Maybe I’m about to join the latest class of love retirees. Should I call myself a love vet? Love veteran, of course. I’m retiring not on medical grounds, but it seems like the rules have changed in this game.
I used to know this game like the palm of my hands. You see someone, the air shifts, a laugh lands in the right place, and suddenly your body starts writing poetry it never asked permission for. Fingers find each other under a table at Java. A kiss that starts polite and ends with someone’s lower lip caught between teeth. The quiet, dangerous promise of a night that might stretch until the call to prayer or the first matatu of the morning, whichever comes first.
That version of love felt like a shared secret. You learned the map of a person’s body the same way you learn the backstreets of your own city, by getting lost a few times and then never forgetting the way home.
Now the rules feel rewritten by committee. Everyone is “vibing.” Everyone is “keeping it light.” Everyone has a soft launch and a hard exit strategy. You can spend three weeks trading late-night voice notes that sound like confessions, only to discover the other person has been soft-launching three other people in the same period. Ghosting used to be a crime of passion. These days it’s just efficient time management.
And the phones… ah, the phones. I catch myself staring at lock screens more than I should. Those patterns people draw with their thumbs, nine dots arranged like a quiet conspiracy. Some draw the simple L, the quick Z, the easy square. Others… others create patterns that look like the most complicated meander through the Tugen Hills of Baringo. You know the ones: those roads that twist and fold back on themselves as they climb from Tenges toward Kipsaraman, rising and dipping, looping around forested crests and Kerio Valley gorges until you forget which way is up. A single swipe that starts at the top left, snakes down, doubles back, climbs again, circles once for good measure, then ends somewhere you never expected. Complicated. Beautiful. Exhausting. Exactly like trying to read someone’s intentions these days.
But maybe we men have also gone a little wild in all of this. Maybe we changed the game too, without fully noticing. Where intention once felt natural, now the options feel endless, and the exits feel easier. Desire can start to look like a buffet: sample a little here, taste a little there. Keep things open. Stay light. Protect the freedom. And maybe, somewhere along the way, that freedom started costing more than it gave. Maybe I need to adjust. Maybe the real retirement isn’t from love itself, but from the version of myself that forgot how to stay when the night got quiet and the morning arrived with questions.
I keep catching myself mid-scroll, remembering the older ways. The way a woman’s perfume used to cling to my shirt after she left, so that the next morning felt like evidence. The way her hand on the back of my neck in a crowded club could rearrange the entire evening. The delicious, slightly reckless decision to go home with someone because the conversation had already undressed us both. There was risk in it, yes. There was also electricity. Sitima! The kind that makes your blood thicken when she says your name like she’s tasting it.
I miss that. I miss the slow, deliberate burn. The kind of night where you both pretend you are only staying for one more drink, and the next thing you know the sky is turning the colour of overripe mango, and neither of you has looked at your phone in hours. Bodies learning each other without a user manual. Laughter turning into something lower, thicker. The particular African romance of it, sweat and perfume and the distant sound of a neighbour’s radio playing Congolese rumba while two people invent a private language under thin sheets.
But the game has changed, and maybe we all helped change it. Soft boundaries that somehow feel like walls. People who want the intimacy of being chosen without the inconvenience of choosing. Situationships that demand the emotional labour of a relationship and the freedom of a one-night stand. It’s exhausting in a way that makes me want to hang up my boots and declare myself a love veteran, honourably discharged.
Still… humour me.
Because even as I say I’m retiring, some quiet, stubborn part of me is still listening for the old music. Still wondering if somewhere between the endless swipes and the carefully curated Instagram stories, there is still a woman who looks at you the way the first rains look at dry earth, hungry, certain, ready to ruin the neat plans you made for the evening. Someone whose lock pattern is simple. Or complicated. Doesn’t matter. As long as she still knows how to stay long enough for the night to turn into morning, and as long as I remember how to stay too.
Until then, humour me with love.
I’ll be over here, remembering how it used to feel when two people decided the
rest of the world could wait.
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