Rihanna and her former boyfriend split up. She dumped the dude. I see from the way your eyebrow is twitching that you are preparing to ask, in a not-too-slightly sneering tone, “Which one?” because she has been attached to and detached from at least three dudes over the past few months. The answer is pick any. The explanation I am going to give you this week will apply to all of them. Starting with Hassan Jameel, the billionaire businessman she dated for three years, during which he failed to be of any use to us — couldn’t even inspire her to record at least a single for a movie. The official statement says they “broke up”, but come on, let’s not be coy here. You don’t break up with Rihanna. Once you are in love with her you are in until she kicks you out. You don’t break up with her. Not even if she is always forcing you to stop your PlayStation games when you were about to clear the level because she wants you to look at her when she’s talking to you. Not even if she is always making fun of your mustache for how sparse and thin it is, as if you haven’t told her how sensitive you are about it. Not even if she says that is because you inherited your mustache genes from your mother. No, not even if she is always bringing nightclub bed bugs into your house, no matter what, you don’t dump Rihanna because Rihanna has what PhDs who study the science of love call ‘capitalist appeal’. We all suffer from the cruelty of capitalism, but no society has ever managed to actually remove itself from the system. The only way to escape from capitalism is to become too poor to participate in the market and starve to death. Rihanna is like capitalism. The only way to escape is if it, or her, decides you are of no more use and kicks you out. So Jameel was kicked to the curb. We don’t know what he did, but he’s gone. Soon after him came Asap Rocky, and speculation that she was dating him. Rocky would prefer to spell it with a dollar sign instead of an ‘S’, but I am not going to indulge such vulgar behaviour. Names are spelled with letters, you uncouth child! I would like to hate on him a bit more, but unfortunately, he is actually quite talented and I enjoyed his album, if not the name on the cover. Unfortunately, he was not with Rihanna as her rapper, but as her rebound boyfriend. He was not very “dope” at that and was also dumped. That was followed by speculation that Drake was still trying to get his nomination into committee stages. However, there is bro-zone, friendzone, and then there is Drake-zone. So who is she seeing, you ask, because it is our business after all, and how come we don’t know? There are battalions of tabloid journalists assigned to hunt for Rihanna gossip and yet none of them can answer the question. How come? Let me explain. Rihanna is insanely powerful, you people, she is virtually a pop culture infinity stone. She has so much power to shape her public narrative that if we don’t know who she’s seeing, it is because she doesn’t want us to know. And why doesn’t she want us to know? She is obviously not lonely. Rihanna is very sexual. You can tell that much from pretty much all her songs. Even if we don’t see who she is seeing, she obviously gets plenty of sight. The way her hips move when she dances and the way she looks out of the top right corner of her eyes? I have known women like that. Those are women who are very much in control of their sexuality. So, when you combine these two attributes of Rihanna, you see the obvious answer to our question: Rihanna has had a series of young, virile, sex champions on a roster. They apply through a top secret app and only the elite scorers are flown to the final exam room. There, if they meet the high standards, they sign confidentiality agreements in blood and are awarded contracts to shut up and drive. She doesn’t need a boyfriend. She is living an ASAP Rocky rap song. And we will never know if this is true because no one is ever going to report on it. Because she controls the media.
