There exists, in the great and tragic comedy of human connection, a peculiar epoch upon which we have unfortunately stumbled. It is an era where the pursuit of love resembles less a delicate dance of mutual discovery and more a hostile takeover bid disguised as a romantic comedy. Life, as the poets and the debt collectors have often reminded us, is never easy. But for the contemporary pilgrim who dares to set forth into the thorny thickets of courtship, the path is less a journey of the soul and more an obstacle course designed by a particularly sadistic economist.
We find ourselves trapped in a curious asymmetry, a grand imbalance that makes the leaning Tower of Pisa look like a paragon of structural integrity. Lately, to observe love is to witness a one-sided affair, a lopsided contract where one party signs with their heart, and the other with a meticulously itemized invoice. It is a phenomenon that transcends gender, though its most theatrical performances often unfold in the theatre of heterosexual courtship, where the roles, once defined by Victorian chivalry, have now been recast with a distinctly modern, transactional flair. The question that echoes through the hollow chambers of our collective romantic psyche is not “Chi sono io per te?” (Who am I to you?) but rather, a far more pragmatic, “Che cosa hai fatto per me, ultimamente?” (What have you done for me lately?).
This is not merely an opinion; it is a fieldwork report from the trenches. And having spent considerable time in these trenches, ducking flying expectations and dodging the shrapnel of unmet demands, I feel compelled to present a satirical, yet deeply moving, academic reflection on the state of our affairs. Let us proceed under three modest headings, for even a comedy of errors requires a semblance of structure.
The Gospel of St. Babe: A Liturgy of Lack and the Spiritual Crisis of Entitlement
In the beginning, there was the Word. And the Word was, “Babe.”
The liturgy of modern courtship, particularly in its Nairobi-Kampala-Lagos manifestation, has evolved a sacred lexicon. It is a language of lack, a prayer cycle of perpetual need. “Babe, sina bundles,” comes the whisper, a digital intonation that travels across WhatsApp like a novena requesting a miracle of airtime. “Babe, sijakula,” a Eucharistic plea for the body of Christ, or at least a chapati and some nyama choma. And then, the grand spiritual summit, the aspiration that borders on the mystical: “Babe, am craving chicken.”
Let us pause here to apply the psychological scalpel. This is not merely hunger; it is a metaphysical hunger. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, one must secure physiological necessities before achieving self-actualization. But in this new dispensation, the roles have reversed: self-actualization is the act of another securing one’s physiological necessities. We have moved from a partnership model to a vending machine model. You insert affection, loyalty, and financial output, and out should pop a pre-selected snack of contentment.
The philosophical undertow here is profound. The ancient Greeks spoke of Eros, a passionate, desiring love that seeks completion in the beloved. But this modern Eros has been stripped of its mutuality. It has become a form of spiritual vampirism, where one party is designated the eternal giver, a human ATM with the emotional intelligence of a therapist, and the other the eternal receiver, a professional consumer whose only contribution to the enterprise is the grace of their presence. “It has to be always the other partner offering,” I lamented, and in that lament lies the kernel of our collective spiritual decay. We have confused love with logistics.
“Ohh my, this is unfortunate,” I wrote, and the universe nodded in agreement. For when one person believes they are inherently special, so special that the laws of thermodynamics do not apply to them, that they can never contribute energy to the system, we have left the realm of romance and entered the domain of the cult. The psychological term for this is narcissistic entitlement; the spiritual term is a crisis of the soul. Eti babe, indeed. This cry, once a term of endearment, has become a battle cry of unilateral expectation.
Yet, to be fair to the gender wars, for no satire worth its salt would ignore the empirical data, I must offer kudos to the outliers. There are those, scattered among us like righteous souls in Sodom, who are “smart and understanding ones who take up a shared responsibility.” To these women, who look at a bill and see a partnership, not a test of devotion, I say: Grazie mille. You are the exceptions that prove the rule, the oases of sanity in a desert of demands. You understand that love, in its healthiest form, is a reciprocal circuit, not a one-way drainage system. You are the reason hope still flickers in the heart of the jaded.
The Fall of the Boy Child: When the Hunter Becomes the Hunted
But just when we thought we had mapped the contours of this modern imbalance, the damsel in distress, the provider in a suit, life, in its infinite comedic genius, throws a curveball. For if the phenomenon were limited to one gender, we could dismiss it as mere cultural inertia, a hangover from patriarchal systems that trained women to seek providers and men to provide. But no. The rot, as they say, has gone systemic. It has metastasized.
Behold, the rise of the new archetype: The Energetic Man, Above 18, Asking for the Same.
“Mbu, “babe, silina sente” (babe, I don’t have money). Or its Luganda cousin, “Babe, mpa sente za chicken” (babe, give me money for chicken). You cannot imagine. An energetic man, possessing two hands, two feet, a functioning brain, and, presumably, the ability to walk to a kafunda or open a Chicken Tonight app, sitting back and articulating his cravings as a romantic request. The hunter, it seems, has traded his spear for a begging bowl, and he is looking at his partner with the same expectant eyes that were once reserved for his mother.
