Do you ever look back and feel nostalgic about your childhood? Given the chance, would you go back?

Looking back, life was so full. There was an abundance of joy, curiosity, very little fear. One core memory for me was keeping rabbits. Every day at dawn my friends who also kept rabbits and I would walk down to Lake Victoria to cut reeds and gather the lushest food for them. I grew up in Kisumu, in a town by the lake called Dunga Beach.

The most fulfilling part of it wasn’t the rabbits. It was doing it together. We’d stop halfway home when we came across an empty can or a bottle and decide, right there, to play an epic World Cup final. Those friendships had almost no constitution to them — the only rule was that you had to inherit each other’s enemies. Nothing else mattered except who was linking up to play and whose mum had made chapatis so we could all go there for lunch. (Meanwhile my dad was using me as free labour to feed those rabbits before he eventually turned them into food. I was heartbroken for about a day. Then I tasted the meat and moved on.)

I didn’t keep any of those friends. Boarding school scattered us, then Nairobi did the rest, and I had to start the whole business of friendship from scratch. I’ve done it a few times since. And after enough cycles of making, losing, and remaking friends, I’ve ended up with a small handful of very close ones — the kind that give me that same nostalgic, low-pressure, chapati-at-your-mum’s-house feeling. Not counting me, I could count them on one hand. They are the good, real thing. This piece isn’t about them.

This piece is about the people I lost.

But here is what happened. Every version of me I’ve become — the one who stopped drinking, the one who started building things, the one who got serious about training and health, the one whose beliefs about how to live shifted — has cost me friends. Not because we fought. Not because anyone did anything wrong. Just because, one by one, the things we used to bond over stopped being the things I did. And when you take those away, most friendships turn out to have been standing on nothing else.

The drinking is the easiest one to point at, because it’s the most obvious. When I stopped, I didn’t just lose the bar. I lost hanging out. I lost the long spontaneous conversations that only happen when everyone’s a little loose. I lost the shared ritual of unwinding, the ranting-about-life sessions, the wide-open Saturday that starts with “come through” and ends at 3 a.m. Sober friendship has to build all of that out of drier materials, and it turns out drier materials are much harder to work with. I tried to nurture those friendships after. Most of them thinned quietly. We had never actually bonded over anything else, and there was nothing else to move the conversation onto.

I hear all the time that people are drinking less these days. I promise I don’t know where they are. Not in Nairobi, or at least not in my slice of it. And here is the twist that took me a while to see: sport is not actually the problem. I love sport. I think every man should love something competitive — there’s a kick to the chase, to the score, to caring intensely about an outcome that doesn’t matter. The problem is that in my city, watching sport with other men is almost always wrapped in alcohol. The pub is the venue. The pint is the ritual. Which means the thing I love has been welded to the thing I left, and I can’t have one without the other. So I watch at home. Alone or occasionally with one of my remaining friends

Which leaves professional networking, and that one turns out to be mostly a market — a soft, mutually beneficial “what can you do for me” that dresses itself up as friendship and rarely holds.

But you know what is harder? It’s not only the drinking that changed. It’s everything else too — the hobbies, the health, the ambition, the beliefs. Which means the problem isn’t fixed by finding sober friends. Sobriety on its own doesn’t give me anyone to call. What I actually need is people who are somewhere near where I am now, in more than one dimension at once. And this is the part that’s difficult to say without sounding arrogant, so I’ll say it plainly and let it land how it lands: at my current level of interest and intensity in the things I care about, I can’t find them. That’s not a boast. It’s more like a quiet loneliness I didn’t know was waiting on the other side of doing the work.

One recent Saturday, I told my girlfriend it would be nice to call a man-friend and go do a Hyrox simulation together. And just seating there, I realised I did not have a single man to call. Not because my friends have a problem — they don’t, they’re great — but because none of them are into fitness at the level I am. Multiply that Saturday by the number of interests I now have that used to be someone else’s job to share with me, and you have the shape of the problem.

I don’t try harder than I do partly out of dread, and partly out of a suspicion that I’ll try and still not find the people. Building an adult friendship from zero when you’re already this deep into your own path — with your own routines, your own convictions, your own opinions about how to spend a Saturday — is genuinely dreadful. Somehow it feels worse than the isolation. Which is probably why so many men just stay in the isolation.

