By Peju Akande
The air inside the house always smelled of burnt onions and bleach, a sterile, sharp mixture he used to clean the floors every Saturday morning until the terrazzo gleamed like the surface of a fresh grave.
We live in a culture that treats endurance as a spiritual currency, especially for women, telling us that a man’s volatility is just a landscape we must learn to navigate with prayers and softer tones.
But there is a specific kind of emotional starvation that happens in modern relationships, the sort that doesn’t advertise itself with bruises but with the quiet, structural dismantling of your own sanity.
They do not tell you about the ledger. They do not tell you how a person can turn your entire existence into a debt you must constantly pay with apologies for things you never even thought of doing.
