

I’m not convinced that’s how people work.

Some of the most influential people in my life are people I could never properly define. No commitment. No obvious ending. Just enough history to leave a mark, and just enough uncertainty to make it difficult to know where that mark belongs.

Sometimes they don’t represent a person you’re trying to get back. They represent a version of yourself you’re still reluctant to leave behind.

The depth of a relationship has very little to do with the depth of its influence. Those were never the same thing.

And this is where casual does its quietest damage. We say it wasn’t serious. Nothing was spoken. It was physical, a thing that happened and then stopped happening. So we tell ourselves there’s nothing to hold onto, and we keep the person anyway. Still in the contacts. Still followed. Still occupying a space they were never meant to keep.

We never actually chose to let them go. We just stopped needing a reason to, and called that the same thing.

But you don’t hold onto people for no reason. You hold onto the experience. You hold onto the version of yourself that existed inside it. And sometimes you hold onto the fact that it was never resolved, because the things that were never spoken are the things that never get old. Nothing was promised, so nothing could disappoint you. It never had to survive an ordinary Tuesday. It stayed exciting precisely because it never had to become real.

That’s what makes it dangerous when you’re moving into the next chapter of your life. It’s easy to reach back and reminisce at your partner’s expense. To reach for something you can’t have with them, not because they’re lesser, but because what you have with them is real, and real things carry responsibility. Nothing you build with someone will ever feel as weightless as something that never had to be built at all.

So you keep the option open. You leave the door unlocked. You keep one person on hand as somewhere you could always go back to, and you tell yourself it means nothing because it never meant anything.

Maybe that’s the truest form of never choosing someone. Not leaving. Just never fully closing the doors you keep telling yourself are already shut.

Act III

The Line

Somewhere along the way we changed the question. We stopped asking whether something is respectful and started asking whether it counts.

Those aren’t the same question. One asks how close you can get to the line. The other asks why you’re standing near it.

The second is harder, so we’ve built an entire vocabulary to avoid it.

‘Nothing happened.’ ‘We’re just friends.’ ‘It’s not that deep.’

Every one of those sentences is technically true. That’s exactly why they work.

I know they work because I’ve used them.

I’ve accepted the request before. I’ve followed someone I had no reason to follow. I’ve had conversations I had no business having, the kind you tell yourself are harmless while carefully not mentioning them to the person who would have found them significant. It interfered with my relationship. Not because anything dramatic happened, but because attention is finite, and every bit of it I was spending over there was attention I wasn’t spending where I’d promised it.

I wasn’t a different person then. That’s the part that stayed with me. I was the same person, making decisions so small that none of them required me to admit what I was doing.

And because I’d decided they meant nothing, I never went back to examine them. Why would you? But unquestioned things don’t disappear. They just move somewhere you can’t see them.

Some part of you files a person away as a kind of measure, a high point you quietly compare things against without ever admitting that’s what you’re doing. And because you never look at it directly, it keeps its charge. Those experiences were real. The body remembers them whether or not you give it permission to. And when that person resurfaces, however briefly, there’s a reaction. There’s always a reaction, and it’s never quite neutral. We tell ourselves it is. But the not-thinking is the tell. You don’t work that hard to ignore something that genuinely holds no weight.

Nobody wakes up intending to betray someone they love. You slowly become the kind of person who can. Hundreds of decisions that seem too insignificant to matter until they all do.

One conversation that didn’t need to happen. One boundary that felt unnecessary. One person who didn’t need access to your life. One version of yourself you should have left behind, but quietly carried into a relationship that deserved somebody different.

It’s better not to be in the car than to spend the rest of your life explaining how the accident happened. That isn’t fear. It’s wisdom. Because by the time anyone is explaining why they cheated, the story they’re telling started months earlier, hidden inside decisions that were far too ordinary to question at the time.

Act IV

Knowing What You’re Capable Of

I know how this sounds. Controlling. Insecure. The kind of man who checks phones and calls it standards.

That objection deserves a proper answer, because there are people who hold all of this loosely and it genuinely means nothing. They keep every ex on their timeline, reply to every message, and none of it moves anything inside them. I’ve met those people. I believe them.

I’m not one of them. That’s the whole answer, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to arrive at it.

For years I assumed maturity meant becoming the kind of man who could handle anything. Sit anywhere. Talk to anyone. Trust myself completely, because needing a rule felt like a weakness. So I kept giving myself access I’d already proven I couldn’t be trusted with, and called it confidence.

There’s nothing intelligent about that. Emotional intelligence isn’t knowing what you’d never do. It’s knowing what you’ve already done.

The person who needs the boundary is the person who has evidence. And I have evidence. So when the request comes now, I don’t accept it. Not because she asked me to. Not because I’m afraid of what would happen. Because I’ve watched what that conversation does to my attention, and I’d rather not run the experiment again to confirm a result I already have.

That decision costs me nothing, which is what makes it so easy to skip. And here’s the part I keep turning over. She wouldn’t have minded.

If I’d accepted it, my girlfriend would have felt nothing, because there would have been nothing to feel. A follow isn’t an event. Nobody raises it. There would have been no conversation, no tension, no moment where I had to explain myself, because as far as anyone could tell, nothing had occurred.

Nobody was ever going to catch this. No rule was being broken. No promise was being tested. Nobody was watching, including her, including me. Which meant the only person who could possibly make that decision was a version of me nobody would ever check on.

Most of the decisions that shape a relationship are made in exactly those conditions. Alone. Unwitnessed. About something so small that no one would ever think to ask.

The tell was never the content of those conversations. It was that I didn’t mention them. You can argue about what counts for a long time, but you always know exactly which parts of your day you’re editing out. The editing happens automatically, before you’ve consciously decided anything, and it’s the most honest signal you’ll ever get about what you’re doing.

The version of me that made those decisions didn’t disappear. He just stopped being in charge. Most days that’s fine. Some days it isn’t, and on those days I’m grateful the decision was already made, long before I was in any state to make it well.

There’s an age where this stops being theoretical. Somewhere in your late twenties you start noticing that things are setting. The person you’ve been improvising as for most of the decade is quietly becoming the person you’re going to be. You catch yourself one day realising that the habits you kept describing as a phase have started looking a lot like a character.

Almost everyone I know is somewhere in that same stretch. Old enough to have hurt somebody. Old enough to have been hurt. Still young enough to be deciding what we’re going to do with that information.

Growth isn’t a moment where you become good. It’s a series of small refusals that nobody sees and nobody thanks you for.

And here’s what nobody warns you about. The older you get, the fewer excuses you actually have, and the easier they somehow become to make.

When you were younger, the excuses were built in. You were single. You were figuring it out. Nothing was serious yet, so nothing had to be answered for. Those were real reasons, and they expired without you noticing. Because at some point you enter something serious, something that asks you to be accountable, to hold your own actions to a standard for the sake of protecting someone else. None of the old excuses survive that. You can’t reach for “it’s casual” when you’ve asked someone to build a life with you.

So we invent new ones. We get creative. We find fresh, slightly ridiculous ways to explain behaviour we already know we’ve outgrown. I understand the pull, because I’ve been the person reaching for those excuses while telling myself I had come a long way. Coming a long way and still reaching are not the same thing. I had to learn that the hard way.

Act V

What It Costs

Somewhere along the way, boundaries became controversial. Sacrifice became old fashioned. Selflessness started sounding like weakness. Even asking someone to give something up for the sake of their relationship can feel offensive now, as though love is supposed to arrive without a bill attached.

We’re so busy protecting our freedom that we’ve forgotten every commitment worth making asks for some of it.

Nobody argues that becoming a doctor closes off a hundred other careers. Nobody complains that becoming a parent asks you to give up parts of your old life. We understand instinctively that a serious commitment reshapes how you live, and we don’t experience that as a loss. We experience it as proof that the thing was serious.

Relationships are the one place we’ve decided that logic doesn’t apply. So faithfulness gets treated as a test of willpower. Something you pass by resisting, over and over, as though the goal is to want everything and take nothing.

Maybe faithfulness has less to do with resisting temptation than with building a life where certain temptations have less room to grow.

That’s inconvenient. I know it is. Sometimes love is inconvenient. Sometimes consideration is inconvenient. Sometimes respect costs you something you would rather have kept. I’ve become suspicious of how quickly we call that oppression.

