Michelle Ntalami opens up on heartbreak, being ‘happily single’, and why she is misunderstood

Marini Naturals founder and CEO Michelle Ntalami has the reputation of one of the most controversial celebrities in the Kenyan showbiz scene.

Ntalami has grabbed headlines before, especially on matters of love and relationships, with the last one coming as late as 6 months ago.

Then, she took to Instagram, where she enjoys immense following, to pen a 3-part letter detailing how the person she was in love with had messed her up.

She didn’t mention names, but threw in pronouns just to remain ‘politically correct’, and her followers filled in the rest for themselves.

Six months on from that explosive rant, Citizen Digital caught up with the entrepreneur at her Marini Naturals office in Nairobi’s Industrial Area.

In the exclusive interview, Ntalami looked all lively and bubbly.

What started with a light chat accelerated into a more serious discussion, with her opening up on her love life, why she believes people don’t really know who she is and the kind of relationships she admires.

“For as long as you are alive and you are a human being you will be misunderstood. I think there is a perception that I’m a b***h because of just my nature. I am very forward, very aggressive, very blunt, I don’t mince my words,” says Ntalami.

On dating, she says she is currently not seeing anyone after ‘they’ cheated on her, leading to a heartbreak that has taken her months to heal.

Ntalami describes herself as an androsexual, meaning she is attracted to masculinity. People who are androsexual may be attracted to anyone with masculine qualities regardless of their gender or sexual orientation.

We ask: What is that one thing you notice first when you meet someone from the opposite sex?

“Height. For physical I would say height,” she says, adding; “I just like my partner taller than me, I think it is very sexy when I can look up at them… something material would be how they smell. And if they have a beard, how it looks.”

On whether she will date again, Ntalami says:

“I haven’t had the best experience from my previous relationship so when you leave that, I am happily single, working on myself, working on my business… but I want to get to a place where I have fully healed because parts of myself were scattered around in a bid to love someone and be there for them. So there were pieces of me scattered around and hurt me a lot,” she says.