A hụrụ m gị n’anya—Stewardship of Love
A comparative note on love, recognition, and stewardship
Some ideas need an image because language arrives too slowly. This one does. The position I’m about to share—about seeing, responsibility, and the kind of love that carries what it recognizes—has always been easier to picture than to say.
In the cinema watching Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025), “I see you” was repeated plainly, steadily, with increasing weight—the way vows are repeated. With each repetition, it began to feel less like a dialogue and more like a promise. It quickly became clear that I see you—an avowal of pragma—is not just a feeling but a commitment made audible.
Seeing here is not the literal act of looking in someone’s direction and registering their presence. It’s a kind that creates an obligation—one that changes what you are allowed to do next. I rarely go to the cinema, yet here I am, poised for the Eywa network and a cinematic embodiment of a simple but unsettling idea: to see is to be responsible for what you have seen.
For every exchange of “I see you” between Jake and Neytiri, you can tell it’s not a poetic substitute for “hello.” It is an admission. A recognition. A moment where someone is no longer an object in your world, but a whole person—with interiority, history, shadow, and becoming. It’s affection, yes, but it’s also alignment. It is the difference between noticing someone and receiving them, and that’s why it has weight. Because the moment you truly see someone, you inherit responsibility.
That’s the part most people want to skip. We like the romance of love, the aesthetics of love, the feeling of love. We appreciate the warmth and the affirmation. But we don’t always like the obligations that come with accurate perception. We want the intimacy without the accounting. We want the bond without the burden. We want soul-level access without any stewardship.
But the eye is not neutral. Seeing is not passive. Seeing is a form of contact, and real contact changes both parties. This is why I keep returning to the Igbo phrase a hụrụ m gị n’anya (afurumgi nnanya).
It translates to “I love you,” but what interests me is the implied ethic—sometimes glossed as “I see you in the eye,” as if love begins with a kind of vision. That’s the difference I care about: love as recognition that binds, and acknowledgment that carries weight. It doesn’t just say, “I perceive you.” It says, “To acknowledge you is a moral event.” There is tenderness here that is not soft—a quiet strength that costs attention, freely given.
In many ways, a hụrụ m gị n’anya says to love someone is to spend attention on them—deliberately, consistently, with care. To pay the cost of learning their patterns. To notice what is changing. To recognize what hurts them before they have to announce it. To see beyond their performance, beyond their competence, beyond their mask.
Most people don’t fail at love because they lack feeling. They fail because they refuse responsibility. They want love as a possession rather than love as a practice. They want love as a mood rather than love as a discipline. They want love as something that happens to them, not something they must uphold.
“I see you,” whether spoken in Na’vi cinema or in Igbo intimacy, doesn’t permit laziness. It establishes a standard.
Because if you truly see someone, you cannot pretend you do not know. You cannot plead ignorance when you shrink them for convenience. You can’t claim love while repeatedly misunderstanding them in the same avoidable ways. Seeing collapses excuses. It removes the comfort of vague affection. It demands specificity, and specificity is where responsibility lives.
There’s also something else hidden in this idea: seeing someone is not just romantic, it is stabilizing. Being accurately seen is one of the rare experiences that reorganizes a person from the inside. It gives people permission to be whole. It reduces the need to perform. It softens the impulse to hide.
But again, that gift has a cost:
If you want the closeness of being the one who “sees,” you must accept the burden of being trustworthy with what you find. You don’t get to use what you learn as leverage. You don’t get to weaponize vulnerability. You don’t get to treat someone’s interiority like entertainment, or trivia, or a case study. If you see the hidden, you must protect it.
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So maybe that is my thesis, in plain terms: Love is not primarily an emotion. Love is recognition that accepts accountability. “I see you” is not a compliment. It is a claim. And every claim creates a duty.
The modern world encourages the opposite. It trains us to be fluent in desire but illiterate in devotion. It teaches us to chase the feeling, then discard the person when responsibility becomes inconvenient. It praises freedom without teaching fidelity. It celebrates connection but avoids commitment.
Yet every serious love story, every lasting friendship, every stable family, eventually becomes a story about responsibility—choosing restraint, and repair. It becomes about the slow courage of showing up when the moment is no longer cinematic. Love is not proved by intensity. It is proved by stewardship.
So when we say a hụrụ m gị n’anya, or when we hear “I see you,” we don’t want to treat it as a soft phrase. We want the hard promise inside it. We want to remember that seeing someone is not the end of love—it is the beginning of what love requires.
The next time I’m tempted to say “a hụrụ m gị n’anya,” I want to ask myself a harder question: do I mean it enough to be responsible for what it implies? Because if not, it is better to be quiet. It is better to look away than to look without care.
I want to be Igbo so I can relate fully 😅
But this was such a good read ✨
I enjoyed every word 🔥