She Got the Courage to Love centres on Sarah, a woman who wants to be loved so badly that she’s willing to tolerate discomfort, embarrassment, and blatant disrespect just to say she’s on a date. The film doesn’t flinch from this. Sarah shows up for a date where the man is three hours late, and instead of leaving, she stays. Waiting. Hoping. Convincing herself that endurance is part of romance.
While she waits, the story unfolds through a series of phone calls with her best friend and housemate, Jemima. Their dynamic becomes the emotional backbone of the film. In one of its most memorable moments, Jemima calls Sarah to help her pronounce the word “choir,” immediately revealing her illiteracy. What begins as a light, almost playful exchange slowly exposes deeper layers of vulnerability.
When Jemima asks where Sarah is, Sarah admits she’s on a date. Jemima, already openly biased against men, asks to speak to the date. Sarah hesitates and becomes evasive. That secrecy, rather than the man’s absence, is what angers Jemima. To her, it feels like Sarah is hiding something, and that distance sparks the first real conflict between them. Jemima ends the call sharply, frustrated and unsettled.
Concern eventually overrides anger. Jemima calls Sarah back, sensing that something is off. It’s during this second conversation that Sarah finally admits the truth: her date still hasn’t arrived. Jemima responds the only way she knows how. She tells Sarah to leave. She reminds her that she is loved at home. She insists that waiting endlessly for a man who can’t show up is not love, it’s self-abandonment.
Sarah pushes back. She tells Jemima that this is exactly why she didn’t want to talk about it in the first place. Their exchange becomes tense, raw, and painfully familiar, two women talking past each other while trying to protect themselves.
As the film progresses, Jemima’s hostility toward men is given context. She was once married, but her husband left her after falling in love with her salesgirl, disgusted by Jemima’s illiteracy and what he perceived as her inadequacy. That history reframes her behaviour. Her anger isn’t irrational. It’s defensive.
Eventually, Sarah’s date does show up. But by then, the emotional imbalance is already clear. Trying not to be biased 😂, but Nigerian dating dynamics and I are not allies, and the chemistry between Sarah and her date didn’t land for me. More importantly, Sarah herself is too consumed by her desire to be chosen to enjoy the date. She performs. She adjusts. She does everything she can to be palatable, forgetting to ask whether she actually wants the man sitting across from her.
That desperation becomes the quiet tragedy of the film.
The performances hold this tension well. The acting is solid overall, but Jemima stands out as the emotional anchor. Her performance is grounded and raw, giving weight to every sharp word she delivers. Sarah’s portrayal captures a softer, internal desperation that feels uncomfortably real.
Because the film runs for just 35 minutes, the pacing is fast, and at times She Got the Courage to Love feels more like a series of emotionally charged moments than a fully cohesive arc. The background score occasionally overwhelms scenes that might have benefited from more subtlety.
Still, the film succeeds in capturing something painfully recognisable: the way women negotiate love, loneliness, and self-worth, often in conversation with other women rather than with the men at the centre of their longing. She Got the Courage to Love is not perfect, but it is honest, asking whether the courage to love should ever require abandoning yourself in the process.