Relationships are never simple. They are the place where our wounds, our longings, but also our hidden strengths rise to the surface. For Selin (30) and Neko (29), it has been a long and rocky road. Growing up in a rough environment, they entered adulthood with almost no tools for navigating the terrain of love. Two years ago they became parents to little Othalive, whose name in Xhosa carries the meaning “one who hears the name of God.” And it is for his sake that they try their very best. They work on their relationship out of a shared desire to give their child a family, something many children around them do not have, a goal they both recognize as meaningful and important. In them, I see what I believe about humanity and love: that people can rise above the patterns they inherited and that tenderness can appear even in places where no one taught them how to feel or speak it. Despite the setbacks, despite the odds stacked against them, they continue to work through their recurring disagreements - learning, stumbling, trying again. They move forward while standing on the fragile ground of unhealed pain, their inherited past, and the fractured examples they grew up with. In their little family, their own small universe, love is not the absence of wounds; it is the courage to keep meeting each other vulnerably in spite of them and to hold each other’s hand while finding their way into better versions of themselves. Parents of Othalive South Africa, 2025