The Love Cycle Is Real — And Most Ghanaian Relationships Are Stuck In It

There is a woman in Adenta who has been engaged twice, and both times, somewhere around month eight, the same fight started happening — different man, same script, same accusations, same silent treatment, same eventual breakup. There is a man in Kumasi who tells his friends, only half joking, that he attracts "the same woman in different bodies." And there is an entire generation of young Ghanaians, watching their parents' marriages up close, quietly deciding that maybe love simply doesn't work the way the films and the church promised it would — that maybe the fighting, the silence, the slow curdling of affection into resentment, is just what marriage becomes eventually.

I want to challenge that quiet resignation, because I don't think it's true, and because a relationship coach named Stephan Labossiere — known widely as "Stephan Speaks," author of Love After Heartbreak and He's Lying Sis: Uncover the Truth Behind His Words and Actions — has spent years mapping out exactly why so many relationships feel like the same painful loop on repeat. His framework, built around what he calls the "love cycle," deserves serious attention in a country where divorce is rising, where courtship happens increasingly over WhatsApp rather than in the presence of family, and where nobody, frankly, is teaching young people what emotional maturity in a relationship actually looks like.

THE LOVE CYCLE: WHY THE SAME FIGHT KEEPS HAPPENING

Labossiere's central idea is that most relationships that fail don't fail because the two people found the wrong partner. They fail because both partners walk into the relationship carrying unresolved wounds — from childhood, from a previous heartbreak, from a family pattern neither of them ever examined — and those wounds create a predictable, repeating cycle: attraction, connection, the first signs of friction, the retreat into old defensive habits, the eventual blowup, the breakup, and then, painfully, the whole thing starting again with someone new who somehow triggers the exact same wounds.

This is the part I think Ghanaian couples, and Ghanaian culture more broadly, need to sit with honestly. We are quick to blame the individual — "she's too stubborn," "he's not serious," "that family has bad blood," — when the truth, according to this framework, is usually less dramatic and more uncomfortable: two people who never did the work of healing what hurt them before are now trying to build something new on top of an unaddressed wound, and the relationship keeps hitting the same wall because neither person has actually moved past the thing that put the wall there in the first place.

Consider how common it is here for a young woman to move from a controlling father directly into a controlling boyfriend, mistaking the familiar tightness in her chest for love because it feels like home. Consider how common it is for a young man raised by a mother who never let him express sadness to grow into a partner who shuts down entirely the moment his girlfriend cries, not out of cruelty, but because he was never taught what to do with big emotions. Neither of them chose the wrong partner. Both of them walked into partnership carrying an old, unhealed pattern, and the relationship simply gave that old pattern a new stage to perform on.

HEAL FIRST, THEN DATE — A HARD PILL FOR A CULTURE THAT RUSHES MARRIAGE

The most provocative part of Labossiere's teaching, and the part I suspect will spark genuine debate in our households, is his insistence that healing must come before the search for a new partner, not during it and certainly not after. In a culture where family pressure to marry by a certain age is intense, where a woman past thirty is asked at every family gathering when she's "bringing someone home," and where a man is quietly mocked for "taking too long" to settle down, the idea of pausing — of actually doing the internal work before pursuing the next relationship — can feel like a luxury we cannot afford.

But here is the uncomfortable truth this framework points to: rushing into a new relationship while still carrying the wreckage of the last one, or the wound of a difficult childhood, doesn't skip the healing process. It just guarantees that the healing happens inside the new relationship, at the new partner's expense, usually in the form of misplaced anger, jealousy that has nothing to do with anything the new partner actually did, or a defensiveness that shows up the moment real intimacy starts to form. Labossiere's advice — become the best version of yourself first, and you begin attracting a healthier kind of partner — is not the empty self-help platitude it might sound like at first glance. It is a direct challenge to a marriage culture that treats "finding someone" as more urgent than "becoming someone capable of a healthy relationship."

THE STEEL MAN: IS THIS JUST ANOTHER "WORK ON YOURSELF" EXCUSE FOR DELAY?

I owe my readers the honest counter-argument here, because this idea has real critics, and I would be doing you a disservice if I pretended otherwise. Skeptics of the "heal before you date" framework rightly point out that healing is not a destination with a finish line — nobody arrives at a relationship fully healed, and the expectation that you must be, before you're "allowed" to date, can become its own form of paralysis, particularly for people whose trauma runs deep and whose access to therapy in Ghana is genuinely limited by cost and stigma. There is also a fair critique that this entire framework, imported largely from American relationship coaching culture, sometimes underestimates how much of what looks like "unhealed trauma" in African relationships is actually a reasonable response to real economic pressure, extended-family interference, or gender expectations that no amount of individual healing will fix, because the problem isn't purely psychological, it's structural.