Because choosing someone was never only about gaining a person. It’s accepting the responsibility that arrives with them. Nobody hands you their heart because they believe you’ll never make a mistake. They hand it to you because they’re trusting you to treat it as something worth protecting.

We spend so long asking whether we’ve found the right person. We spend almost no time asking whether we’ve become the kind of person somebody else can safely build a life around.

And I think the reason we avoid that question is simpler than we admit. We’re afraid of what we’ll find.

We don’t do enough introspection because introspection means going back to the versions of ourselves we’d rather not meet again. The naive one. The selfish one. The one who did the thing we’re still ashamed of. It’s easier to keep those chapters closed than to sit with what they say about us.

But that’s exactly where the truth lives. Not in the parts of ourselves we’re proud of. In the difficult ones. The experiences we bury because looking at them directly costs something. That’s where you find out what you’re made of, what you’re still carrying, what you haven’t finished being honest about.

Those are the real conversations. And most of them aren’t with a partner. They’re with yourself.

Because we talk endlessly about letting people go, but you can’t let go of what you haven’t been willing to look at. Half the time the person is still there because the work isn’t done. The shame is still doing the holding. And shame, left alone, doesn’t loosen its grip. It just gets quieter.

You can’t choose someone fully until you’ve stopped hiding from yourself. That’s the confrontation nobody wants. Not with the people who hurt us. With the person who did the things we don’t talk about. I think that’s the work. And I think most of us are avoiding it.

The request is still sitting there. And everyone who tells me it isn’t a big deal is correct.

It isn’t. Nothing happened. Nobody was hurt. There is no story here. That’s exactly what makes it worth paying attention to.

Nobody drowns because the water suddenly got deeper. They drown because they kept swimming.

It’s not that deep.

It never is.

Until it is.

One Last Thought

If you’ve read some of my other pieces, you’ve probably noticed I keep circling back to the same themes. Relationships. Responsibility. Boundaries. That isn’t because I’ve run out of things to say. It’s because I haven’t reached the end of the questions yet.

Writing has become the place where I try to make sense of things that have left a mark on me. Sometimes that comes from my own mistakes. Sometimes from being hurt. Most of the time it’s both. So this isn’t me handing down conclusions. It’s a snapshot of where my thinking is today. A conversation with myself that you’re welcome to listen in on.

Maybe a few years from now I’ll read this back and disagree with parts of it. I hope I do. It would mean I’ve grown.

For now, these are the questions that keep finding me. Maybe they’ve found you too.

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I need to start here: I am not a political commentator.

I do not pretend to be one of those people who has spent years writing deeply researched political essays, quoting case law from memory, and speaking with the confidence of someone who lives inside Parliament. On these topics, I am probably closer to a pseudo-intellectual than an expert.

But I am an interested citizen.

And lately, I have become very interested.

Not because politics suddenly became glamorous, but because it became impossible to ignore. The more I read, listen and follow these court rulings, commissions, reshuffles and parliamentary fights, the more I realise how dangerous it is for ordinary South Africans to remain politically passive.

My previous article was about that exact point: we need to become more politically literate. Not because politics is entertaining, but because politics is already deciding the shape of our lives.

This article is a continuation of that thought.

Because Cyril Ramaphosa is on thin ice.

And I do not think enough people understand why.

When Phala Phala first broke, it sounded ridiculous.

The President of South Africa allegedly had foreign currency hidden in furniture at his private farm, and that money was stolen.

Money in a couch?

At the President’s farm??

Stolen?!?!

It sounded like something out of a movie. So, in normal South African fashion, many of us laughed. We turned it into jokes. We made memes. We said, “This country, hey,” and moved on.

That laughter says something about us.

South Africans have a habit of turning national embarrassment into humour before we fully understand the seriousness of what happened. It is one of the ways we survive. If we absorbed every scandal with the weight it deserved, we would probably be emotionally exhausted every day.

But sometimes laughter becomes a political anaesthetic.

It numbs us.

It makes us remember the couch, but forget Parliament. It makes us remember the farm, but forget accountability. It makes us laugh at the absurdity before we understand the danger.

Because Phala Phala was never only about where the money was hidden.

It was about whether the President had a case to answer, whether Parliament was willing to do its job, and whether the ANC would once again protect its leader when accountability became inconvenient.

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To understand why this moment matters, you need the timeline.

According to Ramaphosa’s version, the money came from the sale of buffalo to a Sudanese businessman in December 2019. The amount most commonly reported is about $580,000. Ramaphosa has maintained that the money was legitimate and that he did nothing wrong.

Then, in February 2020, the money was stolen from his Phala Phala farm.

For more than two years, the public did not know the full story.

That changed in June 2022, when Arthur Fraser, the former head of the State Security Agency, went to the police and laid a criminal complaint. He accused Ramaphosa of concealing the theft, misusing state resources, and covering up the matter.

Fraser’s allegations were explosive, not only because of what he claimed, but because of who he was. This was not a random person online. This was a former intelligence boss walking into a police station with allegations against the sitting President.

Soon after, the matter moved into Parliament.

The African Transformation Movement brought a motion under Section 89 of the Constitution.

In plain English, Section 89 is the impeachment section. It deals with the removal of a President. A President can only be removed for a serious violation of the Constitution or the law, serious misconduct, or inability to perform the functions of office. If the process goes all the way, two-thirds of the National Assembly must support removal.

Impeachment, in simple terms, is not a criminal trial. It does not decide whether someone goes to jail. It is a constitutional process that asks whether a President has behaved so seriously against the law, the Constitution or the dignity of the office that Parliament should remove them.

Before that final stage, an independent panel must look at the information and decide whether there is enough substance for the matter to go further.

That panel was not made up of political commentators, influencers or party activists.

It was chaired by retired Chief Justice Sandile Ngcobo, with retired Judge Thokozile Masipa and Advocate Mahlape Sello SC. These are serious legal minds. They understand evidence, procedure, constitutional responsibility and the difference between gossip and a case that deserves further inquiry.

That is why their finding matters.

They did not say Ramaphosa was guilty.

That distinction is important.

They said there was prima facie evidence that he may have committed serious violations and serious misconduct.

Prima facie simply means “on the face of it.” It does not mean a final finding of guilt. It means there appears to be enough there to justify further investigation.

In ordinary language: there is a case to answer.

That should have been enough for Parliament to allow the process to continue.

But in December 2022, the National Assembly voted not to refer the report to an impeachment committee. The ANC used its majority to protect Ramaphosa, and the process was effectively killed before the facts could be properly tested in public.

That moment should have angered South Africans more than it did.

Because the question was not whether Ramaphosa must be removed immediately. The question was whether Parliament was willing to investigate properly. Instead, the process was stopped before the country could get a full public ventilation of the facts.

This is where the Constitutional Court comes in.

The EFF and the ATM challenged Parliament’s decision. The case eventually reached the Constitutional Court, which heard the matter in November 2024 and handed down judgment in May 2026.

People may ask why it took so long.

The simple answer is that this was not a normal political argument. The Court had to deal with complicated constitutional questions: whether Parliament’s rules were valid, whether the National Assembly could stop the process at that early stage, whether the delay in bringing the case should be overlooked, whether the Court had jurisdiction, and how far courts can go without interfering in Parliament’s political space.

That is why the judgment took time.

When the Constitutional Court finally ruled, it found that Parliament’s earlier handling of the matter was unconstitutional. The Court set aside the National Assembly’s 2022 vote and referred the Section 89 report to an impeachment committee.

That ruling changed everything.

It brought Phala Phala back from the political grave.

And this is where Cyril Ramaphosa’s position becomes difficult.

After the Constitutional Court revived the process, Ramaphosa did not simply say, “Let the committee do its work.” He filed a review application to challenge the Section 89 panel report. Then he brought an urgent interdict in the Western Cape High Court to stop the impeachment committee from continuing while that review is pending.

A review application is when you ask a court to examine whether a decision or report was legally flawed.

An interdict is basically a court order that stops something from happening.

So, in simple terms, Ramaphosa is asking the High Court to pause the parliamentary process while he challenges the report that forms the basis of that process.

Legally, he is entitled to approach the courts.

But politically, it looks terrible.

