The latest viral storm in Nigeria’s entertainment space is not a hit song or a movie premiere, but a shaky clip of a couple’s fight. A live stream showing popular Nigerian TikTok influencer, Habeeb Hamzat, popularly known as Peller, repeatedly shoving and striking Jarvis (Elizabeth Amadu) has turned social media into a courtroom.
Across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and news sites, the footage has been replayed, dissected, and judged as if the world has been invited into their living room.
Celebrity relationships have always been under the spotlight, but today’s digital age magnifies every misstep. What would once have been a private quarrel behind closed doors is now captured, clipped, and circulated for millions to consume.
This relentless scrutiny is arguably one reason why so many celebrity marriages and relationships don’t last. It is difficult for love to thrive when it is constantly treated as a public performance, a soap opera for strangers to critique.
And yet, in Peller and Jarvis’s case, one can hardly argue against the public’s right to weigh in. This is not a couple that shuns the limelight. Their very livelihood is built on sharing their relationship with fans, streaming their outings, quarrels, reconciliations, and all.
In such a setup, where the relationship is the career, how do you draw boundaries between private affection and public spectacle? How can they protect intimacy when their audience demands constant access?
The viral video in question shows Peller forcing Jarvis into a car, at one point pushing her by the head and shoving her repeatedly, during a heated moment. His crass and crude tendencies are not new; followers recall earlier incidents where he used coarse language in live sessions or made provocative jokes at Jarvis’s expense.
His brand thrives on controversy, often treading the fine line between entertainment and outright disrespect. Jarvis, on the other hand, has often been the one trying to hold the chaos together. She later admitted, in her response after the ugly incident, that she was deliberately holding back her emotions, saying: “Normally, if he pushes me, I would push him back.” That remark is telling; it suggests this dynamic is not new but part of their relationship’s rhythm.
What makes this troubling is not just the act itself but its normalisation. Jarvis’s attempt to downplay the incident, insisting it was not abuse, promising to leave if she were ever truly beaten, only complicates matters further. It gives the impression of a couple accustomed to public spats, unwilling to fully confront the unhealthy patterns in their bond.
Meanwhile, Peller’s defence, that his actions were “taken out of context” and were an attempt to protect her from a mob, does little to erase the image burned into the public mind.
Still, one must be careful not to mount the moral high horse too quickly. These are very young people. At their age, many couples are still fumbling through love, making mistakes, and learning boundaries, only they have the misfortune of making those mistakes with the entire internet watching.
If every relationship were placed under such a harsh microscope, cracks would surely appear. There is no marriage, no partnership that could survive flawlessly under 24-hour surveillance.
This is not to excuse Peller’s crude behaviour nor to suggest that shoving and striking in any form is acceptable. But it is to recognise that the digital mob has a way of inflating a single moment into a lifelong label.
It is possible to condemn the behaviour without condemning the entire relationship as doomed or abusive. It is also possible to acknowledge that both Peller and Jarvis need to take responsibility for their actions, for their choices to broadcast their intimacy, and for the image they present to young followers who may mistake dysfunction for normalcy.
What this scandal illustrates is the growing tension between celebrity as a career and love as a private life. When the two are merged, intimacy becomes performance, and conflict becomes content. Blessing CEO, the infamously outspoken relationship expert, hit the nail on the head when she urged the couple to take their lives offline.
Her blunt point was that if you stream your fights, you must accept public correction. And she is right, you cannot invite millions into your living room and then complain when they have an opinion about your furniture.
For Peller and Jarvis, this could be a turning point. They can either continue feeding the audience with drama, allowing each quarrel to become content, or they can reclaim their relationship from the glare of the public stage. One path may boost their numbers in the short term, but the other might actually save their love. The choice is theirs to make.
As for the rest of us, perhaps we should temper our judgments with perspective. Yes, Peller’s actions were crude and unacceptable. Yes, Jarvis’s attempts to downplay the incident expose troubling dynamics. But they are also two young people navigating love in the worst possible environment: under the constant eye of millions. That is a burden few of us could bear.
In the end, the lesson is not just for them but for all of us consuming these spectacles. Love, especially young love, is fragile. When turned into public property, it becomes entertainment at the cost of authenticity. And maybe that is why so many celebrity relationships collapse under the weight of our gaze, not because love is impossible, but because it cannot thrive as a performance.
