Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

He was good-looking. Not accidentally good-looking — the kind of man who makes architectural decisions just by entering a room. The kind the aunties whisper about and the uncles resent. Tall. Put together. Probably smells expensive without trying.

He went on a date.
She arrived beautifully. And she knew it. The way a weapon knows it’s loaded.

Before the starters arrived, before the ice melted in the glasses, she laid her terms on the table like a board resolution. R100,000 a month with a Yoco machine. Oh  And I want Peace- she concluded with a straight face and a killer smile.

He was intrigued enough by the second item to ask. What does Peace mean to you? Then for good measure he asked – is the money net or gross SARS deductions?

He silently  made a mental note to send to the SARS Commissioner – “more revenue for  SARS – deem it as income not as girlfriend  allowance”. 

She didn’t flinch. She said: Cheat — but I must not know. Do not be broke. Good sex. And plenty of orgasms.

Applause, honestly. What most men secretly desire but never admit in public – the visa to cheat.

That is one of the most honest manifestos delivered at a restaurant table in the history of courtship. No ambiguity. No love-bombing. No three months of emotional theater before the real terms emerge. She came to negotiate, not to pretend.

He, the Aquarian, idealistic –  poor philosophical soul, came to date.

He pushed back. He asked her — gently, the way educated men do when they’re about to lose an argument — doesn’t money make a relationship transactional rather than relational?
Doesn’t it hollow out the depth?

She looked at him the way a CFO looks at a poet and CMO.

Then she said it. Slow. Deliberate. In the language that does not soften for anybody:

Amadoda atya ubuhle.
Men eat beauty.

She said: the beauty you are eating is feeding something broken inside you. It inflates your ego. It bandages your cracked self-esteem. She is not your girlfriend — she is your trophy. She is what you show your friends when words fail you. She is proof that you are somebody. She allows you to hide your Alexithymia, or “emotional blindness,”. Beauty hides  your  significant difficulty in identifying, processing, and describing emotions, limited imagination, externally oriented thinking, and trouble recognizing feelings in yourself  and others. In all honesty men with resources who chase the obvious – beauty needs no high IQ to notice- these men  are  on an ASLD –  autism love spectrum disorder.

He was quiet.

He thought- Clear is Kind.

She continued. And I cannot eat my own beauty. Beauty does not keep the lights on. Beauty does not pay for the YSL, the red bottoms, the LV. This beauty he is so eager to consume — it is expensive to maintain. It does not arrive cheap. The symmetry costs money. The skin costs money. The posture, the hair, the nails, the audacity to walk into a room like that — all of it has a line item.

So, she said, we are both bringing something to this table. You bring money. I bring beauty.
What exactly is your complaint?

And that is where the story turns philosophical.

Because he had come not just for a date — he had come with a question that has been quietly dismantling modern romance from the inside:

What is going to happen to love?

He wanted to talk about the strange mathematics of attraction in this era. About men who bless nines and tens — who voluntarily, enthusiastically fund the maintenance of beautiful women — and whether that is a relationship or a procurement.

He wanted to talk about beauty depreciating. About how familiarity erodes mystique. About how the woman who was a ten in mystery becomes a comfortable five  once you have shared a bathroom, an argument, you got some (tapped) and a bereavement.

If all she brings is beauty — and beauty fades — what remains?

And if all he brings is rands and dollars — and the economy turns, and the exchange rate misbehaves, and the investment goes south — what remains then?

We have dressed up an arranged marriage in modern clothing and called it a vibe. We have replaced dowry with debit orders and called it standards. We have substituted the elders’ negotiation with Instagram DMs and called it falling in love. The architecture is medieval. The aesthetic is contemporary. The confusion is total.

Here is what nobody wants to say out loud:
We have killed love. And money is holding the weapon.

Not because money is evil — it is not. The woman at that table was not villainous. She was rational. In a world that has repeatedly shown women that romantic love is an unhedged risk — that vulnerability is a liability, that softness gets exploited, that the man who says I love you most loudly is often the first to leave — she simply did the math. She priced her exposure. She drew up a contract where others drew up hopes.

