Feral Truths & Tangled Threads: Velvet Hostage Situations
How Boyz II Men Taught Me to Beg, Guilt Trip, and Call It Love
Feral Truths & Tangled Threads
Raw, personal essays weaving together intimate stories and cultural reflections that uncover the complexities of identity, power, and belonging.
There’s a particular kind of second-hand embarrassment that hits when you realise the most romantic thing you could imagine at age thirteen was a man crying in four-part harmony because his girlfriend left him—and he decided she wasn’t allowed to. I used to think Boyz II Men were singing about love. Now I know they were singing about control issues with really good lighting.
I remember visiting my aunt and cousins in Auckland—those long, humid drives across the city where the car stereo was basically a feelings explosion. Boyz II Men, Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson, George Michael. Big vocals. High drama. Men down bad. It was glorious.
Back home, my mum’s music was a different flavour of emotional devastation. Tracy Chapman. Paul Simon’s Graceland. Marianne Faithfull. Cat Stevens. Carole King. Her heartbreaks were quieter. Less “I’ll die without you”, more “I already did and now I’m making tea.”
So of course I grew up weird. Caught between the cousin-mixtape masculinity of I’ll never walk again unless you forgive me, and the soft fatalism of you’re probably going to leave but I wrote you a folk song anyway. I thought love meant intensity. Proximity. Volume. A man weeping into the rain at your window, possibly holding roses and a boombox, definitely ignoring your boundaries.
But it wasn’t until much later—after some breakups, some questionable choices, and a deeply clarifying 50-minute therapy session—that I started listening back and thinking, wait, did he just say that?
And worse:
Did I used to think that was hot?
So this is part confession, part re-education. A tour through the velvet hostage situations of 90s R&B—where heartbreak was a performance art, accountability was optional, and love meant never letting go, even when asked politely.
Exhibit A: “End of the Road”
Or: Emotional Blackmail You Can Slow Dance To
This one was everywhere. “End of the Road” was the break-up song of the early 90s. Number one for thirteen weeks. Played at every school disco, wedding, and deeply awkward youth group social. I once slow-danced to it in cargo pants and body glitter. I thought it was the height of romance.
It is not.
“Girl, I’m here for you / All those times at night when you just hurt me / And just ran out with that other fella / Baby, I knew about it / I just didn’t care”
Sir. You saw her cheat and stayed because… you were committed to the aesthetic?
“Although we’ve come / To the end of the road / Still I can’t let go / It’s unnatural / You belong to me / I belong to you”
We are well past healthy communication and directly into restraining order set to music territory. The breakup already happened. She’s gone. But he’s like, Actually, no. You still belong to me. I’ve decided.
It’s giving certificate in manipulation with a minor in baritone. And we just swayed along, letting it burrow into our brains. We were learning that love means persistence. That saying goodbye is unnatural. That if someone leaves, your job is to sing at them until they change their mind.
What We Inherit
Both sides of the family listened to Eric Clapton. That was neutral ground. But I remember the look of surprise on my cousins’ faces when one day they were playing his Unplugged album on guitar and I asked if they knew Malted Milk. I wasn’t meant to know that one. It wasn’t a hit. It was slow. Raw. A little haunted.
That was the moment I realised I carried a different kind of sadness. Not louder. Not better. Just… quieter. Less about the grand declaration. More about the ache that stays after the music stops. The part where the stage is packed down and you still have to live with yourself.
Exhibit B: “On Bended Knee”
Or: Man Cries in Mall Carpark, Somehow Gets Applause
If End of the Road is heartbreak, On Bended Knee is a public meltdown. No dignity. No personal growth. Just a man collapsing like a deck chair and calling it vulnerability.
“Darlin’ I / I can’t explain / Where did we lose our way?”
Spoiler: it was probably somewhere between not listening and never apologising.
“Can we go back to the days our love was strong? / Can somebody tell me how to get things back the way they used to be?”
No mention of what he did. No reflection. Just vibes and selective memory.
“I’ll never walk again / Until you come back to me / I’m down on bended knee”
He’s down. On the floor. You just know he showed up outside her job with a flower and tears already queued, asking if she remembered “that one time we laughed about breadsticks.”
It’s not romance—it’s a staged intervention with backup singers.
Dramatic Bitch Training, 101
Of course I turned out like this.
We were raised on songs that made feelings theatrical. Love wasn’t about connection—it was about delivery. You didn’t just have emotions. You had to arrange them into a crescendo.