I am not saying the interdict proves guilt. It does not. A person can be innocent and still use the courts to protect their rights. But when the President of the country tries to stop an accountability process after the Constitutional Court has already revived it, South Africans are allowed to ask difficult questions.

If the allegations are baseless, why not go to the committee and answer them?

If the panel report is flawed, why not let that be exposed through evidence?

If the President has nothing to hide, why does the process need to be stopped before it can begin properly?

Ramaphosa’s argument is that allowing the impeachment process to continue while his review is pending may cause irreparable harm. He argues that potentially defamatory allegations may be publicly ventilated, damaging his reputation before the court decides whether the panel report was lawful. He also argues that the panel misconceived its mandate and that the report itself is flawed.

Those are serious legal arguments.

But there is also a serious political answer.

The Presidency is not an ordinary office. The person who occupies it carries the highest constitutional responsibility in the country. If the office is powerful enough to lead the nation, it must also be strong enough to withstand scrutiny.

That is the burden of power.

You cannot enjoy the dignity of the office and then hide from the accountability that comes with it.

And this is where Ramaphosa starts to look politically exposed.

He was sold to South Africans as the clean-up operation after Zuma. He was supposed to represent renewal, calm, legality and institutional repair. But Phala Phala has placed him in a position where he is now relying on legal process, party protection and procedural delay in a way that feels uncomfortably familiar.

That does not mean he is Jacob Zuma.

It means power has habits.

When leaders are under pressure, they often reach for the same tools: party loyalty, legal technicality, delay, public calm, and the hope that ordinary people will get tired before the process reaches its conclusion.

The ANC’s instinct was predictable. It rallied around him in 2022, and that protection allowed him to survive politically. But the Constitutional Court ruling has weakened that shield. It has forced the issue back into Parliament at a time when the ANC is no longer the dominant force it once was.

That is why this is bigger than one scandal.

It comes after the ANC lost its outright majority in 2024. It comes while Ramaphosa is governing through a GNU. It comes while the country is preparing for local government elections in 2026 and national elections in 2029.

Phala Phala has become the scandal that refuses to die.

But we must be careful not to reduce this to entertainment.

Yes, politics is getting juicy. The timing is dramatic. The court dates are coming. The parties are positioning themselves. The President is fighting. The committee is resisting. The ANC is trying to protect its leader while pretending this is only about process.

But this is not a Netflix series.

This is the country testing whether constitutional accountability still works when the person being questioned is the President.

And this is where I land personally.

I think it is about time the ANC and the President finally meet a level of accountability they cannot simply manage, delay or explain away.

I understand that politics is a game. It has always been a game. It is strategy, timing, loyalty, survival and power. But for too long, the ANC has played that game as if South Africans are not intelligent enough to understand what is happening in front of us.

That is the insult.

It is not only the scandal. It is the confidence with which the scandal is handled. It is the assumption that people will get tired. That we will laugh, complain, move on and forget. That legal language will confuse us. That party loyalty will silence us. That liberation history will make us emotionally incapable of demanding better.

But South Africans are not stupid.

We are tired, yes. We are distracted, yes. We are overwhelmed by survival, yes. But we are not incapable of understanding power when it is protecting itself.

And that is why Phala Phala matters.

This is not about hating Cyril Ramaphosa. It is not about pretending allegations are the same as guilt. It is not about denying him his legal rights. He has every right to defend himself, challenge reports, approach courts and argue his case.

But the President also has a duty to account.

That duty comes with the office.

The highest office in the country cannot be treated like private property. The Presidency belongs to the Constitution before it belongs to any individual. If there is a serious case to answer, then the President must answer it. Not through political theatre. Not through delay. Not through party protection. Through the process.

That is what accountability means.

For me, the most disturbing part is not only Phala Phala itself. It is the attempt to stop the impeachment committee from doing its work after the Constitutional Court revived the process. Maybe the courts will agree with him. Maybe they will not. But politically, it raises a serious question: why is the President so determined to prevent the matter from being tested openly?

That question matters.

Because South Africa’s democracy rests on the strength of its Constitution. And the Constitution only means something if it can hold the most powerful person in the country accountable.

If Parliament can be blocked, delayed or politically managed every time a President is uncomfortable, then accountability becomes optional. If a ruling party can protect its leader whenever the facts become inconvenient, then democracy becomes performance. If citizens are expected to simply accept that, then we are no longer being governed. We are being insulted.

The ANC cannot keep surviving on the gratitude of a country it continues to disappoint.

Liberation history matters. It always will. But gratitude cannot become a prison. The people of this country are not permanently indebted to a political party. Political parties are indebted to the people.

That is the shift we need.

So yes, Phala Phala started as a joke.

But it cannot end as one.

The President must be held accountable. The ANC must be held accountable. Parliament must do its work. The courts must do theirs. And South Africans must pay attention long enough to understand what is happening in our name.

Because this is bigger than Cyril Ramaphosa.

It is bigger than the couch.

It is bigger than the farm.

It is about whether South Africa’s constitutional democracy still has the courage to look power in the eye and say:

You

You are not above the law.

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We were in Durban on a family holiday. The conversation started with the state of the city, parts of it have looked under construction for years, and from there it slid, the way these things always do, into the ANC.

My grandmother’s view was clear: the ANC has done too much for people of colour for her to simply turn her back on it. No political party is good, she said. We are always choosing the lesser of two evils.

I understood her. For my generation, apartheid is history. For hers, it was life. She did not meet it in a textbook or a documentary. She lived it, and she felt the daily message that the lives of people of black people were worth less. So when she looks at the ANC, she does not only see corruption and failed municipalities. She sees liberation. That kind of loyalty is not random. It comes from trauma, gratitude and lived experience, and younger South Africans need to be careful not to mock that.

But this is where I told my grandmother she needs to die. Not physically. Politically.

What needs to die is the version of politics built on fear and blind loyalty, the version that says this party liberated us, so we must forgive everything, that treats criticism as betrayal, that confuses gratitude with permanent obedience. The ANC’s liberation history deserves respect. Its record in government deserves scrutiny. Both things can be true. It helped deliver political freedom, but it has also governed over corruption, weakened institutions and a deep loss of public trust. At some point, memory must meet performance.

And her “lesser of two evils” argument, the one most of us inherited without questioning it, can become a trap. It can make people tolerate failure because they fear the alternative, and make citizens feel permanently indebted to parties that are supposed to be accountable to them. That mindset has to die too. We are not indebted to political parties. They are indebted to us.

That conversation is really the whole argument of this piece. Not that my grandmother is wrong to feel what she feels. But that the politics that held her generation captive cannot be the same politics that holds ours back, and South Africans need to get a lot more politically literate, and a lot more accountable for the country we’re inheriting, instead of just complaining about its flaws.

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I think about that kitchen a lot, actually. Because the thing I couldn’t say to her properly in the moment is the thing I want to say properly here: politics stopped being a distant thing a long time ago. It is not Parliament and the news and a screen switching off. It is the condition of our roads, the instability of our water, the price of food and petrol , the quiet anxiety I feel about whether this country is becoming a harder place to build a life in. None of that is boring. It is immediate, it is expensive, and it is personal to every single one of us, including her.

So here is what I actually believe, and what I think she needed to hear that day. Many of us know the country is in trouble, but we do not always understand how the trouble is produced. We see the crime, the corruption, the broken cities. What we miss is the machinery behind it, the budgets, the tenders, the coalition deals nobody reads the fine print on. That gap is exactly where politicians survive. A tired population is easier to manage. A frustrated one can be turned against itself, and I think that’s what scares me most, watching it happen. You can see it in the rise of xenophobic violence, ordinary people doing the state’s job badly because the state refuses to do it at all. That violence is not accountability. It is misdirected pain, people pushed to the margins fighting other people pushed to the margins, while the ones actually responsible stand safely above the whole thing.

None of this is new, and I don’t think my grandmother’s generation invented it either. Apartheid was not only a legal system. It was an architecture. It organised people psychologically and economically, and it taught all of us where we belonged before we even had the language to question it. The laws changed. The flag changed. But I don’t think the damage ever really left the room. You feel it in class tension, in how we sometimes treat each other depending on money, accent, proximity to whiteness. It trained us to fight sideways while the structures above us stayed exactly where they were. That is why I can’t separate South African politics from South African history, and it’s why my grandmother’s loyalty and my impatience with her both come from the same wound, just felt differently, a generation apart.

I want to be careful here, because this isn’t an essay telling you to vote DA. The DA has its own history and its own credibility problem with a lot of South Africans of colour, for some older voters, it still looks like a mirror of the old country, and whether that’s fair or not, it’s real and it has to be reckoned with. The DA also has a new problem now. After the 2024 election, the ANC lost its outright majority and we entered a Government of National Unity, which means the DA is now inside the room it spent years criticising from the doorway. It can’t be brave only when it has nothing to lose. It can’t sell itself as the watchdog and then go quiet the moment proximity to power makes accountability inconvenient.

This is the literacy I’m talking about. We have to see these parties as they actually are, not as they market themselves to us. The ANC is not only liberation. The DA is not only clean governance. The EFF is not only performance. MK is not only blind loyalty. None of them are entitled to our vote. Every single one of them has to earn it, and I don’t think we ask that of them nearly enough.

That matters right now because the 2026 Local Government Elections land on 4 November, and I think we treat local elections like the younger sibling of national ones, which is a mistake I keep watching us make. Local government is where failure shows up first, the roads, the water, the refuse trucks that don’t come, the clinic queues. It’s the ground under our actual feet.

Johannesburg is the clearest example I can point to. This is the economic heart of the country, and its finances have become a national worry. Mayor Dada Morero has defended the city while Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana has questioned whether it can even afford the R10.3 billion wage agreement it signed, and reports say Joburg owes billions to creditors while sitting on far less cash than that. You don’t need a finance degree to know that math doesn’t work. What gets me isn’t even the failure, it’s the denial. Residents drive through the decay, pay for it, live inside it every day, and then watch their leaders talk as if none of it is happening. That’s why I don’t think local elections are small. I think they’re the politics of everyday life, full stop.

It’s the same story at national level, just with bigger furniture( no pun intended). Phala Phala still sounds like a joke when you say it out loud, money allegedly hidden in a couch on the President’s farm, then stolen, and we laughed because that’s what we do with national embarrassment. But underneath the joke is a real question about whether Parliament can hold its own president accountable. That’s not funny. That’s the same denial as Joburg, just wearing a nicer suit.

And while all of this sits in front of us, I think most of us are distracted, not because we’re stupid, but because we’re tired. People are working, raising kids, trying to make it to the end of the month. The country becomes background noise until something breaks close enough to actually touch you. That’s how the decay hides. It hides in the gaps where we’re just trying to survive the week.

Social media doesn’t help. We take in more information than ever and walk away understanding less of it. We know the joke before we know the facts, the scandal before the process. Our attention is everywhere and our understanding is thin, and I think that’s a genuinely dangerous combination in a democracy, which needs people who can tell history apart from performance, slogans apart from policy, outrage apart from actual accountability.

This isn’t me calling for chaos. It’s me asking us to get sharper. Read more. Register. Vote. Ask better questions. Know your ward councillor’s name. Stop forwarding things you haven’t checked. Stop treating politics like gossip. And most of all, stop handing politicians the comfort of our ignorance, because that comfort is the only thing keeping some of them in office.

We are a resilient country, nobody can take that from us. We laugh through pain, we find humour in disaster, it’s basically a national skill. But I don’t think resilience should ever become an excuse for bad leadership, and I think we’ve let it become exactly that for too long. We cannot keep surviving what we should be fixing.

The 2026 elections aren’t a side issue. They’re a test of whether we’re actually ready to take our own communities seriously. One vote won’t fix the country. One election won’t either. But I do think the change starts the day we stop acting like spectators in our own story.

The old politics has to die. The fear has to die. The idea that any party owes us nothing, and we owe it everything, has to die with it.

That’s what I was really trying to tell my grandmother, sitting in that Durban kitchen, while she told me no party is good and I told her none of them deserve what she’s giving away for free. I wasn’t telling her to disappear. I was telling her that the politics which held her generation hostage cannot be the same politics that holds mine.

We need to smarten up. Because South Africa is not going to save itself.

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God,

I think I found the one.

I do not know why that sentence feels so difficult to write.

Maybe because it sounds too simple for something that has taken so much out of me. People say it like it is supposed to be romantic, when really it feels more like surrender. Like admitting that love has finally reached a part of me I thought I had successfully protected.

I used to think the question was about her.

How do I know she is the one?

As if love was something I could audit. As if I could sit with a clipboard in my spirit and tick off patience, beauty, kindness, faith, humour, softness, compatibility, peace.

As if a person becomes the one after enough evidence.

I think that was my first mistake.

I was not really looking for evidence. I was looking for a way to love without risk. I wanted certainty to do what only faith can do. I wanted God to give me an answer so clean that I would never have to be brave.

That is not love.

That is fear asking for paperwork.

And I have been very good at making fear sound wise.

I have called it discernment. I have called it caution. I have called it taking my time. I have called it being realistic, because realistic sounds better than terrified.

But God knows the names we give our wounds when we are not ready to call them wounds.

That is the uncomfortable thing about praying honestly. You start by asking God to reveal someone else, and somehow end up exposed yourself.

I asked You if she was the one.

You showed me the parts of me that were still trying to remain untouched.

The control. The walls. The quiet suspicion that follows love into the room and pretends it is there for protection. The part of me that wants marriage, but still wants a hidden exit in case vulnerability starts asking too much.

I wanted to know if she was safe.

You kept asking if I was surrendered.

I hated that.

Because it is easier to study a woman than to become a man.

And I do not mean that in the loud, chest-beating way people speak about manhood online. I mean the quiet kind. The kind that apologises properly. The kind that stays gentle when it has the power to be cruel. The kind that does not turn pain into punishment. The kind that understands that a wife is not a reward for becoming successful, she is a responsibility that reveals whether love has actually matured in you.

I wanted a sign.

Not because I needed one.

Because I wanted something outside of me to take responsibility for the choice.

But You did not give me a spectacle.

You gave me a softer heart.

That was almost worse.

A sign would have been easier to explain. I could have pointed to it. I could have told people, “This is how I knew.” I could have made the story neat.

But how do you explain that one day your heart simply stopped trying to escape?

How do you explain that the same woman who once made you afraid of forever suddenly made forever feel less like a cage and more like a calling?

Nothing dramatic happened.

No sky opened. No music played. No holy voice interrupted the room.

I just looked at her without my fear standing in front of her.

And there she was.

Not perfect.

Not painless.

Not easy.

Just hers.

The life, I mean.

The actual life.

The ordinary things.

I think that is where marriage hides. Not in the proposal video. Not in the anniversary caption. Not in the aesthetic version of love that makes everyone believe devotion is supposed to photograph well.

Marriage hides in the parts nobody posts because they are too holy to be content.

I saw that today.

Not the wedding.

The life after the wedding.

And I still wanted it.

That scared me more than doubt ever did.

Doubt is familiar. You can analyse it, feed it, dress it up, send it to friends, pray about it with one eye open. Doubt keeps you busy enough to avoid surrender.

Peace is different.

Peace just sits there.

It does not argue.

It waits for you to stop performing confusion.

I think that is what happened. I ran out of ways to pretend I did not know what my heart had already started becoming.

I love her.

Not only the soft version. Not only the version that makes me feel chosen, seen, wanted, held.

I love her in a way that asks something from me.

And somehow I do not resent the ask.

That is new.

Before You, I think I could have loved her beautifully and still loved her selfishly. I could have written the messages, planned the dates, said the right things, meant them even, and still made my fear the centre of the relationship.

I could have loved her with my mouth while protecting myself with my heart.

That is a dangerous kind of romance.

It looks like love from a distance, but up close it is just control wearing perfume.

I needed You for the closer thing.

The slower thing.

The thing that does not always feel like fire, but keeps the house warm.

I needed Your love because mine runs out when I am tired. Mine becomes proud when I feel misunderstood. Mine becomes defensive when I am exposed. Mine has limits it does not like admitting.

So when I say I found the one, I do not mean I found someone who finally made love easy.

I mean I found someone I cannot love properly without becoming more like Christ.

That is how I know this is serious.

She does not only make me feel.

She makes me accountable to the kind of love I claim to believe in.

The one is not the woman who removes the cost of love.

The one is the woman who makes the cost feel sacred.

Because I look at her and I do not just want romance.

I want discipline. Prayer. Patience that survives my mood. Honesty that does not punish. A love that does not need to be loud to be real.

I want to choose her when choosing her feels beautiful, and when choosing her feels like dying to the ugliest part of myself.

That is not a fairytale.

That is something closer to God than I expected love to be.

And maybe that is why it feels like God.

I did not need You to tell me she was perfect.

I needed You to make me honest enough to see that I wanted to love her through imperfection.

Hers.

Mine.

Ours.

The unglamorous parts that will never trend, but will decide whether the love was real.

So no, I do not think I found the one because everything suddenly made sense.

I think I found the one because I stopped needing love to be safe before I called it holy.

I found her somewhere after fear.

Somewhere after pride.

Somewhere after all the clever reasons I had for keeping part of myself untouched.

And when I got there, I realised she had not suddenly become the one.

I had finally become willing to love her like she was.

God,

I think that was the answer.

Not that You pointed at her.

But that You changed me enough to stop pointing everywhere else.

I needed to find You first.

Because without You, I would have mistaken my fear for wisdom, my control for peace, my desire for love, and my walls for standards.

Without You, I would have kept asking how to know she was the one while quietly avoiding the man I needed to become for her.

She did not become the one when I became certain.

She became the one when my heart stopped negotiating with surrender.

And today, for the first time, forever did not feel like a trap.

It felt like a place I was being invited to become holy.

With her.

For her.

Beside her.

And maybe that is all I was really asking.

Not, “How do I know?”

But, “God, can You make me brave enough to stay when I do?”

I think You did.

I think I found her.

Or maybe more truthfully,

I think You found me first.

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Dedicated to CLV

Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong generation.

Not in that dramatic, “everything was better back then” kind of way. I am not naive enough to romanticise the past as if people were kinder, more faithful, more emotionally mature, or somehow less broken than we are now. They were not. People cheated. People lied. People disappeared. People broke homes, broke vows, broke each other, and then still woke up the next morning and went to work like nothing happened.

So no, I am not trying to rewrite history into some perfect love story.

But when it comes to the type of music I listen to, and maybe even the way I love life, I sometimes feel out of place in this generation.

Today I was listening to old school music. 70s, 80s, 90s, early 2000s. The kind of music you would hear on Metro on a Sunday.

The kind of music that made the house feel warmer than it actually was. The kind of music that played while someone was cooking, spring cleaning, ironing, getting ready, recovering from the night before, or quietly pretending they were not thinking about somebody they had no business missing.

And the more I listened, the more uncomfortable I got.

Because love used to sound different.

It was not just the vocals. It was not just the live instruments, the basslines, the bridges, the key changes, or the dramatic background singers acting like the relationship was also happening to them. It was something deeper than nostalgia. It was the way love was allowed to sound human.

Messy. Desperate. Guilty. Honest. Embarrassing. Devoted.

Old love songs were not always morally clean. A lot of them were deeply problematic if we are being honest. Some were apologies after cheating. Some were confessions of desire that had no business being confessed. Some were begging sessions dressed up as ballads. Some were grown people standing in the wreckage of their own decisions, trying to sing their way back into somebody’s heart.

But that is exactly what made them feel real.

There was an absence of pride.

People were willing to sound like they needed someone. They were willing to admit that they had failed. They were willing to say, “I messed up, I lost you, and I do not know how to live inside this consequence.” They could stand inside their shame and still confess love without trying to make it sound cool.

That is rare now.

Now everybody wants to sound like the winner. Even in heartbreak, people want to sound untouched. Nobody wants to beg. Nobody wants to be seen wanting someone more than they are wanted. Nobody wants to admit that one person has the power to disturb their whole nervous system.

So we turn everything into pride.

We turn pain into a caption. We turn lust into personality. We turn sex into content. We turn emotional avoidance into self respect. We call it healing when sometimes it is just fear with better branding.

Then we wonder why we suck at love.

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Your playlist is not innocent. Mine is not either.

We listen to songs about options, bodies, revenge, cheating, replacing people, not caring, moving on before we have processed anything, and then we act shocked when vulnerability feels unnatural. We consume detachment all day and wonder why devotion feels like a foreign language.

At some point, the songs stop being just songs.

They become instructions.

They teach you what to desire. They teach you what to mock. They teach you what to call weakness. They teach you how to speak when you are hurt. They teach you how quickly to replace someone. They teach you that being needed is power, but needing someone is dangerous.

Then one day you are sitting across from someone who genuinely loves you, and you do not know what to do with it because your heart has been trained to treat sincerity like a trap.

That is the part we do not like admitting.

We think our playlists are just entertainment, but they are also shaping our emotional imagination. They are giving us language for love, sex, pain, betrayal, loyalty, desire and forgiveness. And if most of the language we consume is lustful, prideful and emotionally unavailable, why are we surprised when our relationships start sounding the same?

And maybe this is where men need to be honest with themselves too.

Somewhere along the way, we started expecting women to respond to a level of effort we have not actually given.

As a man courting a woman, pursuing a woman, or trying to get her attention, there has to be humility in that process. Not humiliation. Not obsession. Not begging for someone who has clearly rejected you. But humility. The kind that says, “I want your attention, so I need to give you a reason to trust mine.”

That is something old music understood.

A lot of those songs were sung by men who knew love required action. You had to show up. You had to explain yourself. You had to risk looking foolish. You had to put your best foot forward because love, or even the chance at love, required something from you.

Today, a lot of music teaches men the opposite.

It teaches men that women should chase them. That women should compete for them. That being desired is the same thing as being worthy. And maybe most dangerously, it teaches men that money is access.

And maybe money does give you access to certain rooms, certain attention, and certain women. But maybe that is exactly where we lost the point.

Because access is not love. Provision is not ownership. Offering a woman something does not mean she now owes you her body, her softness, her loyalty, or her submission. That is not courting. That is a transaction wearing romantic language.

So you get men expecting softness from women they have not been gentle with, loyalty from women they have not led properly, and intimacy from women they have only tried to purchase.

That is entitlement with a better outfit.

Men used to understand that getting a woman’s attention required intention. You had to approach. You had to call. You had to write. You had to go through the discomfort of making your interest known without hiding behind irony, ego, money, or a half-hearted DM at midnight.

The pride was already left at the door.

That is why the music sounded the way it did. By the time a man was singing like that, he had already accepted that love was going to cost him something. His pride. His comfort. His performance of being unbothered.

We want the reward of being loved without the responsibility of becoming lovable. We want women to respond to us like we are men of substance while approaching them like boys with Wi-Fi, money and confidence.

Old music reminded men that love required action.

Not just attraction.

Not just access.

Listen to Lenny Williams on “Cause I Love You.”

That man is not performing detachment. He is not trying to look unbothered. He is not pretending he has options waiting outside. He is pleading. He stops the music and starts speaking like he needs you to understand the weight of what love has done to him.

It is almost uncomfortable to hear now because we are not used to that kind of exposure anymore.

He had no armour on.

That is what old music understood. Love is not always polished. Love can make you look stupid. Love can make you explain the same feeling in five different ways because you are not trying to be poetic anymore, you are trying to be heard.

And maybe that is what we lost.

We lost the willingness to be heard in our most undignified state.

I am not saying we need to go back to unhealthy love. I am not saying anybody should stay where they are being abused, disrespected, manipulated or destroyed. I am not romanticising suffering. Some of the love our parents had was traumatic, and a lot of us are still trying to heal from what they called normal.

But I do think they had a language for emotional seriousness that we have almost abandoned.

When they loved, at least in the music, they loved with weight. The songs carried consequence. Desire had atmosphere. Sex had intimacy. Missing someone had grief inside it. Apology had humiliation. Even when the song was wrong, even when the situation was messy, the emotion had blood in it.

Today, a lot of love music feels like it is afraid of love.

It wants the body, but not the burden. It wants the pleasure, but not the responsibility. It wants the aesthetic of intimacy without the inconvenience of being known. It wants someone in the bed, but not someone in the soul.

And that is not just a musical problem.

That becomes a cultural problem.

Music has always taught us how to feel. It gives us permission to access parts of ourselves we are too proud to say out loud. That is why a song can embarrass you in private. That is why one lyric can drag you back into a memory you thought you had matured past. That is why old school music still has the power to make grown people quiet.

It does not just entertain you.

It finds you.

