Bello of Ready to Love Detroit Is the Struggle Prince Charming Black Women Have Outgrown

On paper, Bello checked all the boxes. Tall. Confident. Well-spoken. He entered Ready to Love presenting himself as what many women would recognize as the modern ideal: six feet, alleged six figures, and a polished vocabulary that suggested stability, ambition, and direction.

But Black women have lived long enough and dated enough to know that titles don’t always tell the truth.

Over time, we’ve learned to side-eye certain language. “Entrepreneur.” “Real estate developer.” “Investor.” Not because there’s anything wrong with those professions, but because too often, they’re used as placeholders—smoke screens meant to signal success without the substance to support it. Hustling isn’t the issue. Being in transition isn’t the issue. What is exhausting is posturing. Grandstanding. Inflating a narrative to appear fully formed when you're still moving day to day, robbing Peter to pay Paul, hoping no one looks too closely behind the curtain.

Black women are not opposed to men who are still building. We meet men where they are all the time. What we don’t tolerate is being misled. Don’t sell me a finished product when you’re still assembling the pieces.

What made Bello especially revealing was how easily he shifted depending on who he was speaking to. With Dominique, a woman clearly familiar with affluence, polish, and elevated spaces, he spoke the language of status and sophistication. With Ashante, whose grounding comes from self-awareness and therapy, he leaned into emotional intelligence and introspection. With Lauren, a visible model and host in Detroit’s social scene, he mirrored charisma and public-facing charm.

On the surface, that adaptability could be mistaken for emotional intelligence. In practice, it revealed something else entirely: a man skilled at performance, not presence. Bello wasn’t evolving, he was auditioning.

By the end of the season, Bello chose Dominique, and many viewers initially framed it as her “winning.” She did what women on this show are encouraged to do. She included him. Introduced him to her family. Attempted to integrate him into her real life, not just the televised version of it. She treated him as someone she was building with, not evaluating from a distance.

But once the competition ended, once the cameras stopped rolling and the exposure faded the illusion collapsed.

The reunion clips tell a familiar story. A visibly frustrated Dominique, grappling with the reality of who Bello revealed himself to be once the performance was no longer required. Without the incentive to impress or posture, what remained bore little resemblance to the man he claimed to be throughout the season.

Instead of rising to the occasion, Bello did what insecure men often do when the jig is up: he flipped the narrative.

When a woman begins to see clearly, she becomes dangerous to a man who relies on illusion. Rather than take accountability for being unfinished, Bello redirected his disappointment outward. He gathered his shame, his inadequacy, his unrealized promises and placed them squarely on Dominique. Suddenly, her imperfections became the justification. Her expectations became the excuse.

This pattern isn’t unique to Bello, nor is it new. Reality television has long provided men the opportunity to present a fantasy version of themselves—the man they hope to become, not the one they currently are. And when that fantasy dissolves under scrutiny, accountability rarely follows. Instead, women are reframed as demanding, critical, or flawed, blamed for the collapse of an image that was never stable to begin with. But the truth is far simpler.

A man who cannot sit comfortably with who he is will never be at peace with a woman who sees him clearly. And when he realizes she will eventually choose herself over his illusion, he tries to reject her first.

Bello didn’t lose Dominique because she was imperfect. He lost her because she was perceptive. And Black women especially grown Black women, have learned that fairytales don’t fall apart because women ask for too much. They fall apart because some men spend more time pretending than preparing.

The era of the Struggle Prince Charming is over. And Bello is simply the latest reminder that Black women have outgrown the fantasy.

Catch Part One of the two-part Ready to Love Detroit reunion Friday, January 30th at 8 p.m. EST on OWN