- Babatunde Adebayo.
Love is the oldest emotion known to man. Simply put, a characteristic feeling of attraction that every man must feel at least once in a lifetime. Love as a word is often on the lips of everyone, young and old. rich and poor, male and female. Love knows no bounds, religion, race nor tradition. Verily, love is pure.
Love comes with countless definition which has come to cause confusion in the hearts of man. This is the reason why society went further to coin the tautological, ‘True Love’, which is meant to depict love in its purest form amongst two people. Nonetheless, for an emotion so pronounced, I’m baffled at the amount of confusion sourced by a straightforward feeling. I assumed love was simple until I embarked on a righteous journey of finding love. It was a strenuous one, but I did succeed in finding what I was looking for, albeit, quite a painful experience.
I realise a number of things about love. And first is that love is a pandora box full of emotions, problems and battles, a box that once opened cannot be shut out. I also learnt that love is a compound complex package of random emotions juxtaposed together in the mind of the lover. Love is a simple word, but humans being a complicated animal will often hold different meaning to such a word.
And while I sacrificed my mental health to experience the apparent thrill love had to offer, I discover that love is a combination of positive energies from all angles. There is attraction, trust, passion, obsession, infatuation, then there’slust. All individual emotions that could as well stand alonewhich makes way for further confusion.
Like the fruit of knowledge, love is oddly appealing. It isevidently a sign of weakness which exposes you to mental vulnerabilities, but everyone lusts for this feeling of fragility just to appear human. We willing relinquish control just to belong to something. And in most cases, inflicting ourselves in pain we would regret for the rest of our lives, heartbreak.
Now, I know what I’m talking about. After all, I’ve never lied to you before, have I? I feel in love not because I was enamoured with the woman straight up. No, it actually took a pandemic, life threatening conditions and a lot of time before I actually thought, lets give it a shot. And if the gamble fails, I’d have enough to whine and write about. What I didn’t expect was that it would nearly strip me off my ability to write.
I would like to define love from what I felt these past months, but since people often get different experiences, I won’t bore you with an epistle. But the truth is, I mostly found pain in an affair that mumbled up my minds. I take one positive out of it though, beforehand I used to keep my heart in a cage, now, I wear it on my sleeves as a hopeless romantic. Perhaps, I’m going to get my heart broken a number of other times again, but I realise that there is no other bliss that be loved and being in love with the same person.
I understand that dreaming about such fantasies is like building castles in the sky as mutual love can hardly ever be found. Simply because, people are either after only money or attention, and do not know how to love. Those who know how too are scared of loving again just to save themselves from the pain, while some are egocentric, some are just toxic who wants love but are awful at giving it back.
The thing is, love is about giving… giving so much that one shouldn’t even worry about taking. Once you open your mind for expectations then maybe you aren’t completely in love. As love means sacrifice, cutting yourself down for someone to survive. Surrendering your parachute in a crashing plane, taking a bullet for someone, relinquishing an opportunity, running 90-miles post-surgery just to steal a kiss. Oh… heavens, love is solely about giving. And I’ve paid my dues, time after time, I think I deserve some accolades (Clap for me Y’all!)
I’m not giving up on love, because I now know that love failing isn’t because love is doomed, its mailing because on side of the induction is faulty. Many a times, a partner is full of lies, that is, love often fails when one or each partner isn’t completely honest. I’ve heard rehearsed words like, “I will love you forever, rest assured.” End in tears. One that is still quite fresh in my mind is one from an old acquaintance, she said to me unprovoked. “Adebayo… I want you to know that I will always love you… come rain… come sunshine.” While I was still thinking that those lines sounded like a lyric from the late Whitney Houston, I had already got dumped.
It is just as difficult to fall out of love as it is to fall in love. Sowhen next your girlfriend winds up and tells you she doesn’t love you anymore, and up until that moment, you felt things were fine… then she probably never loved you before (maybe just attracted to something you had to offer).
Many of us do not know that love is circumstantial, it takes certain occurrences for the heart to open up completely. And when it does happen, it comes with a lot of changes, when I fell in love, I deleted all female acquaintances. Invested all my time, emotions, self-sufficence, happiness into the relationship, because I felt, I’ll marry this woman! Big mistake. I gave the energy she was willing to take but wouldn’t dream of giving back. Now falling in love with her is completely natural. However, looking for happiness within someone who is like a reaper of joy is the most foolish thing one could think of. I was a fool… a fool in love.
The truth is that, for love to flourish, two happy people must come together to create something called bliss… pure bliss. But when its only one person carrying the love, he would sooner die by the venom of the other party. Run away from toxic people, may God be with you.
Asides from toxicity, eg0 is another enemy of love. If you know you have a notorious pride, it is time to look inward (Yes, I know you care about nobody but yourself and you feel that you could possible do no wrong.) yes, inward, stop blaming those girls, or boys, that you broke their hearts. It wasn’t them;it is you; you’ve been the problem all along. You might think, what’s this guy saying, I’ve got someone better. Don’t sweat, you’re still infatuated, your true colours will show soon and you’ll scare him away, breaking his heart also. Pride, my dear, is the enemy of love, with it, love with forever remain inert, failing to flourish.
Forgive me… I digress… I guess I’m still too passionate to talk about this subject. This is bad journalism; I just made the whole thing about myself. Sorry, how have you been lately. Ah yes, have you been scammed by a lover lately? One who promised forever that only later turned out to last for two months, series of sex, shortage of time and money? Hummn sorry. I know how you feel. Cheer up, you didn’t make a mistake loving, just the wrong choice of a lover. Love is beautiful… you will love again, don’t give up. It is like you dodged a bullet because they never loved you anyways, love never expires. My father would say… old love dies hard, but love in its truest form lasts forever.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
