This week, after an exchange of subtweets, sports broadcaster Robert Marawa appears to have blocked his fiancée, actress Pearl Thusi, on Twitter.

Now their friends are wondering if South Africa’s most famous couple will still be heading to the altar.

It all came to a head on Monday on the social media platform, where the couple have a combined 1.5 million followers.


In South Africa, Marawa posted a tweet that offered a definition of the term “unfinished business” as “nagging, unresolved, unexpressed or withheld feelings, memories and events of hurt, anger and resentment towards another person” that drain one of emotional energy.

No one would have made much of the tweet had Thusi, in New York, not quote-tweeted it with a “lol” and then followed that up with a tweet that read: “You subtweeted me but you have my number...”.

The tweet included a “But why?” meme, a confused emoji and the hashtags #thisisalsoasubtweet and #atweetforatweet.

Marawa, it seems, then blocked Thusi.

Her quote-tweet indicated his tweet was unavailable, but it was not deleted from his feed – which means that Thusi could no longer access his feed.


The app DoesFollow confirms that Marawa and Thusi are no longer friends on Twitter, at least not at the time of going to print.



FRIENDS ARE CONCERNED


City Press spoke independently to three friends of Thusi and Marawa who do not want to be named.

They said that they were concerned that the relationship was in trouble, adding that the couple was working on it and that they believed infidelity could be a cause of the “unfinished business”.

Thusi’s management was unwilling to respond to questions about the actress, who is growing more famous by the day thanks to her role in the US TV series Quantico, in which she is entering her second season as Dayana Mampasi, a human rights lawyer turned CIA recruit.

City Press messaged Marawa and Thusi, but received no response at the time of going to print.

After great secrecy throughout much of last year, Marawa and Thusi eventually came out about their engagement to TV talk show host Anele Mdoda in two separate interviews.

Thusi showed off her engagement ring on Mdoda’s show, Real Talk, in October and described how Marawa had proposed over dessert at the end of a romantic dinner date.

Despite reports that her family was unhappy that no lobola had been paid, Thusi told City Press in January that she was “ready to be umakoti [a wife]”.

Last month, she arranged a surprise 44th birthday party for Marawa, who called her the “chief organiser of the party and of my heart”.

On Instagram she thanked him “for always being honest to those who listen to you, watch you and even those around and closest to you”.

This week, friends of the celebrity couple told City Press that the two had had a bad fight just before Thusi left South Africa, after her last visit home to record a new season of popular TV series Lip Sync Battle, which she hosts.

They said the wedding was under threat since that fallout.

On Friday, Thusi shared pictures of herself in a cream-coloured Thula Sindi frock attending the opening of the New York African Film Festival, where Akin Omotoso’s movie, Vaya, was the opening-night selection.

Her happiness was contradicted by this tweet, sent earlier in the day: “When you feel most unloved & misunderstood... is when you grow up & learn to love & understand yourself (sic).” Marawa tweeted about sports for the rest of the week.

http://www.channel24.co.za/The-Juice/News/robert-and-pearl-over-20170506