Ghana stands on the world stage demanding reparations for slavery. Fighting against xenophobia. Claiming moral authority on human rights. Then returns home and passes a bill criminalizing LGBTQ citizens for identity. And we are now leading Africa to dismantle the Maputo Protocol.
So yesterday PCOS was renamed to PMOS. After 11 years and about 22,000 people fighting for it.
If youโre one of the women who was told to just lose weight or come back when you want children, the reason it was renamed is going to make a lot of things make sense.
Keep reading๐งต๐ฉท
They put 17 people, married an average of 21 years, into a brain scanner and showed them a photo of their spouse. The same parts of the brain lit up that fire when a teenager has their first crush. Two decades together, and the chemistry was still going off like fireworks.
The study ran at Stony Brook in 2011. What changes after 20 years is the anxiety. That panic of not knowing if they love you back, the wondering, the checking. All of that fades. The pull toward them stays.
So that tells you what old love looks like in the brain. It doesnโt tell you how a couple gets there.
A marriage researcher named John Gottman has spent 40 years on that question. He films couples arguing in his lab at the University of Washington and predicts whether theyโll divorce. He gets it right 93.6% of the time, from 15 minutes of footage. More than 3,000 couples now.
He watches the two-second moments between sentences. The pauses. Thatโs where the prediction lives. The fights themselves matter less.
His go-to example: your wife is staring out the window and says, look at that bird. You glance up and say, oh wow. Or you keep scrolling on your phone. That tiny choice, that little reach for your attention, is what he calls a bid.
He watched newlyweds in his lab and followed them for six years. The couples who were still married had responded to each otherโs bids 86 times out of 100. The couples who divorced had responded 33 out of 100. Same money fights. Same in-laws. Same dishes in the sink. The one thing that was different was the bird.
This part stopped me. Gottman found that 69% of the things every couple fights about are problems that never get solved. The chores. The money. His mother. Whose family they spend Christmas with. The arguments repeat for 50 years. Happy couples and unhappy couples have roughly the same list of problems. The happy ones learned to argue about that list without contempt. The eye roll. The sigh. The little smile that says you are pathetic. Gottman calls contempt the sulfuric acid of relationships. He says itโs the single biggest sign that a marriage is over.
When you see two old people asleep on each other on a plane, the forgiveness in that picture is real. They have absorbed thousands of small failures by now. There is something quieter underneath the forgiveness, though. Decades ago, one of them said look at that bird. The other one looked up.
Publication day is officially here! ๐ฑ ๐๐ฅณ๐๐๐พ
A book about Tamale, the city I was born and raised in, endorsed by the most amazing feminist scholar of this generation, Professor Sylvia Tamale! ๐ฅ
Congratulations to me for writing an entire book. ๐ฅน๐
Ti diya! ๐๐ฟ
Itโs not only people who lose money through fraud that are affected by it. The services we canโt access because we are black listed, the increased difficulty of getting visas, cost of housing/recreational spots, the unfair profiling, remote jobs/contracts you miss out on, etc
fraud boys worsened the worship of money in our communities. they made the pursuit of knowledge look foolish.
i hope every single one of them is arrested and every pesewa taken from them.
I still have to learn. I still have to unlearn. It's why spaces to unlearn and relearn with love patience and kindness is needed. I wouldn't be who I am today without teachers and sisters and lots of love.
I was anti black, I was male centred, I was homophobic/queerphobic, I had low self esteem, I was problematic & indoctrinated like most people. Feminism, black revolutionaries, pan africanism, my village back home all saved my life. I still know I'm probably indoctrinated -