U'aaa

Data X Design

[U'aaa @XoXoPhil]

I look forward to my ultimate exit from sm

[Steph S @stephanienaome]

“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”

[U'aaa @XoXoPhil]

@Pearlie_DO It better be to me

[U'aaa @XoXoPhil]

@Pearlie_DO @MaryRoseMalomo Then there’s us that didn’t even want and got gifted twice 😭

[U'aaa @XoXoPhil]

I think I have burnout from all the AI generated think pieces on the internet. Can we please stop?

If you can prompt AI to generate the content, then so can everyone else of we need it. If you don't have something useful to say, please don't post.

[U'aaa @XoXoPhil]

@Pearlie_DO @BusisiweMotha_ Don’t I love you? 😘

[U'aaa @XoXoPhil]

One more thing and I may just spiral out

[U'aaa @XoXoPhil]

My to-do list is not catching a break this year.

[U'aaa @XoXoPhil]

Anything Nigeria is so frustrating.

[U'aaa @XoXoPhil]

3 months down and I'm still in the cottage

[U'aaa @XoXoPhil]

I need a hug

[U'aaa @XoXoPhil]

Reading 5 novels in January wasn't in my bingo cards for the year but I'm not too mad about it

[U'aaa @XoXoPhil]

@nmxmxh Brave doesn't support spaces or user profiles like arc and user experience on arc is way better

[U'aaa @XoXoPhil]

Still bummed that I haven't been able to find a good replacement browser for Arc

[Elnathan John @elnathan_john]

I read the Substack essay on Nigerian weddings. I personally dislike relationship conversations especially Nigerian ones, as most of them are shallow but in this case, there is plenty of scholarship one can refer to, for anyone who cares about deeper thought.

What is being described in that essay has been thought through, deeply, across feminist theory, philosophy, and psychology. The discomfort comes not from discovery, but from recognition.

In All About Love, bell hooks begins from a blunt premise: most people do not actually know what love is. They confuse it with desire, endurance, romance, sacrifice, and spectacle. They know how to perform romance, how to endure dissatisfaction, how to exchange resources for security. To anchor her argument, she draws on M. Scott Peck’s definition of love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” That definition immediately exposes the lie at the centre of many relationships. Money, performance, and public display cannot substitute for care.

hooks insists that love is not a feeling but a practice. It requires care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. Without these, people may be attached, but they are not loving. What the essay calls a charade is exactly this failure of practice. Men and women are not simply deceiving each other. They are participating in a system that allows both sides to avoid truth.

Seen through that lens, Nigerian romantic life makes painful sense. Men lead with money not because they are necessarily shallow (yes, too many are), but because money allows them to bypass emotional exposure. Women accept money not because they are greedy (yes, too many are), but because demanding care in a patriarchal culture is costly. Both sides learn early that vulnerability is dangerous. So they negotiate safety instead.

This is not uniquely Nigerian. Erich Fromm diagnosed the same structure in The Art of Loving. Fromm argued that love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person but an orientation of character. In societies organised around market value like Nigeria, people approach relationships as transactions. They ask what they can get rather than who they must become. Men are valued for earning power. Women for attractiveness. The relationship becomes an exchange between assets, not a meeting of equals.

Weddings then stop being celebrations of intimacy and become public confirmations of success. Proof that the script was followed correctly. That is why they are loud. That is why they are expensive. That is why the marriage itself is almost secondary.

This is also why the Nigerian feminist contradiction described in the article is not surprising. hooks warns that feminism without a commitment to love as ethical practice collapses into convenience. You cannot reject domination while clinging to its rewards. You cannot demand equality while preserving financial hierarchy as destiny. Love requires shared risk, shared responsibility, and mutual accountability.

The hard truth is that most people do not want that. They want the benefits of old systems and the language of new ones. They want tradition when it protects them and progress when it flatters them. So they perform. They complain. They repeat the cycle.

It feels safer. It costs less emotionally. And it allows everyone, (men, women, and the feminists who bend feminism to benefit from capitalist patriarchy), to keep performing, loudly, expensively, and emptily.

The system persists not because it has not been criticised, but because it works well enough. For fear. For comfort. For appearances.

[Whemïmor @hy_wemmy]

Your first mistake in life as a woman, is to assume a man doesn’t know what he is doing.

[U'aaa @XoXoPhil]

I need to clear out videos from my watch later playlist 😭

[U'aaa @XoXoPhil]

@AfroVII I relate to this so well

[U'aaa @XoXoPhil]

Nobody asked but hands-down my best purchase this year was my supernote. 10/10 love it, highly recommend

[U'aaa @XoXoPhil]

I need a break like I need to breathe