From glow-ups to breakdowns: How love is draining our ‘baddies’
By Cynthia Atuo, July 29, 2025If you’ve been on TikTok for the past month, you may have a million reasons to fear men, fear love, and definitely fear relationships, especially the ones that lead to marriage.
Before you come at me, these aren’t my words, but rather an expression of how many millennial and Gen Z girlies feel about everything love-related.
Hey cousins, let’s dive deep. So, the internet, particularly TikTok, has been buzzing with videos, conversations, and a lot of anger or excitement surrounding the “He Drained the Life Out of You Challenge.”
Essentially, the challenge tells a story, through pictures, of how young women entered into their relationships as hot bombshells, yep, the Ariana Madix kind of Bombshell entrance into the Love Island Villa, only to end up looking like typical vienyeji pros from an unknown location in the middle of nowhere near earth.
“I had a mini-stroke and had to spend time in a wellness centre because my brain shut down and had to learn to walk properly again. I regressed,’’ confesses @Noelle, who seemingly went through hell while in her relationship.
Surreal figures
Another female user, @nkositdk, says that she learned of broken heart syndrome while in her marriage, and her doctor even diagnosed her with physical pains in the heart, which nearly caused her a stroke.
“I cry every night, but wake up the next day and act like I am okay. But deep down, I am dying inside. I can’t explain this situation, but I am praying every day to have the strength to leave completely. It’s been hell, but it’s not easy to let go at once,” she says,
In a normal generation, like our dads’ and grandpas’ or ancestors’, just anything before the millennial and Gen Zs, you would expect a woman to have a glow when in a relationship.
But this is not the case today. It seems that these latter generations love in a different way, because how do you do a baddie dirty like that? Yoh, what the helly!
Yes, the Gen Z and Millennials baddies are really going through it in these modern relationships, and the question that begs is why?
Some look like they have undergone serious ailments, others with black eyes and bruises all over their bodies, but those that stood out the most to social media fans were the baddies who had surreal figures but ended up either overweight and obese, or sickly-looking and slim.
“I’ve been seeing this ‘he drained the life out of me trend’ and it is intense. It really goes to show what people go through when they are in certain kinds of relationships and I freeze when I see some of these images because it’s hard to believe that people can go through such incredible transformations,” says Khaya Dlanga, a South African writer, public speaker, and social media commentator who chimed in on this shocking challenge.
Loved or not
In his view, the greatest tragedy is that people don’t know that they are loved and how much, so they would go and accept anything that resembles love.
And then they say yes to things that they should be saying no to. More notably, many people find themselves in such situations, and it happens slowly.
In most of these cases, the victims’ partners tend to drain their self-belief and self-respect to such an extent that the victims don’t believe that they have it anymore.
“It’s that lie that someone has to stop themselves out of, because they still have respect, strength and dignity to get out of the relationship. It has been demonstrated through the physical evidence who have changed once they left the relationships,” says Dlanga.
He denotes that being loved is a huge responsibility, and it is the duty of the beloved not to abuse that knowledge.
Some people abuse the knowledge that they are loved and the perpetrators worship their weak and fragile egos by breaking other people because they themselves are broken.