No more ‘unfinished business’: Pearl Thusi and Robert Marawa call it quits

Three months ago, City Press reported that the relationship between actress and television presenter Pearl Thusi and sports broadcaster Robert Marawa was in trouble. At that time both neither confirmed or denied the breakup.

Last night, however, Marawa confirmed on his Twitter account that they had called it quits.

He posted: “I confirm the rumour and speculation that our relationship with Miss Pearl Thusi ended a few months ago. We continue to be good friends though.”

The tweet came after an exchange of subtweets, where Marawa appeared to have blocked his fiancée on Twitter.

At that time friends wondered if South Africa’s most famous couple would still be heading to the altar.

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

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, then blocked Thusi. Her quote-tweet indicated his tweet was unavailable, but it was not deleted from his feed – which meant that Thusi could no longer access his feed. The application DoesFollow confirmed that Marawa and Thusi were no longer friends on Twitter, at least not at the time of publication.

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”.

Friends of the celebrity couple said 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.

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 last year 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]”.

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