I just wrote on the topic we are contemporaries to count on, arguing that peers and age mates become one crucial aspect of people who are allies or available resources that we have in the journey of life that must not be taken for granted. I shared a live story to reveal how people who lost their partners may suffer rejection and difficulty in trying to navigate a generational shift, including unmarried women at a certain age who find it difficult to choose between married women with differing identity and interest, and younger age mates to associate with on the common interest of being single.
After writing the story, two live events made me return to it emotionally. One is the post by a netizen, Alfa Abdulrahman. He wrote that in search of Ndamadiwu’s audio Diwanu rendition, as a young orphan in Bida from 1980 to 1985, there was this popular Ndamadiwu whose rendition of Diwanu inspired him a lot.
Alfa added tha the last time he visited Bida, he took time off to visit the erstwhile popular Melody at Tutijiba and two other cassette CD marts in Esso. None of them could provide that inimitable Ndamadiwu’s rendition of Diwanu for him. He asked if anybody on the platform could check his old historical collection for him, even if it is audio only, and said he was ready and willing to pay a token for it.
I suddenly remembered my piece on contemporaries centred on the significance of memory, connection, and experience. He is looking for a song he has missed like a missing human being. Are there no new songs? That is how many could still hold on to past films, drama, events and all that, the connection that often binds a generation.
Then, this morning, while scrolling the news, particularly on entertainment, I came across an epic story that has received high positive responses and approval from netizens. The news was that the popular Nollywood actress, Nkechi Blessing Sunday, has reconciled with her ex-partner, Opeyemi Falegan, and ended their four-year public feud during a TikTok Live on Saturday night, November 7, 2026.
They had been communicating since February 2026. Nkechi demanded a public apology for hurtful comments Falegan made during their 2022 breakup, which she said people still used to insult her. Falegan apologised, from the bottom of my heart to the depth of my soul, I am sorry, Nkechi, that is in the past.
They both confirmed that have resolved their differences and are in a very good place now, we hold no bitterness. Their relationship had collapsed publicly in April 2022 after mutual accusations on social media. I wish them well.
Meanwhile, it reveals that the memories and connections that bind people or attract them are not necessarily good ones. They are shared weakness and strength. This is the very issue that puts most widows, widowers, and divorcees at a disadvantage, who become suspects of earlier exposure, training they have encountered in the previous relationship, to keep the memory that my former husband or former wife is this or that every time the new partner tries to do things differently.
It also shows why former lovers or exes often find a good opportunity or privilege to reconcile than building a new relationship. The fear that often affects the perception of divorcees is that they will always think about her former ex as an alternative, to remain a permanent rival for the new lover.
Psychologists call this the mere exposure effect, first demonstrated by Robert Zajonc in 1968, that we tend to prefer things simply because they are familiar to us. Familiarity does not mean perfection, it means predictability.
And in matters of the heart, predictability can feel safer than perfection. Add to that what John Bowlby called attachment theory, that our early and long bonds create an internal working model of who we are and who loves us, and you understand why an ex can still shake a heart that a stranger cannot even touch.
The ex knows where the wound is, because he helped to create it, and he knows where the balm is, because he once applied it.
When once a generation is mostly settled or moved on in the journey of life, although divorce is both painful and therapeutic, it looks more like an abuse, to say the least, to contemplate divorcing at a certain age when people’s prospects are limited by a generational factor, that the newer generation will not patronise them and the older ones are fixed.
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call this social capital, the invisible wealth stored in relationships, memories, favours, and shared history. A new lover brings excitement, but an ex brings capital. He brings a shared language, shared enemies, shared jokes, shared shame.
That is why the sociologist Mark Granovetter, in his famous work on the strength of weak ties, still admitted that strong ties, the old ones, carry emotional intensity and time that new ties cannot manufacture overnight. To throw that away at fifty is not just to lose a partner, it is to declare bankruptcy on a whole generation of investment.
For me, one of the major revelations that makes me return to the topic of contemporaries again is the realisation that our ex, like peers, becomes a critical component of our life that we would always need, return to, and find indispensable, who may know our weakness to appeal to, no matter the difference.
It is what I will like to call the power of incumbency. It becomes more of a failure to a generation if no one takes responsibility. In political science, incumbency advantage means the sitting holder has name recognition, experience, and a record that a challenger cannot match, even when the record is flawed.
The same is true in love. The ex is the incumbent. He has already won an election in your heart once. A new suitor is just a promising candidate with fine manifestos and no track record. That is why, as the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed human lives for over eighty years, found, the quality of our long relationships, not the quantity of new ones, predicts our happiness in old age. We do not need more people, we need the same people, healed.
I therefore call on people to take advantage of this to rebuild, work on broken relationships as a pathway of finding peace again. Look for that man or woman you have abandoned, that time and circumstance have made still available for the quilt we must share.
Because people still see the power of incumbency in the ex as long as they still live. Let us rebuild failed relationships and friendships today, possibly with those who know us better, to tolerate or embrace us back no matter the shortcomings. A lost friend with long years of courtship or relationship means a loss of generation and the biggest opportunity.
Like Nkechi Blessing Sunday and Opeyemi Falegan, let us embrace forgiveness and reconciliation today.
bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com
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Bagudu Mohammed is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media, and writes a weekly newspaper column published every Monday on the back page of Peoples Daily.Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