And when the music you consume constantly tells you to stay guarded, stay desirable, stay detached, sexually available but emotionally unreachable, you eventually start believing that is normal.

You start thinking love is supposed to feel like control.

But love is not control.

Love is risk. Love is confession. Love is apology. Love is choosing one person in a world that keeps offering you distractions. Love is being brave enough to be affected by somebody. Love is allowing another human being to matter to you without immediately trying to protect your ego from the possibility of loss.

That is why old love songs still hit.

They were not perfect, but they were alive.

They knew that love was bigger than looking cool. They knew that sometimes the most honest thing you can say is, “I cannot do this without you.” Not because you have no identity outside of that person, but because love, real love, is supposed to leave a mark. It is supposed to humble you. It is supposed to make pride feel expensive.

And this is not only about romantic love.

That is the part I keep coming back to.

The essence of those songs was bigger than relationships. They taught people how to feel deeply. How to miss people. How to honour people. How to cry without making it a joke. How to love your friends, your family, your people, with a kind of emotional honesty that did not need to be disguised as sarcasm or distance.

Maybe that is what I miss most.

Not just the sound, but the softness it gave people permission to have.

Because somewhere along the way, we lost the formula. We lost the bridge. We lost the monologue. We lost the part of the song where someone stops performing and starts confessing. We lost the ability to say, “This is what love has done to me,” without immediately trying to make it sound less vulnerable.

And now we have playlists full of lust, pride and detachment, wondering why love feels so difficult to hold.

Maybe you do not have commitment issues.

Maybe your heart has just been studying the wrong syllabus.

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If this made you check your playlist, you already know what to do.

Somewhere between hookup culture, emotional unavailability, social media, and alcohol, an entire generation forgot how to just be friends.

Nobody says it honestly because honesty would force people to confront how emotionally chaotic modern relationships have actually become. So instead, we hide behind language that sounds casual enough to remove accountability.

“We’re just friends.”

But modern friendship barely resembles friendship anymore.

It is emotional dependence without responsibility. Intimacy without commitment. Romantic tension disguised as convenience. People text each other like lovers, confide in each other like partners, sleep together when alcohol gets involved, then wake up and pretend none of it meant anything because nobody wants to look emotionally attached.

And somehow, this became maturity.

And maybe that is why so many people feel emotionally exhausted now.

Because modern relationships demand the emotional vulnerability of commitment while simultaneously rejecting the structure that once made vulnerability feel psychologically safe.

We want access to each other without responsibility toward one another.

We want intimacy without accountability.

We want exclusivity without sacrifice.

We want emotional reassurance while still keeping other people emotionally available in the background “just in case.”

And I am not even speaking about this from some morally superior position. I have participated in it too. Most people have. Modern dating culture is not some distant phenomenon happening to “other people.” We are all inside it to some degree.

We all contributed to normalising emotionally confusing dynamics because they benefited us at one point or another.

Maybe that is why this conversation feels so uncomfortable.

Because people recognise themselves in it.

Everybody Has History With Everybody

Friendship circles today have become strangely incestuous. Everybody has history with everybody. Somebody dated someone briefly. Somebody drunkenly hooked up once. Somebody still secretly would if given the chance. Somebody swears they are “past it,” while still speaking every single day.

Yet the entire group continues operating as though none of that history matters.

Modern culture normalized the idea that people should remain emotionally and socially accessible forever. And maybe temporarily, it works.

Until real relationships enter the picture.

Until somebody gets a boyfriend or girlfriend outside the friendship group and is suddenly expected to feel completely comfortable with their partner spending weekends, nights out, holidays, and alcohol filled environments around people they have already been intimate with.

That is where society starts gaslighting people.

Because now, boundaries are called insecurity.

Discomfort is called controlling.

Principles are treated like emotional weakness.

People are told they should be “mature enough” to accept situations that, realistically, most human beings would naturally struggle to trust.

But not every boundary is insecurity.

Sometimes it is discernment.

Because once physical intimacy enters a relationship, the dynamic changes permanently.

And maybe this is the uncomfortable part people avoid saying out loud, but I genuinely do not believe something remains fully platonic once physical boundaries have already been crossed.

Maybe friendly.

Maybe familiar.

Maybe emotionally attached.

But not fully platonic.

Because intimacy alters the psychological structure of a relationship permanently. The body remembers access. Emotional familiarity changes. Boundaries become psychologically blurred whether people admit it or not.

And pretending nothing changed simply because two people agreed to keep calling each other “friends” feels emotionally dishonest.

Intimacy creates psychological familiarity whether people admit it or not.

The body remembers access.

And maybe that is the part people struggle to discuss honestly.

Because once somebody has experienced physical intimacy with you, there is often an unconscious entitlement that develops afterward. Not always maliciously. Sometimes subtly. Emotionally. Socially. Energetically.

People begin interacting as though access to your body, your attention, your vulnerability, or your emotional availability remains permanently negotiable simply because it existed once before.

That is why so many modern friendships feel psychologically heavy.

Because the boundaries are no longer clear.

Everybody is navigating invisible histories while pretending they are emotionally neutral.

And deep down, people can feel it.

That strange discomfort when someone touches their “friend” too familiarly.

The lingering tension in certain jokes.

The emotional territorialism hidden underneath “platonic” dynamics.

The subtle jealousy people pretend not to feel.

The possessiveness hidden beneath casualness.

Everybody acts detached while emotionally reacting to one another constantly.

And maybe that is why so many people feel anxious inside modern friendships without fully understanding why.

Because human beings are trying to intellectualise instincts that the body still experiences emotionally.

Especially when alcohol is involved.

Because alcohol does not create tension.

It exposes it.

Social Media Made Everything Worse

And social media made all of this infinitely worse.

Because now nobody ever fully leaves anybody.

Old flings still watch each other’s stories. Former hookups still send memes. People who crossed physical boundaries years ago continue maintaining emotional access to one another through likes, replies, private jokes, close friends lists, late night conversations, and casual “friendly” communication that previous generations never had permanent access to.

Social media gave people unlimited emotional proximity while removing almost all accountability.

The terrifying part is how normal all of this has started to feel.

People now casually maintain emotional ecosystems around themselves. Former lovers. Old situationships. “Friends” with unresolved tension. Mutuals waiting quietly for emotional openings whenever relationships become difficult.

Everybody has backups.

Everybody has access.

Everybody has emotional contingency plans disguised as friendship.

And social media allows people to maintain these almost-romantic emotional connections indefinitely without ever having to define them honestly.

That is why modern relationships often feel psychologically unsafe.

Not because people are necessarily cheating physically.

But because emotional loyalty itself has become blurred.

People keep tiny pieces of intimacy distributed across multiple people while calling it harmless because nothing is “officially” happening.

But emotionally, the lines are still being crossed constantly.

And within modern friendship groups, social media created the perfect disguise:

“We’re just friends now.”

That sentence has become the safest hiding place for unresolved tension in modern relationships.

Because technically, maybe they are friends now.

But history matters.

Attraction matters.

Emotional familiarity matters.

And pretending those things disappear simply because people renamed the dynamic feels intellectually dishonest.

Especially when the communication never stopped.

That is what people struggle to trust.

Not random strangers.

The person your partner already shared intimacy with. The person who already knows them emotionally vulnerable. The person who still has direct access to them every single day while everybody else pretends the past no longer exists.

And the moment somebody questions that dynamic, society immediately labels them insecure.

But there is a difference between insecurity and understanding human nature honestly.

Modern culture keeps trying to convince people that unlimited access without boundaries is emotional maturity.

But maybe maturity is understanding that not every connection needs to remain accessible forever.

The Social Punishment Of Growing Up

And maybe the strangest part of modern friendship culture is what happens when somebody finally decides they no longer want to participate in those dynamics.

The moment somebody meets a person who makes them reevaluate the chaos, the blurred boundaries, the emotional ambiguity, and the constant normalisation of intimacy within friendship groups, they often become the villain of the group.

People suddenly act as though growth is betrayal.

As though wanting clearer boundaries is judgment.

As though removing yourself from emotionally complicated dynamics means you think you are “better” than everyone else.

And maybe that reaction reveals something uncomfortable.

Because deep down, many people know these environments are unsustainable long term.

But instead of confronting that honestly, people often protect the culture itself.

