I saw a tweet the other day that said, “No matter how in love you are, never—I repeat, never create a joint social media account with your partner,” in response to the break-up of two prominent social media users.
And that sentiment got me wondering if we realise how much pain has become our default. How much we have normalised emotional contingency plans. How we enter relationships already preparing for their demise. That our first instinct is not to connect, but to protect.
We have become masters in holding parts of ourselves back because the pain of being betrayed with all of us, is far too great. We are planning for the end before anything even begins. We withhold, protect, retreat—not because the people in front of us have harmed us, but because we are already certain they will.
Because what kind of love can grow when you have already deemed the other person guilty before the connection even begins? We meet people with walls already built. Everything is filtered through suspicion.
We wear trauma like armour. And while it has supposedly protected us, it has also made us rigid. Difficult to reach. Difficult to love. We have begun to treat each other not as potential companions, but as potential threats—to our peace, our healing, and our sense of control.
We love with suspicion. We date with defence. We are terrified of being disappointed, and so we rob ourselves of the very joy we long for.
When last did you enter something with childlike excitement? With trust? When last did you revel in a connection and quietly whisper, "Maybe this could actually work.”
We have become obsessed with protecting ourselves from heartbreak, forgetting that love has never guaranteed us safety, that real love will always carry risk.
The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control…
False notions of love teach us that it is the place where we will feel no pain, where we will be in a state of constant bliss. We have to expose the falseness of these beliefs to see and accept the reality that suffering and pain do not end when we begin to love… when we are making the slow journey back from lovelessness to love, our suffering may become more intense.
—bell hooks, all about love

Even those who are ready, intentional, self-aware—they do not stand a chance with us. We look at them through tainted lenses. We no longer enter connections from a place of hope. We enter from fear. From hurt. From a long line of disappointments that have taught us that being open is being foolish—an unwelcome burden.
And the thing is, we can’t build anything when we are constantly assessing each other as liabilities. We cannot build intimacy, friendship or kinship from a place of presumption and paranoia.
We need each other. We need each other so badly. Human beings do not do well in isolation. The very fabric of every society that has ever survived has always been relationship. Kinship. Collectivity. Shared joy and shared burdens that have ensured our collective longevity.
What frightens me most is that the world is burning—literally and metaphorically. Wars and unprecedented natural disasters. Our world is marked by collapse and instability at every corner. And yet, instead of leaning into each other, we are pulling away. This is not the time in history where we can afford to discard love. To discard each other.
The most tragic thing about living in this generation is that we advise each other from a wounded place. We teach one another how to stay guarded and armed even in the absence of an actual threat. And we wonder why we are always tired, always drained and unfulfilled—because our whole lives are a battle in waiting.
…being part of a loving community does not mean we will not face conflicts, betrayals, negative outcomes from positive actions, or bad things happening to good people. Love allows us to confront these negative realities in a manner that is life-affirming and life-enhancing.
—bell hooks, all about love
We coach ourselves out of intimacy and vulnerability, preaching survival over softness. Choosing defence over connection. Forgetting to allow ourselves to hope. Forgetting how to be excited. And forgetting how to believe in the possibility of being loved well.
We need to become the people we want to meet. The kind of people we want to see more of in the world. We need to love with the kind of love that reaches past ourselves. We need to love not just for the people we are in connection with, but for the kind of world we want our children to inherit.
What kind of legacy are we leaving behind when we discard each other so easily? What kind of future are we cultivating when “nobody owes you anything” has become the gospel?
Because generational curses do not fall from the sky. They are shaped by the choices we make—and the love we either give or withhold. Every posture we take in love becomes part of the generational soil we plant into.
So… what are we sowing?
We often speak with such contempt for our ancestors. We resent them for the generational curses and toxic patterns they left behind. But rarely do we ever ask ourselves what we are actively passing down.
What patterns are we embedding into our bloodlines through our defensiveness, our unavailability, our inability to trust? Are we not also choosing silence over repair? Detachment over intimacy? Retreat over reaching out? What we normalise today becomes inheritance.
We won’t live forever, but the consequences of how we treat one another will. They will live on in the children we raise, the communities we shape, and the love ethic we choose to cultivate or allow to wither.
As a millennial, I sit at the crossroads of two worlds. I was raised in a time when collectivity mattered. I remember what it meant to borrow sugar from a neighbour. To find food in a home that wasn’t your own. To knock on a door and not be met with suspicion, but with welcome. I was a child in an era where people were bound by shared responsibility. So this loss is personal. Now I find myself adulting in a world that says, “nobody owes you anything,” the mantra of disconnection.
And so yes—there is nothing normal about relationships today. We are drifting further and further away from love and collective care. Hollowing out the very thing that has always helped us to survive.
Because this world—this chaotic, burning, crumbling world—is falling apart. And when everything collapses, what will save us?
Only love.
Unless we reclaim love, radical tenderness, and collective care, we will be a people without shelter in a storm.
When everything collapses, it is only our relationships that will either carry us or fail us. And I fear we are not building connections strong enough to hold us anymore.
So no, there is nothing normal about relationships today. And we need to admit that.
We deserve better than what we are currently witnessing. We need to become people who treat each other with more reverence. We need to sit with ourselves. To reverse this legacy of coldness and relational carelessness that we are on route to leaving behind.
Let’s choose again. Let’s love again. Even if it’s terrifying. Even if it doesn’t work out. Even if people seem to prove they do not deserve our love. Even if the world tells us that it is foolish. Because love—radical, soft, inconvenient love—is our collective redemption. The only thing that will save us and return to us all that we have lost.
With much heart and sincerity,
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