I do not have a lightbulb moment for you. This is a rant, and I mean it as one. I don’t know how it ends. I still don’t have a man to call for the Hyrox thing. I still walk around most days aware of a small empty seat where a friend used to sit.

But here is the “and yet,” because there always has to be one if the essay is going to be honest.

I feel more alive than I have ever felt. I am living more intentionally than I ever have. My body works better, my head is clearer, my work is sharper, and I actually like who I am when nobody’s watching — which is not something I could have said before I made any of these changes. So the trade, so far, is genuinely worth it. I would not want the old version of me back, even to fill the empty seat.

I just wish someone had told me, before I started, that the better version would be this lonely on some days. That when you rebuild yourself, the room clears out for a while. That the price of becoming someone you actually respect is a season — maybe a long one — of not knowing who to call.

If you’re a man reading this and you recognise yourself in it, I don’t have anything to offer you except the recognition itself. You are not doing it wrong. You are not weird. This is what the middle of the change looks like, and the middle is a lonely place. And if you’re a woman reading this and you’re watching the man you love go through it — this is what it feels like from the inside. He’s not shutting down. He’s between rooms.

I’ll write the second part of this essay when I have a happy ending. In the meantime, if you’re in the same middle: I see you. I don’t have a Hyrox partner either.

Until then 🤞🏾

Do you know what it means to be in love? It’s a question I think most men have never actually been asked, let alone sat down to answer honestly, without ego doing the talking for them. And I think that gap or the unasked question explains a lot of what you might be experiencing with the man you’re struggling with.

If you’re with someone who feels unavailable, or distant, or just off in a way you can’t name, I want to offer a possibility. Not an excuse — a possibility. What looks like nonchalance, like he doesn’t care enough to try, might not be a lack of feeling at all. It might be a lack of education. He may simply never have learned the intelligence of love.

Because almost everything we know, we learned somewhere. We observed it, or someone taught it to us. And love is no exception; it’s not only science and money that have to be studied. Love is learned, too. You may agree with me that women tend to actually learn it. They seek it out. They talk about it with their friends, they compare notes and pass experiences around a circle. Her mother, out of all her own joy and all her own wreckage, sits her down and tells her things. Those long conversations leave deposits — little by little, a picture forms of what love is and what to expect from it.

Most men get none of that— Zilch! Unless a man has a father who has done his own work, who is soft enough and grown enough to actually tell his son what it takes to love a woman properly, he arrives into adulthood with no education on the subject at all. And it gets worse, because men don’t talk to each other the way women do. We don’t sit with our friends and discuss our feelings, let alone dissect love and learn from one another. A few do — the genuinely strong ones, the ones who’ve done the work. But most don’t.

So the man you’re struggling with may simply not know how. His lack of ‘‘cholance’’ might be hollowness — not coldness, just absence. There’s nothing there because no one ever put anything there.

Consider what he’s likely working with. He may never have watched his own father love his mother, so he has no template. His idea of love might be largely Disney — the grand gesture, the happily-ever-after with no understanding of the in-betweens, no grasp that the fairy tale is actually built out of a thousand small inconveniences and difficult, unglamorous days. His friends are probably as unschooled as he is, so he has no honest comparison, no one to tell him he’s getting it wrong.

And then there’s the quietest one, the wolf that lurks underneath: he may not feel challenged to keep you. Men are wired to conquer, to pursue or solve the hard, intricate thing — and once he feels he has you secured, that primal drive to work for it can quietly switch off. You may have seen it yourself. Early on, he’s all-invested, planning the dates, buying the gifts, going above and beyond. Then he has you, and it slows or stops. Think of it like a recruitment budget, which is separate from an operational budget. He spent the whole budget winning you and left nothing for day-to-day operations.

I’m not telling you any of this to justify bad behaviour. I’m telling you because in some cases there is often something underneath it; something unworked, unlearned — and it helps to know that what you’re seeing maybe isn’t the whole story.

I know this because I have been him.

I remember one relationship where I was told, plainly, that I’d stopped treating my partner as a priority. And for the life of me, I could not see it. In my mind, in my heart, she was a priority — but my actions were far from it, and I hadn’t noticed a single one of the small changes as they happened. So when she named it, I didn’t hear honesty. I felt attacked. Like she was hunting for a fault in me. I withdrew, took offence, and let it end — convinced I’d done nothing wrong. I didn’t try to fix it. I just moved on. And then I did the same thing again, a few more times, in a few more relationships.