And he — this beautiful, philosophically restless man — has grown up watching men buy access to beauty and call it love, watching women monetize their looks and call it power, and somewhere in the transaction, the actual thing — the terrifying, irrational, economically illiterate thing called love — quietly packed its bags.

We didn’t lose love to heartbreak. We lost it to efficiency.

Friedrich Nietzsche declared, in the voice of a madman running through the marketplace:

“God is dead. And we have killed him”

He did not mean it as a celebration. He meant it as a catastrophe. He meant: the central organising principle around which civilisation built its meaning, its morality, its sense of what matters — that centre had collapsed. And the terrifying question was not what do we believe now? The terrifying question was: what holds us together now?

Here is what Nietzsche did not anticipate — or perhaps did, and despaired quietly about it:
God is Love.

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Structurally.

Theologically. The entire architecture of the divine, across traditions, across centuries, across the arguments of mystics and philosophers and grandmothers who never read a single theology textbook — it converges on that one stubborn claim.

God is Love. Love is the thing itself.

The Christian virtues in 1 Corinthians 13:13, states:

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love”

Love is the greatest of all these.

Which means if God   is dead — and we are the ones who killed him, with our rationalism, our cynicism, our spreadsheets and our transaction histories — then Love did not merely fade.

Love died in the same moment.

By the same hand.

We sat at that restaurant table. We drew up the invoice. We priced the beauty and monetised the access and called it a situationship and swiped left on vulnerability and swiped right on aesthetics and somewhere between the R100,000 monthly retainer and the negotiated ignorance of infidelity we killed God (Love).

And we did not even hear the body fall.

Now the question Nietzsche left unanswered — the one that haunts every generation that inherits a world stripped of its centre — is ours to answer:

What happens to us?

Not rhetorically. Practically. Anthropologically.

What happens to a species that evolved for love — whose nervous systems are literally wired for attachment, whose children die without it, whose elderly deteriorate faster in its absence — when love becomes a liability to be hedged against?

What happens to men who can only express worth through provision, and women who can only protect themselves through transaction, and both of them sitting across a candlelit table, well-dressed and well-spoken, negotiating terms for something that was supposed to be freely given?

Nietzsche said the death of God would cast us into a disorienting freedom. No fixed values. No inherited meaning. Each person is forced to become, in his phrase, their own creator of values.

But most of us are not Nietzsche. Most of us are not built for that altitude of solitude.

Most of us just want someone to come home to.

And we have made that — the most ordinary, most ancient, most deeply human want — into something we are afraid to admit out loud, because it sounds like weakness in a world that rewards strategy.

Here is the quiet irony sitting at the centre of this whole negotiation:

The most beautiful women in the world are often the loneliest. Not because no one wants them — everyone wants them. But everyone wants the trophy, not the person. They are curated and consumed and never truly known.

And the richest men at the table are often the most hollow. Not because wealth is empty — but because they have used it so long as a proxy for worthiness that they no longer know if anyone is there for them, or for the account balance.

Amadoda atya ubuhle. Yes.

But nobody is being nourished.
He came to tell us about love.
She sent an invoice.

And the saddest part — the part that should keep us all up at night — is that neither of them is entirely wrong.

The invoice exists because trust collapsed. The transaction exists because vulnerability was punished one too many times. The negotiation exists because somewhere along the way, we decided that the heart was too expensive an asset to leave unhedged.

But here is the thing about killing God. About killing Love.

You do not just lose the feeling. You lose the grammar. The shared language through which human beings have always made sense of sacrifice, of commitment, of choosing someone on a Tuesday when they are ordinary and tired and nothing like the person you negotiated with across that candlelit table.

Without love as the centre, we are all just very well-dressed strangers.

Optimising. Transacting. Depreciating.

The question is not whether we can afford love in this economy.

The question is whether we can afford to live without it.

He came to tell us.
We were not listening.

We are in search for Black Diamonds and nothingness –

“We Have Killed Love. And We Did Not Even Hear the Body Fall.”


Between Thoughts — Intellectual Musings
Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.