[COMMENT]
For as long as we can remember, we’ve been fed a very seductive myth about love: that true love never dies.
Bagudu Mohammed offers insight in this analysis: From the pages of classic literature to late-night Nollywood dramas, Hollywood trailers, and whispered tales in the compound, the template is always the same.
If it’s real, it survives poverty, palaces, distance, and betrayal. Noah writes every day for years in The Notebook; Rose keeps Jack in her memory for eighty years in Titanic.
The moral is pounded into us until we believe it—that genuine love can outlive time, class, and even death, and that two people can never truly walk away from each other’s minds.
Then, real life shows up with a completely different syllabus.
Life teaches you that there’s a razor-thin line between love and hate, and that’s why “my ex” became the most popular prefix in our modern dictionary.
Psychologists like Erich Fromm have warned us for decades that love isn’t just a feeling we helplessly fall into, but an art we practice.
John Gottman spent forty years studying thousands of couples and found that lasting love isn’t sustained by raw passion alone. It survives on a five-to-one ratio of positive interactions to negative ones, and constant, small bids for connection.
Without daily investment, even the most epic feeling eventually erodes.
Enter Nollywood icon
Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde.
It wasn’t just her perspective that shook social media; it was the sheer candor and intelligence with which she delivered it. Intelligence, after all, is taking something complex and making it simple.
The headline that set the internet on fire was deliberately jarring: Omotola Jalade Opens Up on Marriage: My Husband Knows I Don’t Love Him All the Time.
If she had said they don’t always agree, nobody would have blinked. But she replaced “agreement” with “love,” turning a normal marital truth into a riddle.
Is love periodical? Does it come and go by mood, like a man who’s loved when his wallet is full and ignored when he’s broke?
When she sat down with Chude Jideonwo, she clarified what she meant, and it’s a masterclass in modern relationship psychology.
She said, “He knows that I’m not with him because I love him all the time. I’m with him because I choose to. There are days that I’d see fantabulous guys and I’d be like, I picked this one over you?”
This isn’t a confession of contempt. It is a textbook breakdown of Robert Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love. Sternberg tells us that mature love is made of intimacy, passion, and commitment, and they don’t all shine with equal intensity every day.
Passion oscillates. Intimacy wobbles. What holds the triangle together is commitment—the decision.
After twenty-eight years of marriage, Omotola is reminding us that the butterflies do not clock in for work every single day.
Some mornings she wakes up enchanted; other days, irritated and unimpressed. What remains is choice.
And she went a step further, offering a second insight that completely challenges our cultural conditioning: she refuses ownership.
She noted that they don’t carry this “husband and wife” thing on their heads like some sacred, choking burden.
They are partners. With or without him, she will make her journey. With or without her, he will make his. That echoes Esther Perel’s research on long-term desire—that we need both security and separateness.
When a marriage completely consumes your individuality, desire suffocates.
Of course, her comments split the internet.
For many, it was a refreshing dose of reality. For others, it felt like an unnecessary public devaluing of a sacred institution.
But here is the correction: Omotola isn’t saying love should be moody or transactional. She is saying that feelings are periodic, but love as a commitment is what keeps you in the room when the feeling is absent.
The danger isn’t that couples experience emotional dips—every longitudinal study confirms they do.
The danger is when we use those dips as an excuse for disloyalty, or mistake a momentary lull for proof that love has died.
The deeper question she has forced us to ask is simple: What definition of love are we actually living by? Is it just an emotion, or is it friendship, loyalty, responsibility, and deliberate choice?