So when somebody leaves those dynamics behind, creates distance, or chooses a relationship that requires stronger boundaries, they get treated as though they abandoned the friendship instead of simply evolving beyond a lifestyle that no longer feels emotionally healthy.

Modern culture praises freedom constantly, but becomes strangely hostile when somebody chooses restraint voluntarily.

Especially when that restraint forces other people to question their own lives.

And maybe what makes this entire conversation so emotionally charged is that people can feel themselves becoming disconnected in real time.

You can feel it in the way people speak about each other.

The way vulnerability became embarrassing.

The way genuine care now gets mistaken for desperation.

The way emotional detachment became socially attractive.

The way people laugh at love publicly while privately craving reassurance, safety, consistency, and intimacy more than ever before.

There is a sadness underneath modern dating that people rarely talk about honestly.

Everybody looks connected.

Everybody looks desired.

Everybody looks sexually liberated.

And yet so many people feel emotionally homeless inside their relationships.

Not because they are incapable of intimacy.

But because modern culture taught people how to access one another without teaching them how to emotionally protect one another afterward.

We Don’t Even Speak About Sex Properly Anymore

And maybe the clearest evidence of society’s deteriorating relationship with intimacy can be seen through language itself.

We no longer even speak about sex with reverence.

We speak about it violently.

We do not say “making love” anymore. Most people barely even say “having sex.” The dominant word now is “fuck.”

A swear word.

A vulgarity.

A term associated with anger, disrespect, humiliation, aggression, and dismissal somehow became the primary language people use for intimacy.

And maybe that says everything.

Because language reflects culture. Language reveals psychology. The way people speak about things exposes how they subconsciously perceive them.

And the fact that one of the most emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, and physically vulnerable acts human beings can experience together is now described using a derogatory term says everything about how disconnected society has become from the sacredness of intimacy.

Sex stopped being viewed as connection.

It became consumption.

Something recreational. Casual. Transactional. An activity stripped of emotional weight and reduced to pleasure, validation, entertainment, temporary loneliness relief, ego, or social currency inside friendship groups where everybody has history with everybody else.

And now people are shocked that modern relationships feel emotionally unstable.

People are more sexually open than ever before, yet emotionally disconnected from one another. Everybody has access to bodies, but almost nobody feels genuinely seen.

People confuse physical closeness for emotional intimacy, then wonder why they still feel empty afterward.

Because sex was never designed to function without emotional consequence.

The Death Of Safe Love

That is the lie modern dating keeps selling.

That nothing means anything unless you decide it does.

But everything means something psychologically.

That is why betrayal hurts so deeply.

That is why jealousy exists.

That is why trust collapses when certain histories enter certain rooms.

That is why so many people privately feel anxious while publicly pretending to be emotionally evolved.

And maybe that is the irony underneath all of this.

At the exact same time people are becoming more emotionally accessible, more sexually open, and more interconnected than ever before, people are also struggling more than ever to sustain relationships, trust one another, or build love that actually lasts.

Everybody keeps asking the same question:

“Why is modern dating so hard?”

“Why can nobody commit?”

“Why do relationships feel so unstable?”

But maybe part of the answer is sitting quietly inside the way we now relate to one another.

Because these dynamics do not leave people untouched psychologically.

They shape people.

They condition people emotionally.

They slowly normalise emotional ambiguity, blurred loyalty, fractured intimacy, and temporary attachment until people no longer recognise what healthy emotional connection is supposed to feel like anymore.

And over time, people stop knowing how to distinguish genuine intimacy from emotional convenience.

People enter relationships carrying unresolved attachment, emotional familiarity with former lovers, blurred boundaries, psychological entitlement, and social environments built around ambiguity, then wonder why trust feels fragile.

Why commitment feels difficult.

Why vulnerability feels terrifying.

Why emotional permanence feels almost impossible to maintain.

And maybe the saddest part is that many people are not trying to hurt one another intentionally.

They are simply participating in a culture that taught them how to access people emotionally and physically without teaching them how to protect the emotional consequences afterward.

And maybe the saddest part of all of this is how rare safe friendship has started to feel.

Not attraction.

Not sex.

Not situationships.

Just friendship.

The kind where two people can sit across from each other at a coffee shop, speak honestly, laugh deeply, share vulnerability, and trust that intimacy will not eventually become transactional or sexualised.

The kind where somebody can call you during the worst moment of their life and know you are showing up because you genuinely care about them, not because some hidden part of you hopes emotional vulnerability might eventually become access.

What happened to relationships feeling emotionally safe?

What happened to friendships that did not carry undertones?

What happened to simply caring for people without secretly wanting ownership of their bodies?

And maybe that is why so many people struggle with modern intimacy now.

Because once every relationship becomes psychologically loaded, emotionally ambiguous, or sexually negotiable, people stop feeling safe around one another.

Not physically.

Emotionally.

And the strange part is that people who recognize this often get treated as insecure, conservative, emotionally immature, or controlling simply because they still believe boundaries matter.

As though wanting clarity is weakness.

As though restraint is repression.

As though emotional safety itself became old fashioned.

But maybe there was wisdom inside those boundaries.

Maybe boundaries were never about restricting intimacy.

Maybe they existed to protect it.

Because deep down, I do not think people are craving more access to one another.

I think people are craving relationships that finally feel safe enough to trust again

Maybe calmness is the new intimacy.

Maybe safety is the new luxury.

And maybe the problem was never that this generation wanted love less.

Maybe we just destroyed the boundaries that made love feel safe enough to exist.

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I noticed the moment it broke. I just didn’t allow myself to feel it.

I noticed the moment it broke. I remember it clearly, not as confusion, but as recognition.

It was Christmas Day, when I learned what betrayal actually feels like in real time.

The night before, she had gone out for dinner with her mother on Christmas Eve. At some point after that, she disappeared. No replies, no updates, no way of reaching her despite the constant calling and trying. I remember the repetition of it, the way concern slowly becomes uncertainty, and uncertainty slowly becomes something heavier that you start carrying in your body instead of your thoughts.

Eventually I stopped trying to force contact and went out with friends, but I was not really there. I was present in the physical sense, laughing at the right moments, responding when spoken to, but underneath it there was this quiet, constant tightening in my chest. I kept telling myself it was anxiety, or overthinking, or distance. But the truth is I still trusted her. I still believed in her. I just didn’t understand why she had gone silent.

Again.

I got home later and sent her a goodnight message. And a request to her, to let me know when she was home safe.

Something simple. Something normal. Something that still assumed tomorrow would explain tonight.

Then, around 6 in the morning, the phone rang.

But it wasn’t her voice that answered first.

There was another man on the line.

And I don’t think I can properly explain what that does to a person. It wasn’t just hearing it. It was the way reality rearranged itself in real time. The way your mind tries to hold onto the version of events you were living in a few seconds ago, while everything new is forcing its way in and replacing it.

I could hear him before I even understood what was happening. And in that moment something inside me didn’t just hurt, it collapsed. Because betrayal stopped being an idea I had heard about in other people’s stories. It became something I could hear breathing on the other end of my own life.

Someone asked me if I was okay while I was still inside that moment. I remember that question feeling almost distant, like it was being asked in another room. Because I was still trying to understand how to exist inside something that had already changed me without my permission.

Then she spoke.

She told me she had met someone else. That she was moving on.

There were plans still in motion. Flights already booked. Hotels already arranged. A future I had treated as real dissolving in the space between one sentence and my inability to emotionally catch up to it.

That was the moment something broke. Not loudly. Not dramatically. But in a way that felt permanent. Like something in me understood it would never fully return to what it was before.

And what I didn’t know then, what I only understand now, is that moments like that do not stay contained in memory. They reorganise you.

There is something that happens in the brain after betrayal that is difficult to explain without sounding clinical, but you feel it before you ever learn the language for it. It is as if the nervous system recalibrates what “safe” means. Emotional pain and physical pain begin to feel less separate. Your body remembers what your mind tries to forget. You start noticing how quickly you scan people now, how easily you detect change in tone, how alert you become to silence.

It is not that I stopped trusting people. It is that trust stopped being automatic. It became something I now have to consciously step into, something I negotiate with myself even in moments that are calm. And that creates a strange split in experience. On the outside, I can be present, even loving, even open. On the inside, there is often another part of me quietly watching, preparing, measuring risk.

