For the longest time, I have been fascinated with love, its dynamics, and how it can reduce the most self-confident person to a blustering mess. It is amusing watching an ordinary person become a veritable Aphrodite in the eyes of their lover. I find it so interesting how someone can be irrevocably and irrepressibly in love with someone this year and some years- and a nasty break up down the line- later, they are once again in control of their oxygen supply and living well without that person they claimed they couldn’t live without.
I remember one time in secondary school when a teacher was talking to us about love. We were at that stage when hormones were surging through our bodies with alarming intensity. We had so much love- or rather oxytocin and estrogen/testosterone- to give!
“You see these boys? They can’t and don’t love you,” she said. “They will claim to do so but they don’t.”
I had so many questions bubbling inside me, longing to be answered.
There is a saying among my people that goes thus:
“Anara amu aka ekpe na nka.”
This translates to “you cannot learn to be a southpaw/leftie at old age.”
Figuratively, it means the older you get the harder it gets to learn/unlearn habits. Kinda like that saying, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
If these boys “didn’t know how to love and couldn’t love the right way” now, is it when they are men they’d learn it?
When did the gene for love finally kick in? When you’re 18? 21? 25?
I knew I might my teachers would punish me for those questions so I bit back them back. Now, I understand that statement had nothing to do with the boys’ capacity to love but rather the fact that we (the boys as well as the girls) were not mature enough to handle the various demands and sacrifices that kind of love entailed.
However, there are still many things I don’t understand about love- and one of those things is its calibration.
I love you
One Sentence
Three words
Eight Letters
But filled with more emotion than words can explain and more meaning than numbers can quantify.
How do you know when those words are real and not spoken through false teeth?
What exactly does it being real entail?
I’ve noticed a trend on social media and real-life with the whole love shtick- and this brings me to yet another story.
This happened in church a couple of years ago. There was a moving story in the church newspaper about a lame, sickler who got married to her heartthrob, a very dashing and attentive young man. One lady’s comment about the love affair would remain evergreen in my mind.
“It is stories like this that convince you that true love exists. People that love like this are the real lovers. Na oyibo dey love like this; our people generally don’t know how to love like this.”
This statement brought a lot of things to mind, principal among which was the question:
Is true love calibrated by how unfortunate it is?
It reminded me of the time when I had horrible cystic acne and someone said anyone who loved me with them really loved me. I couldn’t help thinking: Would clearing my acne clear my chances at true love? LOL
Or like that time in Ugly Betty when Amanda told Betty at least she (Betty) could be sure any man who loved her (Betty)- although she wasn’t conventionally beautiful- really loved her.
Most of the time, when you are dating or “in love” with someone who is not “obviously flawed” people are quick to point out 1001 reasons it won’t work.
Her? She’s too beautiful. She won’t be faithful. I’ve seen her type before.
Well, I wish y’all the best but in my experience, rich guys never stay put. They always want something and once they get it, they move on to the next person.
It is as if people feel for you to find something as beautiful as real love, something has to give.
They either have to be struggling financially, physically, or emotionally; as if lack and brokenness somehow predispose you to love better.
It’s just like we see with celebrities. They fall in love and everyone writes it off as one of those detours and begins a countdown to when they fall out of love, like the multiplicity of options brought by being comfortable and desirable somehow makes it impossible for them to love in the real sense of the word.
So I ask again: Does love always have to be a lotus pushing though the dirt of adversity, strife, and struggle for it to be real?
Does love always have to be directly proportional to unfortunateness?
Can love never be true unless it is mired in sadness, incompleteness, and lack? Does it always have to be so beauty-and-the-beast-esque (without the part where the beast turns to the prince) for it to be real?
Can love not be true while being happy, whole, unflawed, and sunny?
I understand adversity can be a test of love. Maybe everything is perfect when it all started and someone loses their job or gets cancer. Then, the burning question becomes: can and will the other person stick around?
But that doesn’t mean unfortunateness should be the S.I unit of love, does it?
Originally published on Medium
Hey oh! If you like my musings, check out 12 Lessons from Ugly Betty and The Power of Negative Visualization
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