Self Sabotage

A Nairobi Love Language

You met someone nice. Congratulations. You absolute menace. You have just handed yourself a loaded weapon and the target is your own happiness. Welcome to Nairobi, where the traffic on Thika Road moves faster than our ability to receive love without immediately asking it for its ID, CV, and three references mpaka ya chief jamani.

Let us begin.

Stage One: The Panic

Everything is going well. Too well. They text back within minutes. They remembered you mentioned your mother’s uji when you were sick. They show up. ON TIME. In Nairobi. This person arrived before you and was standing outside Java like a responsible adult with a functioning GPS and zero drama.

And what do you do?

You squint at them like they are a suspicious receipt from an Equity agent you don’t recognize.

Why are they like this? What are they hiding? Nobody in this city is this together. Have they been sent? Kwani Umetumwa?

You call your best friend. “Aki this person is too nice,” you say, forgetting that for years you complained that everyone you dated was a disaster. Now that a non-disaster has appeared, you are treating them like a crime scene.

Stage Two: The Investigation

You do not ask them direct questions because you are a Nairobian and we do not do vulnerability. That is for people in therapy.

Instead, you become DCI. You scroll back to their Instagram posts from 2019. You find a photo at a Blankets and Wine with a person who could be an ex or could be a cousin. In Nairobi these two categories have significant overlap and yet you choose to assume the worst.

You screenshot it. You send it to your group chat. Your friends, who are also self-saboteurs and are therefore highly qualified to give advice, confirm your worst fears based on the angle of the lighting in a five-year-old photo.

You have now built an entire courtroom in your head. You are the judge, jury, prosecutor, and the traumatized witness crying on the stand. The person you are dating is not present. They are at home, unbothered, watching Citizen TV.

Stage Three: The Test (That You Never Announce)

You decide to “test” them.

You go quiet for three days. Not because anything happened. Simply because you need to see what they will do. This is Nairobi relationship science. We learned it from our aunties who weaponized silence like it was a competitive sport with prize money.

They text. You read. You do not reply. You are online. They can see you are online because WhatsApp is a snitch and always has been.

They call. You send them to voicemail and then feel both powerful and deeply sad simultaneously, which is a very specific Nairobi emotional experience, somewhere between eating nyama choma alone and watching it rain when you forgot your umbrella on the 7th floor of your office building.

They pass the test. They keep showing up.

You are furious. Now you have to move to Stage Four.

Stage Four: Introduce Them to Your Complications

You were doing so well hiding the fact that you are, in the gentlest possible terms, a lot.

Now you begin to reveal the full portfolio.

You bring drama that you forgot you even had. You remember an argument from six weeks ago that you said you were fine about. You were not fine about it. You have been filing it neatly in a cabinet labeled “things to bring up at any inconvenience” and today, at 11:47pm on a Tuesday, the cabinet falls open.

You pick a fight about something small. The fight is not about the small thing. The fight is about everything. The fight is about your ex from 2021 and your father’s emotional unavailability and that time in Standard Seven when your friend ate your mandazi without asking. This person you are dating has just inherited all of it. They came for a relationship and they are now in a documentary.

Stage Five: Consult Everyone Except a Professional

You talk to:

Your campus friend who has been in an almost-relationship for four years and calls it “situationship” like that is a personality. Your taxi driver, Bernard, who gives you life advice between Kilimani and Westlands and charges you fare plus consultation fee (emotional rush hour surcharge). Your mother, who immediately asks if the person is “a serious person” and what their people do, and then tells you that love is suffering (Ni kuvumiliana).

You do not talk to a therapist because you have decided that therapy is for people who have already sorted out their issues and you are not there yet. You are still in the pre-therapy stage which is also known as “making other people experience your unprocessed feelings in real time.”

Stage Six: Self-Awareness Arrives (Too Late, But Fashionably)

At some point, usually at 2am, lying on your back in your apartment in Kilimani or Kasarani or wherever Nairobi has placed you based on your rent budget and your pride ratio, you will have a moment of terrible clarity.

You will realize: this person was good. They were genuinely good. And I archaeologically excavated every reason to not believe it.

You will also realize that you are not broken. You are just a person who grew up learning that love had a catch, that nice things came with hidden charges, that warmth was a down payment on future pain. And so when something arrived that asked for nothing complicated, your whole nervous system said aaah, nice try.

That realization will sit with you. Heavy, like a pilau at 3pm on a Sunday.

The Ending (Which Is Not Really an Ending)

Here is the thing about self-sabotage that nobody in Nairobi’s group chats will tell you, because we are too busy sending memes and avoiding feelings:

You are not protecting yourself. You are just leaving before anyone else can. You are the one who flips the table and then asks why supper is ruined.

The city will keep moving. Jams on Mombasa Road. Boda bodas making impossible decisions. Matatus named after Bible verses driving like they have already been saved and have nothing to lose.

And somewhere, a person who texted you first, who showed up on time, who remembered small things about you, will be out here living their life while you are in your apartment holding a case file on your own happiness and refusing to rule in its favor.

Babe. Drop the case.

Eat something.

Drink water.

And maybe, just maybe, let someone be kind to you without immediately demanding to see their criminal record.

Nairobi is hard enough already.

If this hit different than you expected, share it with the friend who is currently “taking a situationship break.” They need this more than they need the break.