And I think the hardest part is not even what it does to other people, but what it does to how you see yourself.

Because after betrayal, you don’t just ask “why did that happen?” you start asking quieter, more corrosive questions. “What did I miss?” “What did I not see?” “What does it say about me that I believed so fully in something that could end so easily?” You begin to look at your own trust not as something pure, but as something that led you somewhere painful.

And that changes how you move in love.

Being a man in this makes it more complicated, not because men feel less, but because men are often not given many acceptable ways to express what they feel when it is soft, uncertain, or unresolved. So a lot of it becomes internal. Quiet. Unspoken. You learn how to continue functioning while carrying emotional weight that has nowhere to go. You learn how to look composed while your internal world is still trying to make sense of something it never got closure for. You learn how to mourn the boy who felt everything while feeling nothing.

And there is another layer to this that I don’t always know how to say out loud.

Because I am not unloved in the present. There is someone who shows up with a kind of care that is steady, intentional, and real. Someone who chooses me in ways that are consistent, and not confusing, and not conditional. And still, I sometimes feel like I am learning how to receive something my nervous system no longer fully trusts.

Not because they are doing anything wrong, but because I am still learning how to stop waiting for things to collapse.

And I carry a strange kind of guilt in that space. Not guilt for who I am with them, but guilt for the parts of me that still hesitate when I should be soft. For the moments I am present, but not fully surrendered to what is actually safe. It feels unfair, in a quiet way, that someone can be giving you something pure, while you are still negotiating with memories that are not happening anymore.

But underneath that, there is something even more unspoken.

The memory of what it feels like to choose someone completely, and still be replaced.

To be fully in it. Fully invested. Fully oriented towards a future with someone in your mind, only to realise that the direction was never mutual. That while you were building permanence, they were already halfway out of the room. There is a specific kind of pain in that realisation that is not loud at first. It is slow. It is humiliating in hindsight. It makes you revisit every moment and re-measure it, trying to locate where you misunderstood reality.

And then comes the self doubt. The subtle erosion of certainty in your own perception. You begin to question what you missed. What you ignored. What you interpreted too generously. You start comparing yourself, not only to who they chose, but to the version of yourself you thought was enough at the time. And without meaning to, you start building internal narratives that ask whether love was ever as mutual as you believed it to be.

That is where overthinking begins. Not as curiosity, but as self protection disguised as analysis. The mind replaying conversations, tone shifts, silences, trying to find a pattern that would have warned you sooner. As if understanding it retroactively could prevent it from ever happening again.

And now, even in something healthier, that echo still exists. It shows up in small moments. In pauses. In uncertainty that is not actually danger, but still feels like the beginning of it. It makes me observe love sometimes instead of just living inside it.

And I hate that part. Not because it makes me broken, but because it makes me aware of how deeply I once chose someone who did not choose me back in the same way.

So I am learning, slowly, that not all repetition is prophecy. That just because I have been replaced before does not mean I am always about to be. And that the hardest part of being chosen well again is not recognizing love, but allowing myself to stop searching for where it will eventually leave.

So I end up here, in this in between space.

Trying to be someone who can love without hesitation, while also being someone who has learned what hesitation is for. Trying to trust without self betrayal, while also trying not to ignore what I have already lived through.

And maybe that is the tension I am still learning to live with. Not becoming someone who never feels betrayal again, but becoming someone who does not let betrayal quietly decide every relationship that comes after it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately and honestly, the rhetoric around it in our generation scares me.

Somehow, loving someone out loud has become embarrassing. Showing affection is seen as weak. Caring deeply for someone is treated like foolishness because everyone is so afraid of getting hurt or looking stupid.

We live in a generation where people would rather appear emotionally unavailable than be honest about loving someone deeply. People act like being in a committed relationship is cringe. Like caring too much is embarrassing. Like having endless options somehow makes you more valuable.

And I think social media has played a huge role in ruining the way we experience companionship.

We have become so consumed by the illusion of endless options that we no longer know how to stay. The second things become difficult, people start looking elsewhere instead of working through things with the person they chose.

I’m am guilty of such too.

And maybe that’s because we’ve forgotten that love is not just something you feel.

Love is work.

Love is an action.

Feelings change all the time. Attraction fluctuates. Life becomes difficult. Human beings are complicated. But real love is choosing someone continuously even during seasons where things are imperfect. It is choosing patience. Choosing honesty. Choosing understanding. Choosing commitment.

And I think once we truly understand that, we’ll finally have the right idea about relationships again.

Because to me, loving someone at their worst is the purest form of love.

Not when everything is beautiful and exciting. Not when there is money, attention, convenience, or aesthetics attached to it. I mean loving someone when they are struggling, emotionally distant, moody, uncertain, or figuring life out. Loving them beyond what they can offer you in that exact moment.

Because real love is not transactional.

Human beings are complex. We all carry insecurities, fears, wounds, flaws, and shortcomings. Part of loving someone deeply is pouring into each other so both people can grow.

But more than anything, I think we’ve lost the art of respect.

Not even just love. Respect.

Because if you truly respect someone, you consider them before you hurt them. You think about how your actions would affect them. You think about how devastated someone who chose you and trusted you might feel because of your decisions.

Cheating, betraying someone, lying to someone, entertaining other options behind their back, all of it comes from a lack of respect.

Because if you no longer want to be with someone, honesty should come before betrayal.

But our generation has normalized emotional dishonesty because everyone is trying to protect an image, look cool, stay detached, or avoid vulnerability.

And social media makes it even easier.

The moment people get into arguments or rough patches, they run to old flames, exes, or people they used to entertain for validation, attention, comfort, or reassurance. And I think we’ve normalized giving people access to our lives who should no longer have that access.

Keeping people around “just in case.”

Keeping emotional backups.

Calling someone “just a friend” while knowing there is unresolved intimacy, history, or emotional tension there.

A lot of modern relationships are suffering because people are never fully closing certain doors.

And in the process, we’ve lost consideration for one another.

We’ve forgotten how to genuinely care about how someone else might receive our actions. We’ve forgotten that love and respect are tied together. You cannot claim to love someone while consistently disregarding their heart.

And honestly, I think the biggest issue of all is that we’re trying to do all of this without God.

We’re trying to define love, loyalty, morality, commitment, and companionship without the One who created love in the first place. And I genuinely believe that if God was at the center of more relationships, a lot of this would make far more sense.

But the message online now is the complete opposite.

Don’t care too much.

Don’t love too hard.

Don’t show affection publicly.

Always keep your options open.

Leave the moment your needs are not met.

Cheating is normalized.

Emotional detachment is glorified.

And I’m not saying people should tolerate toxicity or abandon their standards. But I do think we’ve lost the beauty of persistence. We don’t sit through hard seasons together anymore. We don’t fight for each other the way people used to.

Everything feels disposable now, including people.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I still believe there is something beautiful about two people choosing each other through every version of life. Through the good seasons, the difficult seasons, the boring seasons, and the uncertain seasons.

Because that, to me, is what love actually is.

“Love Letter to Me”

I’ve been neglecting you lately.

I haven’t been myself for a while, stuck somewhere in between. A little lost, a little numb. A shell of me, of us. But I’m working on it. I’ve been pouring back into you, into us, the way you always said I should.

Truth is, I’ve thought about everything and everyone else but you.

And I’m sorry for that.

But I’m here now.

I know your toxic trait is that you always take me back.

That’s just how forgiving you are when it comes to us.

And maybe that’s what makes you so special

You’re still here.

You’ve always been here.

You’ve always been all I’ve got. And somehow, you’re still enough.

So I’m choosing you. Every day. All the time.

Forever.

It’s us against the world, Kiddo.

And we’re gonna be good. I’m sure of it.

We always make a way.

And together… we can make magic.

Love you. till the wheels fall off.

Not dates, not places

but chords,

and the way a voice breaks

in the middle of a verse.

Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who does that.

But I know I’m not.

Still, it feels personal

like a secret only I understand.

I remember feelings in music

colours,

faces,

the way the light hit the room.

The echo of laughter.

The silence after.

I remember love in music.

Songs, lyrics,

drums that felt like heartbeats.

Guitars that cried with me.

Chords that held me.

Voices that stayed

long after the moment passed.

I remember moments in music.

And sometimes

that’s how I know they were real.