Both critiques land, and they should temper how uncritically we apply this framework. Nobody should be told to delay love indefinitely while chasing an impossible standard of complete emotional wholeness, and nobody's very real financial or family pressures should be waved away as merely "trauma to work through." But the narrower claim survives that critique: a person who has never once examined why they keep ending up in the same painful pattern is far more likely to keep repeating it than a person who has at least looked honestly at their own contribution to the cycle. That distinction — between demanding perfection and simply demanding self-awareness — is worth holding onto.

CONNECTION VS. CHEMISTRY: THE MISTAKE THAT SENDS PEOPLE DOWN THE AISLE FOR THE WRONG REASONS

One of the more useful distinctions raised in this conversation is the difference between chemistry and connection — a distinction I think gets lost constantly in how young Ghanaians talk about dating. Chemistry is the spark, the attraction, the electricity of a first meeting; it is real, but it is also, on its own, a poor predictor of a relationship's health. Connection is slower, less dramatic, and far more diagnostic — it is whether two people can actually co-exist in harmony, whether their values, their pace of life, their way of handling conflict, genuinely fit together over time.

I think of the number of Ghanaian marriages that were decided almost entirely on chemistry — a magnetic first encounter, a whirlwind courtship, families rushed into approving because "they clearly love each other" — only for the couple to discover, two or three years in, that they have almost nothing resembling actual compatibility once the initial spark settled into ordinary daily life. Chemistry gets you to the altar. Connection is what determines whether you're still glad you're there a decade later.

MASCULINE AND FEMININE ENERGY: A CONVERSATION WE ARE AFRAID TO HAVE PROPERLY

The idea that both partners need to nurture both masculine and feminine energy within themselves — regardless of gender — is likely to be the most contested part of this entire conversation in a Ghanaian context, and I think it deserves to be argued about openly rather than dismissed outright or accepted uncritically. The traditional Ghanaian framing of masculinity and femininity in relationships tends to be rigid: the man provides and protects, the woman nurtures and yields, and any deviation from that script is treated as a crisis of identity rather than a normal feature of a healthy partnership.

But Labossiere's point, as I understand the framework, is not that men should become passive or women should become domineering. It is that every person, regardless of gender, needs access to both energies — the assertive, decisive, structure-providing quality typically labeled "masculine," and the receptive, emotionally attuned, nurturing quality typically labeled "feminine" — because a relationship where one partner is locked entirely into one mode, unable to soften or unable to lead when the moment calls for it, becomes brittle. A man who can never be vulnerable becomes exhausting to be close to. A woman who can never assert a boundary becomes resentful over time. This is not, I think, an attack on Ghanaian gender roles so much as an invitation to hold them more loosely than we currently do — worth debating, certainly, but worth debating honestly rather than reflexively.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR US
I do not believe Ghanaian relationships are failing because Ghanaians don't know how to love. I believe we are, like most cultures right now, discovering that love requires a set of emotional skills nobody formally teaches us — how to recognise our own patterns, how to distinguish a spark from genuine compatibility, how to sit with a partner's pain without shutting down, how to do the quiet, unglamorous work of healing before asking someone else to build a life alongside us. None of this replaces the wisdom of our elders, our churches, or our families in matters of the heart. But it does suggest that alongside the prayers and the family counsel, there is real value in asking the harder, more private question: am I bringing a healed version of myself into this relationship, or am I asking someone else to finish healing me?

That question, uncomfortable as it is, might be the actual difference between the couple that breaks the cycle and the couple that simply repeats it with new names.

Author's Note: I am not a licensed relationship therapist, and I want to be honest about that. Readers navigating serious relationship distress, abuse, or trauma should seek guidance from a qualified counsellor rather than relying on any book, podcast, or column — this one included. My intention here is not to hand down a verdict on Ghanaian relationships, but to open an honest conversation about patterns many of us recognise privately but rarely discuss out loud.

About the Author: Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Ghanaian author, columnist, and filmmaker, founder of Brownsy Silva Company. His columns on culture, psychology, and the Ghanaian condition appear regularly on Modern Ghana, reaching readers at home and across the diaspora in the UK, US, Canada, and Germany.

   Comments0