Boyz II Men taught us that to love someone was to weep publicly. To beg. To write the musical version of a hostage note and call it intimacy.
We didn’t learn how to apologise. We learned how to collapse beautifully.
And yeah—maybe I was a little emotionally feral at fifteen. Maybe I printed out MSN Messenger convos and kept them in a scrapbook. Maybe I cried in the shower while listening to A Song for Mama. I was just following the syllabus.
I once dated a guy for about six months. It ended spectacularly after I told him I was going out with friends to see a movie. My friend’s boyfriend picked me up—he lived closer to me than my friend so, it made sense—he gave me a hug when I got in the car. Harmless. Sweet. Completely unremarkable.
Except: my boyfriend had parked up on a side street nearby. Watching. Just… waiting. Apparently surveillance was his love language.
I spotted him out the corner of my eye and thought, huh. Weird. I told him I was going out. Later came the texts—long, wounded, accusing. I was cheating. He needed time. He needed space.
So he drove. From Auckland to Kaikohe. To sit on the side of his “favourite hill” and “contemplate life.”
Let me be clear: this man was not from Northland. He was not a small-town philosopher. He was from central Auckland. And yet there he was, cosplaying heartbreak like he was filming a live-action breakup special. Somewhere in his head, Boyz II Men were harmonising softly in the background.
Exhibit C: “I’ll Make Love to You”
Or: The Softest Song That Still Somehow Feels Like a Threat
This one’s a classic. A certified wedding jam. Released in 1994 and played at every formal event where someone thought a slow song would “set the mood.” It sounds sexy. It sounds smooth. But peel back the harmonies and what you’ve actually got is… premeditated intimacy with a side of mild coercion.
“I’ll make love to you / Like you want me to / And I’ll hold you tight / Baby all through the night”
So far, so consensual. But then:
“I’ll make love to you / When you want me to / And I will not let go / ’Til you tell me to”
Okay… you’re not letting go until you’re told to? What if she wants to go to sleep? What if she’d like a snack? What if she just wanted a cuddle and a rom-com?
“Just relax, let’s go slow / I ain’t got nowhere to go”
This sounds less like seduction and more like a man who has planned the entire evening down to the temperature of the bath water and will not be deviating from the itinerary.
There’s no actual violence in it—just an underlying vibe of I’ve already decided what tonight means for both of us. It’s like the Hallmark version of pressure: gentle, well-lit, and with a fully choreographed rose petal scene.
We all swayed along to it. We slow-danced with our eyes closed. We thought this was what passion looked like: someone turning up with wine, candles, and zero questions.
Love Songs and Other Bad Teachers
Looking back, I don’t think Boyz II Men meant harm. I think they were working with the emotional tools they had—and singing the hell out of them. They gave us music full of longing, regret, commitment. They showed us men crying, pleading, feeling things deeply in public. And for a lot of us, especially those of us starved of emotional nuance in masculinity, that mattered.
But they also taught us some shit that didn’t age well.
They taught us that persistence is love. That guilt is romantic. That saying “you belong to me” is just part of the chorus, not something to unpack in couples counselling.
And yet—God help me—I still love these songs. I still belt the bridge of End of the Road like it’s church. I still know exactly when the key change hits in On Bended Knee. These songs live in my bloodstream.
So no, I’m not cancelling Boyz II Men. I’m just listening differently. Laughing a little. Singing along, but with better boundaries. And maybe, finally, letting go when it’s time.
If they ever release a comeback album, I hope it’s called Therapy and Boundaries.
And yes. I will be playing it loud.
About the Series:
Feral Truths & Tangled Threads invites you into a space where fiercely honest personal narratives meet layered cultural and political reflections. These essays explore how the wild edges of experience connect to broader stories of identity, history, and community.
Author Bio:
Hayley Walmsley is a conceptual artist, writer, and curator based in Ōtautahi Christchurch. Whakapapa to Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou, and Ngāti Pākehā, her work explores identity, memory, and decolonial narratives through layered storytelling and cultural critique. She is the founder of Provocation Station, an evolving platform for conceptual art and critical reflection. Recent projects include the exhibition Migratory Patterns, and she has essays forthcoming in SCOPE: Art & Design and SCOPE: Tirou. Through her writing and curatorial practice, she invites audiences to engage with the complexities of place, belonging, and power.