The first myth many of us were taught about love, the one that followed us from literature class to late-night Nollywood, from Hollywood trailers to whispered tales in the compound, is seductively simple: true love never dies. Once it is real, it lasts. Forever. It survives poverty and palace, quarrels and queens, distance and betrayal.
That single idea has raised generations who believe that if love is genuine, two people cannot really walk away from each other’s minds; there will always be a soft spot, an Achilles’ heel, an invisible archive where the other is kept. And so we have used first love as a diagnostic tool, we have been suspicious when an old flame does not still flicker, we have told ourselves that my first cannot forget me, and we have prescribed hope where there should have been closure.
That is the template that powers our most enduring love stories. From The Notebook where Noah writes every day for years, to Titanic where Rose keeps Jack in her memory for eighty years, from Breath of Life to DDLJ, Veer-Zaara, Izzar So, Half of a Yellow Sun and Pride and Prejudice, the moral is repeated until we believe it: genuine love can outlive time, class, family opposition, betrayal and even death.
People may hurt one another, build new lives in different cities, but when the bond was real, the memory remains, and they find their way back, not because love is perfect but because forgiveness, humility, sacrifice and compromise give it another life.
Then life itself teaches a different syllabus. It teaches that there is a very thin line between love and hate, that people can move from worst foes to best friends and from best friends to worst adversaries, and that is why “my ex-” has become the most common prefix in our modern lexicon.
What reality adds is what psychology has long documented. Erich Fromm in The Art of Loving warned that love is not a feeling we fall into but an art we practice. John Gottman, after four decades of studying thousands of couples in his Seattle Love Lab, found that lasting love is not sustained by passion alone but by what he calls the five-to-one ratio, five positive interactions to every negative one, and by constant small bids for connection.
Without investment, even the most epic feeling erodes. Love is not a fixed property deed you acquire once because you were first. It is a living account that must be funded daily.
I have argued this before in two essays, Love as an Art and Love is Not Enough, that love can begin from a simple desire to be loved, from loneliness, from fantasy, from the thrill of creating another world where shortcomings are airbrushed. But desire alone cannot carry it. Without character, without enabling circumstances, without the deliberate will to make it work, love becomes beautiful but unsustainable.
That is why Nollywood icon Omotola Jalade-Ekeinde’s recent intervention feels so electric. It is not that the idea is entirely new, it is the craft, the candor and the intelligence with which she delivered it that makes it feel like a reinvention.
For me, intelligence is the ability to take something complex and make it simple, because if you cannot say it simply, you do not know it well enough. The headline that set social media 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 my husband knows we don’t always agree, no one would have blinked. Agreement is expected to fluctuate. But she replaced agreement with love, and by doing so, dressed in creativity and mischief, she turned a normal marital truth into a riddle that demanded to be solved.
Is love periodical? Does it come and go by mood, by minutes, by convenience, like a man who deserves love when his wallet is full and loses it when he is broke?
In her conversation with Chude Jideonwo, she clarified what she meant, and the clarification is more profound than the headline. 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? There are sometimes that I look at him and I say, somebody needs to remind me why I choose this guy again.” This is not a confession of infidelity or contempt. It is a taxonomy of love that psychologists would recognize instantly.
Robert Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love helps us decode it. Sternberg says mature love is made of three points, intimacy, passion and commitment, and they do not all shine with equal intensity every day. Passion oscillates. Intimacy wobbles. What holds the triangle together is commitment, the decision.
Omotola’s school of love is essentially a commitment-centered model. After twenty-eight years of marriage, she is saying butterflies do not clock in daily. Some mornings she wakes up enchanted, some days irritated, tired, unimpressed. What remains is choice. In a culture where we have romanticized love as an involuntary fever, choosing is a radical reframing.
Her second insight is even more subversive for our environment. She refuses ownership. She said they don’t carry this husband and wife thing on the head as if it’s some sacred burden. We are partners. With or without you, I will make my journey. With or without me, he will make his journey.
That echoes Esther Perel’s research on long-term desire, that we need both security and separateness. When marriage consumes individuality, desire suffocates. When partners respect each other’s personal journeys, as attachment theorists like Amir Levine and Rachel Heller argue, secure attachment actually increases because no one is held hostage.
The third anchor is faith. When she is in that valley where affection feels thin, she said she reports him to God. I’m honouring him not because I love him too much, I’m honouring God who gave me a mandate to be by his side. Psychologists call this cognitive reappraisal and meaning-making, the ability to place a transient emotion inside a larger story so it does not dictate behavior.
Baumeister and Leary’s Need to Belong theory shows that belonging is not just about feeling close but about investing in a bond that is perceived as stable and meaningful.
Of course, as expected, the comment split the internet. For some, it was refreshing honesty, proof that romantic feelings naturally ebb and flow and that decades of togetherness are sustained by more than daily attraction. For others, the problem was not the idea but the stage on which it was said. There is a difference between telling your husband privately that feelings fluctuate and announcing publicly that you see fantabulous guys and wonder why you picked him. Some worried that phrases like our marriage is not that serious sound like a demotion of an institution many hold as sacred.
Others noted, wisely, that what works for Omotola and Captain Matthew Ekeinde, married since 1996, is not a universal template. That level of openness requires an unusually secure attachment, high emotional intelligence and decades of shared values. Not every home has that bandwidth.
And there is the legitimate unease underneath her joke. If we take periodicity literally, does love become moody and transactional, given when the wallet is full and withdrawn when it is empty? That is where Omotola’s school actually corrects itself. She is not saying love should be periodic. She is saying feeling is periodic, but love as commitment is what makes you stay when feeling is absent.
The danger is not that people experience fluctuation, every longitudinal study, from Gottman’s to the Harvard Study of Adult Development, confirms they do. The danger is when we make fluctuation an excuse for disloyalty, or when we mistake a momentary dip for proof that love has died.
The deeper question she has forced us to ask, then, is not whether a married person can notice an attractive stranger or feel less affection on a Tuesday morning. That is ordinary human behavior.The deeper question is what definition of love we want to live by. Is it only an emotion, or is it also friendship, attraction, loyalty, responsibility and deliberate commitment?
Omotola’s answer, delivered with a laugh that made it thrilling and unsettling at the same time, is that love is not a constant feeling, but a constant choosing.
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Bagudu Mohammed is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media. It offers evidence-based analysis and real-life insights as a credible alternative to groupthink, convenient narratives, and echo chambers. The platform explores a wide range of issues, including politics, society, relationships, governance, and contemporary trends.
Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
