When Jalia Walda is angry with her husband, dinner still gets served. “Even if we’re angry at each other, or I am angry at him, I still feed him,” the Ugandan creator says in a TikTok video about the habits that shape her marriage.
It is a funny, domestic image with a serious point. For her, a disagreement does not have to stop everyday acts of care.
Walda, who is based in the United States, describes a marriage built around small rituals. She says she kneels when she apologises, compliments her husband at random moments and takes care with her appearance before bed. She shares phone passwords with him and says she informs him or asks him before going somewhere.
Her account has about 1.3 million TikTok followers, according to the details provided for this story.
One of her sharpest observations concerns arguments. “The real arguments happen after the argument,” she says, urging viewers to be careful with words spoken in anger. She also describes keeping work decisions separate from the emotional life of the marriage.
At work, she says, they make decisions according to what is best for the business, even when they disagree.
The video mixes relationship advice with skincare product mentions and playful details, including her preparation for bed and a monthly “reward” for her husband. That mix has helped make the clip entertaining, while inviting debate about where devotion ends and unequal expectations begin.
A third-party mirror of the video showed about 965,000 views and 116,000 likes. Its displayed comments included both praise and jokes, alongside objections to kneeling and to always siding with a husband.
Walda’s habits may work for her and her husband, but they are not a universal marriage manual. Informing a partner about plans can be a gesture of consideration; needing permission to move freely can become control. Shared phone passwords may suit a couple if both agree freely, but access to a phone is not, by itself, proof of trust.
Parents can present a united approach to discipline while still discussing disagreements privately and putting a child’s wellbeing first.
Her declaration that her husband comes before her children, family and friends is also a personal choice, not a rule for every household.
A healthy partnership leaves room for both spouses to speak, disagree and make decisions together. Affection and sexual intimacy, too, should be mutual choices rather than duties owed as a “reward.”
Rwanda’s latest official figures offer context, but not a verdict on the state of marriage. The National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda recorded 50,256 legal marriages in 2025, down from 52,878 in 2024. It also recorded 4,479 divorces that year.
Of those, 2,629 were granted by courts in 2025; the others had been granted earlier and entered the civil registration system in 2025. These are administrative counts, not a divorce rate, and they do not explain why couples separated.
The 2022 census found that 49.1 per cent of people aged 12 and above were married, officially or unofficially. It put the average age at first marriage at 25.3 for women and 28.2 for men.
Those numbers describe marriage across the population, but cannot tell us what happens inside a home.
For Rwandan couples, the useful question raised by Walda’s video is not whether to copy her routines. It is what care and respect look like in their own relationship.
That might mean keeping dinner warm through an argument, as in her anecdote, or finding a different way to apologise and make up. The lasting lesson is simple.
A marriage works best when consideration runs both ways.