I only learned later, after the work, after the wreckage. I have a decent education in love now — still limited, still ongoing, but real. And the things that moved me forward were things no one had ever told me.

The first was letting myself be vulnerable. Actually saying how I feel, out loud, and especially about the relationship itself. It turns out that simply telling your partner where you’re at opens the conversations that show you how you’re doing and where you’re falling short. I’d spent years assuming those conversations were attacks. They were more than that and were needed.

I also started seeking and watching other men —not even to observe love, mostly business and fitness, but I realised their love lives were worth looking at, most were actually good at this, they had happy, steady relationships — because if your father wasn’t the example, you have to go and find one.

I got curious and would ask questions. I started asking my partner how she wanted to be loved, how she wanted me to show up, rather than assuming I already knew. I didn’t. Most of us don’t know half of what we think we do.

Some of it was less obvious. Learning to care for something outside myself genuinely. Not the car, something that actually needs me, a plant, a pet, a home, even showing up properly for my parents — taught me a kind of steady, unflashy attention I’d never practised.

The cringe one! At the risk of sounding ridiculous: I would watch some of those relationship shows with her, the ones I used to roll my eyes at. They’re full of exactly the material I’d never been handed. There’s a reason she understands this stuff better than I do — she’s been studying it her whole life, in every form it comes in.

And then there was therapy, which I’d put above all the rest. If the problem is that no one ever taught you, therapy is where you finally get taught or given a chance to look inside at the hollowness. It’s the closest thing to a vaccine against repeating the same wreckage for the rest of your life.

So here’s what I’d leave you with. None of this is a reason to stay somewhere that’s hurting you, and none of it is your job to fix. A man’s education is his own to go and get. But if you’ve been reading his distance as proof that he doesn’t care, it’s worth knowing it might be something else entirely — a man who feels something real and was never taught what to do with it. Some men never go and learn. But the ones who do can change more than you’d think.

It’s the thought that doesn’t leave. When do I get to sit back and say it’s done — that I’ve arrived, that I can live happily ever after? My friend Njunge has a phrase for the thing we’re all quietly doing: striving to escape the permanent middle class. So that’s the marker, isn’t it? The top 1%. That’s when I’ll have made it.

I’ve been turning this over a lot lately. The early mornings, the long hours, the solitude, the constant learning — somewhere underneath all of it is a quieter question I don’t always want to look at directly. Is this why we’re here? Am I doing all this looking for happiness? And if I am, why does the chase feel so heavy, and why do I never seem to actually arrive?

And the part that confuses me most: why is the evidence of happiness money? We decide we’ll be happy when the number is big enough. Then the number gets big enough and it isn’t, so we move the number. I know this one from the inside. Early in corporate life, I got to what I thought was the top. I had the thing. And what I felt was not happiness — it was a short, bright hedonism that burned off in a few months, and then the same restlessness, just with a better view.

So now in my early thirties, I have stopped trusting the whole arrangement. Not the work — I still show up every day, I still want to be paid, a man has to eat and I like buying gifts and ultimately, as we say in Nairobi ‘‘Kutoka Block’’. What I stopped trusting was the reason I’d been told to work. I had been chasing money believing it was a route to happiness. It isn’t (says Bry). But here’s the part I had to sit with for a while before I could say it cleanly:

Money was never going to make me happy. But money does buy peace — and peace is real, and I want it. Peace is living in a part of the city where I don’t have to brace. It’s a vacation that isn’t financed by anxiety. It’s the small luxuries that take a layer of friction out of a day. That’s not happiness. That’s the absence of being inconvenienced by everything, which is its own quiet kind of freedom. For years I’d collapsed those two things into one word and then wondered why the word kept failing me. They were never the same pursuit. Money is the tool for one of them. It was always going to be useless for the other.

Which left a question I couldn’t buy my way out of. If money is for peace, then where does happiness actually come from?

I went looking for it somewhere I’d never thought to check: the in-betweens. The parts of the day I’d been treating as the commute between important things. My morning triple espresso, made properly, drunk slowly. The hour I spend on a video call with my girlfriend every day over lunch. Two hours of brutalising my body in the gym. Dressing properly to work from home even though no one will see me. None of these are achievements. None of them will appear on any certificate. And every one of them, I can now verify firsthand, is enough.

That’s the thing I didn’t expect — that the boring stuff works. That happiness isn’t withheld somewhere up ahead, released only once the number is hit. It’s been sitting in the ordinary hours the whole time, while I was looking over its head for something bigger.

I think the trap is autopilot. You set the destination once, years ago, and then you stop driving — you just let the days carry you toward a someday that keeps moving. If you’re anxious right now about when you’ll finally feel happy, that’s the signal. Take the manual controls back. Live the actual day you’re in, the small moments fully, and you start to notice happiness was never the prize at the end. It was the texture of the trip the whole way.

The goal, it turns out, was never the point. The goal is just the receipt — proof you did the thing. The thing itself happened in the doing, in the unremarkable middle, while you were busy waiting for it to start.

There’s a version of arrival I might still get — the one with the endless pool of money. Maybe it comes now or in my forties, maybe my fifties, maybe never. I’ve made my peace with not knowing. I’ll keep working for it, because peace is worth working for. But I’m not holding my happiness hostage to it anymore. That account is already open. It pays out every morning, in espresso.

We spend years sacrificing everything to get to the top. And the cruel joke, the one I don’t want to be the punchline of, is….

The moment people get there, they start aching for everything they gave up to climb.

So this is the reminder, mostly to myself: enjoy the climb, because the climb is the part that’s actually alive. Notice the small pockets of it. Live a little — this isn’t the rehearsal, it’s the performance— the finale, and it’s already running.

The peace, keep working for that. But the happiness? That part was free the whole time.

I kept catching myself asking, why is this one different? And the answer, when it finally landed, was not very flattering or very mysterious. It was just me. I was not the same person I had been the last time I tried to love someone. I had changed. Quietly, without announcing it, over a long stretch of unglamorous work.

That is the part I want to write about. Because I think a lot of us wait for love to show up and fix us, when actually it is the other way round. You do the work, and then love has somewhere to land.

This time, I knew how to communicate. I listened. I was intentional. I was kind and honest, and I actually loved her for who she was, not for what she did for me or how she made me feel — which, looking back, is mostly what I had been doing before and calling it love.

I learnt how she wanted to be loved. I told her how I wanted to be loved. And for the first time, I stopped dodging hard conversations. I was in it. Willing to put work in, willing to sacrifice, willing to stay in the uncomfortable parts long enough for something to actually get resolved.

None of that was natural for me. I had to learn all of it.

So what had I actually been doing in the in-between?

1. I went to therapy. This one did a lot of heavy lifting. It helped me face stuff I had been avoiding for years, and work through things I did not even realise I was carrying into every relationship. Having someone trained to walk you through that is genuinely different from talking to your boys. Men — please go to therapy. I cannot say this loud enough. You are not weak for it, you are probably overdue!

2. I worked on being someone worth choosing. Ask yourself this, and be honest about it: the partner you say you want — are you actually what they would want back? In your current life, as you are right now, would they pick you? If the answer is no, that is not a reason to feel bad; it just tells you where the work is.

3. I learnt to love myself first. Not in the cheesy way. I mean actually sitting with the question — who am I, what do I like about myself, what kind of man am I trying to become? You cannot give someone something you have not built yet.

4. I got my life in order. Career, health, money, spirituality, family, friendships — all of it. Because if those areas are a mess, you have no real practice at managing anything, and a relationship is just another thing that needs managing. If you cannot hold down the rest of your life, a relationship is not going to be the thing that saves you. It will probably just expose what was already there.

5. I stopped settling. This one sounds shallow until you have lived the other side of it. Pursue who you actually want. Do not go for easy, do not go for convenient, do not go for whoever happens to be in front of you when you are bored or lonely. Be willing to wait. I know waiting is hard, but trust me, it is worth it.

Anyway. I now remember how beautiful it is to find love — to love someone and to be loved back. It really is one of the best feelings there is. I highly recommend it.

But love on its own is not enough. You still have to show up for the boring stuff, the hard stuff, the stuff no one is going to congratulate you for. That part does not stop just because you found someone.

So do the work first. Then go find it.

P.S. When you do find it, hold on to it. Live a little. Enjoy it. Stay in it for as long as you can — forever, if you are lucky.