Khaya Ronkainen

February arrives with its loud-hearted instructions: roses, reservations, and grand declarations. But these days I’m living inside a quieter register of love; the one I’m meeting through the world I’m writing. I’m learning that in some seasons, love doesn’t perform. It practices.

Making Room for Wanting

Writing into an apartheid-era South Africa has me thinking about wanting. Because then, wanting often had to negotiate with distance, ambition, silence, and the public gaze. When the world feels watchful, how does wanting find room? How does it learn to speak without being overheard? Underneath the romance, there’s always something more essential: the desire for connection, freedom, and peace.

Visibility and the Unsaid

We have the idiom, wear your heart on your sleeve, a display of affection and devotion. It’s a beautiful notion. But visibility can be risky, depending on the time and place you’re living in, and the rules written (and unwritten) around your body and your belonging. In South Africa, even love—across racial lines—was policed by law for decades. And beyond the law, there was the everyday reality of scrutiny: who can love whom, who is allowed to show public display of affection, who is watched.

Quiet Intimacy as Refuge

I can only imagine what that did to love. Still, love didn’t disappear; it adapted and learned new languages. Some love stories couldn’t be written in roses, but in repetitions—in the act of showing up again and again, saying I choose you, regardless.

So how did that showing up look? I can’t say I know for sure. But I imagine quiet intimacy as refuge: shared meals, borrowed time after the children sleep, a slow tune on a vinyl record player. I imagine that making room wasn’t only emotional but logistical too. Love needed privacy, cover, and timing to breathe.

And what continues to captivate me, as I write, is the tenderness people still made possible: the small gestures that kept love alive; the choice to soften rather than harden; the way rituals—small, repeated, ordinary—became devotion.

What This Teaches Us Now

When I think about my own childhood, shared rituals made home feel like love: coming together for meals, song, storytelling, laughter, and a bit of prayer too. Maybe it was Valentine’s every day, who knows! But what I know for sure is that love wasn’t always loud; it lived in private moments, where unspoken gestures said what words didn’t.

Even today, and all over the world, love continues to be “policed” by social and systemic expectations for individuals who don’t fit the traditional and “ideal” couple model. And when we focus on a single highly commercialised day, we risk taking for granted the daily, consistent effort required to keep love alive.

This is why I’m leaning into my year’s practice: Making Room for small yeses, for tenderness, for the brave quiet work of choosing each other every day.

So, I’ll leave you with this question to ponder: What quiet ritual keeps your love alive, and how could you honour it as real romance?

PS. Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash.