Imran Johri is a marketing strategist, an editorial veteran, and a father of three. When his first marriage ended, he avoided facing his grief by becoming a martial-arts-obsessed serial dater in Kuala Lumpur.
In this op-ed for RICE, he writes about the years it took him to recognise the sparring and the dating for what they were: a way to look like he was holding it together as a man.
Top image: Stephanie Lee / RICE file photo
At 31, I was alone in bed, in an upmarket apartment in Kuala Lumpur, staring at the ceiling. It was 2 AM, and I wanted to cry. All the decisions I’d made in the past eight years were being meticulously second-guessed. Unfathomable regret was permeating my soul.
I was divorced.
If there ever was a time I had stared into an abyss, that was it. My mental capacity to reconcile the state I was in then was severely compromised by pessimistic foreboding.
“That was it. I’m never going to marry again.”
“I’ll be alone from now on.”
“Why is the ceiling coming closer to me?”
It was at that exact moment when I realised that it was all for nothing. With my Singaporean dream lying before me in a thousand shattered pieces, what did I truly want now?
“I want to be a ninja.”
Single but Not Ready To Mingle
I was dead serious too, because I had spent the best of my 20s grappling with a relationship that was harder to sustain than a fintech without funding.
The story was an all-too-familiar archetype.
Boy meets girl at university orientation. Boy breaks up with girl because it was orientation infatuation. Boy dates girl’s roommate. Friend groups split in two. Boy and girl face inter-racial opposition from parents, peers, and strangers. Boy and girl hang on to their tertiary union until they start their careers, to prove them all wrong. They acquire a 5-room HDB flat together. Boy gets posted to KL for work. They get divorced.
It also occurred to me then that the soundtrack that pervasively played throughout the us- against-the-world partnership—Shania Twain’s ‘You’re Still the One’—had become deeply ironic.
Its triumphant declaration that we’d somehow ‘made it’ highlighted the fact that we had shoehorned ourselves into marriage to prove everyone wrong. And after we did, we didn’t know what to do with our marriage.
I cringe at the husband I was then. I often mistook accommodation for partnership and stubbornness for conviction.
I’d routinely drop plans with my own friends to hang out with her and hers. I did it so often that I missed major milestones—weddings, childbirths—and gradually surrendered a social identity that had existed outside our marriage.
On the flip side, I would argue for days on end, often in rage over political matters that had little bearing on the relationship.
I bore all the hallmarks of a boy playing ‘house’, and when it came to making a hard decision about whether to live in different countries for work, I didn’t fight her for her proximity. I simply went with, “Yeah, sure, why not”.
It effectively killed all those years of fighting for it.
Objectively though, we did love each other. To simply say we fought because we were stubborn would be too reductive of nearly a decade of dogged determination. But somewhere along the way, proving that our love could survive became indistinguishable from knowing how to sustain it.
And to show for it, I had no marriage. No wife. A five-room flat that had an unfulfilled Minimum Occupation Period.
But the biggest existential undoing was the fact that I had just lost my chance to be a father. Which arguably was an even more coveted title to me than ‘husband’—a title I had longed for since my late teens.
It’s gone. It’s FUCKING GONE.
Ninjas. Ninjas EVERYWHERE.
This is where the timestamp provides the context. My decision to be a ninja at 2 AM, while desperate to find meaning at 31, happened in late 2004.
22 years later, I’m starting to see a pattern of ninja-type decisions all around me.
In the last seven years or so, I’ve had more men crying at my dinner table, seemingly lost and disempowered, than I have ever had before.
These weren’t men who were unaccomplished. On paper, they were career powerhouses, heads of departments, management mavericks, and peak gym specimens. There were even coveted bachelors—all at the cusp of greatness.
Why were they in tears at my dining table, you ask?
From retrenchments to breakups to the often-heard, “my boss is killing me slowly”, these men come visit for a drink and a chat with a buddy. They inevitably end up relinquishing their hardened facade in a safe space I fondly refer to as my dining table.
To which most of them—and I’m speaking of those who have articulated their pain in my kitchen—in the face of chronic uncertainty, chose to embark on a path they believe they can control. Just as I did with my shinobi sidequest decades ago.
And as much as I empathise, as a former ninja, I think this needs to be reframed.
Mission: Escape the Abyss
Back to me staring at the ceiling in the dark. With the most important labels I had built my adult life around suddenly gone, I needed something else I could call my own.
In an epiphanous moment, I simply proclaimed in my mind that I wanted to look amazing in spandex. I mean, who wouldn’t want to have a superhero body? This comic geek definitely did.
And so it began. I was a newly single editor in KL with a decent career and suddenly, an enormous amount of time on my hands. So I trained every single day. Non-stop. For months.
From core strength training three times a week to alternating boxing, jiu-jitsu, and Muay Thai classes (with added strength training in between), I literally sculpted my physique through blood, sweat, and the misshapen determination to deny myself a chance to sit with my grief.
At my physical peak, I was a 10 percent body fat pugilist under the tutelage of some of the best martial artists KL had to offer. I’d done it. I had become the personification of the comic book cover.
I could feel it too. With every lithe movement I made, I felt like a panther, and I loved my new feline form so much that I was happy to revel in my own mirror image.
But then an unexpected milestone occurred from the unlikeliest of sources.
While devouring a well-earned dinner of meat and meat by myself, after an intense session of boxing, I was greeted by my rotund intern, who was passing by with his family.
“Hey boss, eating alone ah?”
“Yeah, just finished training…”
“Haha, what a loser.”
AND HE WALKED AWAY.
Mission: Don’t Be Alone
Being called a loser in public by someone who you thought was the loser had a profound effect on my psyche.
Stunned by the sheer brazenness of the loser labelling, I regressed back into ceiling-staring mode and decided that the insufferable intern was right.
Here I was, in the best shape of my life, a Thundercat no less, and I was alone. This temple I had built was indeed primed for desecration. I had rebuilt my body. Now I needed other people to tell me it had worked. The city of KL beckoned.
What happened next is neither a proud moment nor a redemptive milestone.
I’d spent years writing and researching the topic of relationships as an editor for men’s magazines. I’d also swallowed a radioactive dose of The Game by Neil Strauss, the malignant ‘seduction manual’ I’m ashamed I once treated as scripture. Fuelled by sinewy testosterone, the ‘copulation analyst’ emerged.
My cycle:
Approach → rejection → recalibrate → approach → validation → repeat.
And the CPA (cost per affection) economics would stay at a low threshold with every attempt, provided the application volume was robust.
This meant that I surveyed all manner of social hotspots, from clubs to gyms, and especially the Kinokuniya bookstore at KLCC. NEVER underestimate the power of an innocuous and well-timed “Is that a good book?” query.
I was so high on validation, I rarely stopped to consider what happened to the people on the other end of my selfish ego-trip.
Most of the women I dated knew I wasn’t looking for anything serious. Some didn’t.
On one occasion, I orchestrated a breakup in a crowded restaurant to ‘prevent a scene’. Simply because she had once casually mentioned that her parents would like me.
She chased me, in tears, outside of the restaurant, pleading.
“Wait… why?”
“It’s too soon.”
And I walked away.
The *uck Stops Here
At the height of my egomaniacal dating spree, I encountered a rejection so audacious it sent me into an existential spiral.
“You’re going through a phase,” she said. “Call me again when you’re done.”
And she walked away.
Her words haunted me for months. I think it was then that I finally started to let myself grieve.
Almost immediately, the ceiling-staring resumed, and I started to feel the sheer purposelessness of my shallow relationship KPIs.
Then I got angry. I had done what I thought I needed to move on. I got the ninja body. Martial skills I’d dreamed of. An inordinately large collection of pick-up lines…
But yet, I was still alone. I wasn’t a husband again, and I was far from becoming a father.
I told myself maybe I wasn’t meant to have my own family. I blew it. I’ll never marry again.
But it took some serious self-reflection and change to fix what was broken. I got through that phase and reached out to the lady who turned me down. We eventually got married. And I became a father.
I asked my wife what she saw in me back then.
“I saw a man trying to figure something out. You didn’t hide the fact that you were just exploring. And at the time, I thought I was just one of the many girls you were talking to. Eventually, when things got serious, I asked you if you could love someone 100 percent again. You said no,” she recalls.
“But I understood why—you had just gotten out of a 10-year relationship. Actually, the more time we spent talking, the more I realised what you were looking for was stability.”
All that time, I thought I was trying to become dangerous, desirable, and untethered. What I had actually been searching for was somewhere safe to land.
The Male Urge to Mask
Apparently, my dining table has been performing a public service.
AWARE’s recent survey of more than 1,000 men in Singapore found that more than half hide sadness, fear, anxiety or stress. More than a third believe showing emotion makes them look weak.
Which makes me wonder how many ninjas are walking around out there, holding it together until they find somewhere safe enough to drop the mask.
So yes, I take pride in the fact that my wife and I have been able to build a kitchen so safe that my male friends are okay to tear and curse at the wind when they feel like it.
At a time when men are grappling with finding help and support, I’d argue that while organised support has its place and seeking help warrants due acknowledgement, we need to encourage men to keep building. Keep to that fundamental urge to be productive and progress.
But the key here is not the act of building itself, but the pause to step back and recognise what we are building over.
In my case, it was grief I hadn’t dealt with, a need to control something when everything felt uncontrollable, and an embarrassing dependence on other people to tell me I was still worth something.
I know from experience that when I responded to vulnerability by becoming a ninja, I inevitably built a space where my friends don’t have to be one.
So build, if building is what gets you off the floor. Train. Learn. Make something. Become briefly ridiculous. It might give you somewhere to put all that energy while you’re figuring out what the hell happened and how not to repeat the mistakes that led you there.
52-year-old me can only see this now, but all that building didn’t necessarily make me a better man. It built me a safer place to be one.
And if you ever need a retired ninja to talk to, call me. My kitchen is open for business.