“Where are we headed?” I asked, and the silence was deafening. We have created a cultural blender that has pureed traditional roles into a messy, unrecognizable smoothie of confusion. We wanted to liberate women from the sole burden of domesticity and financial dependency, a noble goal, but in the process, we seem to have liberated a certain breed of men from the burden of ambition entirely. The psychological term for this is regression. We are witnessing a collective retreat to an infantile state. The boy child, for whom we have wept so many tears, is “gravely suffering,” yes, but not in the way we thought. He is suffering from a self-inflicted emasculation, hiding behind the rhetoric of equality to justify a profound irresponsibility.
And here is the greatest irony, the “interesting life” twist that makes this a true tragicomedy. The boy child is not merely suffering at the hands of liberated women. No. “Even the boychild makes another boychild suffer.” We have created an economy of exploitation. In the informal settlements and the corporate offices alike, the same young man who is asking his girlfriend for “bundles” is the one extorting a subordinate or conning a peer. It is a pyramid scheme of parasitism. The energy that should be directed toward building a future is instead channeled into a circular firing squad of mutual dependency.
We must ask the difficult, almost blasphemous questions: And those who are yet to marry, what is our fate? Are we destined to become either the provider who is never provided for or the consumer who has mistaken a partner for a subsidiary? And those already with kids, who are modeling this behavior in their own homes, the father who sits on the couch while the mother funds the household, or the mother who trains her son to expect service and her daughter to provide it, is this what you taught them? Is this the curriculum of your domestic university? “Mamma mia”, what has become of the lesson of self-reliance?
Che Cosa È l’Amore? A Philosophical Prescription for a Transactional Generation
We must, at this juncture, step back from the satire and gaze into the abyss of the central question. Che cosa è l’amore? What is love? Is it a wire transfer? Is it a status update? Is it the act of covering a salon bill for hair that will, in two weeks, grow out and require another devotional financial offering? Is it buying chicken for a person who is perfectly capable of buying an egg-laying hen and starting a small business?
Psychologically, we have conflated love with provision because provision is measurable. It is easier to send a screenshot of a mobile money transaction than to engage in the messy, unquantifiable work of emotional intimacy. We have turned romance into a series of transactions because we have lost the vocabulary for genuine connection. We swipe right based on aesthetics, we negotiate terms of engagement like corporate mergers, and then we wonder why the relationship feels like a hostile work environment.
Spiritually, we are hollow. We have reduced agape, the selfless, giving love, to a currency. The philosopher Martin Buber spoke of the difference between an “I-Thou” relationship, where we encounter another as a whole, sacred being, and an “I-It” relationship, where we treat another as an object to be used. My dear friends, we are living in the age of the “I-It.” The babe asking for bundles is treating the partner as an “It,” a utility. The energetic man asking for chicken is treating his partner as an “It,” a mother substitute. We are surrounded by people who do not want a partner; they want a patron.
The path forward, if we are to salvage love from the jaws of this transactional nightmare, requires a radical re-enchantment. It requires us to resurrect the concept of shared responsibility from the ashes of entitlement. It requires us to look at the person across the table, or across the phone screen, and ask not, “What can you do for me?” but “Tuyige wamu?” (Shall we build together?) in Luganda. It requires the spiritual discipline of contribution, even when it is inconvenient. It requires the psychological maturity to realize that if you are always the one giving, you are not in a relationship; you are in a cult of one. And if you are always the one taking, you are not in a relationship; you are in a rehabilitation center where you are the only patient.
To the young men and women reading this, still unmarried and peering into the fog of the future, I offer this satirical yet sacred advice: Raise your standards. Not your standards for height, or skin tone, or the brand of car they drive. Raise your standards for reciprocity. If a potential partner’s first language is the language of lack, “bundles, chicken, saloon,” muriife run! Run not because you are stingy, but because you are sane. Love is not a crowdfunding campaign. It is a shared venture, a mutual exposure of vulnerability, a joint construction of a life.
For those already in the trenches, already married and modeling this for the next generation, I implore you: teach your children the dignity of contribution. Teach the boy child that his hands are for building, not for begging. Teach the girl child that her power lies in partnership, not in the extraction of resources. Because if we continue on this path, our future will not be a generation of lovers. It will be a generation of litigants, forever arguing over who owes whom for the last chicken.
In conclusion, what is love? L’amore is not a ‘saloon’ appointment. It is not a chicken craving. It is not a bundle of data. It is the terrifying, glorious, and often inconvenient decision to show up as a whole person, inviting another whole person to build something neither could build alone. Until we learn that, we will remain in this comedy of errors, this tragic cycle of asking and demanding, with our hearts empty and our phones buzzing with requests.
‘Mbu babe’, let us grow up. Asante sana.
