By Arinze Ude
Valentine’s Day (Lovers’ day) is a day set aside all over the world to celebrate the gift of love.
For me, Valentine’s Day is just another day on the calendar. You don’t have to wait till it’s valentine to show love. This brings me to the question, what is love? Love is the feeling of tender & passionate affection for another person.
From infancy to adulthood, we have had strong but transient romantic attraction for the opposite sex starting from our teachers to our fellow classmates. We often refer to these individuals as mere crushes & that is what I feel love is. People have labelled me a love critic because I often say love is overrated. Don’t get it twisted, love is a beautiful thing but these are my reasons for saying love is overrated:
We as Christians are implored every day to love our neighbours as ourselves, yet most of us are self-centred & care less about others. I believe if you don’t care about your neighbours, you can’t fall in love.
Love is patient & kind: Most people nowadays are impatient & I don’t blame them. Recently, there’s this girl I was so patient with, took all her bullshit, in the end, I was “lovelorn.” People always feel superior to you when you stoop so low to take their bull, rather they brag in front of their folks saying “that guy/girl is head over heels in love with me.”
Love is not jealous, boastful or proud: Our people normally say “otu onye anaghi alu nwanyi” which means; a woman is married by many not just one man alone. Jealousy/over protection is one of the reasons why people break up, a friend once accused me of trying to snatch his girlfriend from him. The guy was so jealous that any chat with his girl means you are trying to woo her. That you are dating a guy/girl doesn’t mean you are supposed to be monitoring his/her every move or glued to each other. In the end, you will get tired of each other & the rest is history.
Love does not demand its own way: Demand is another inglorious chapter in a relationship. Nobody wants a demanding/nagging fellow as a partner. In the book of Proverbs, a verse says “A leech has two daughters, both named give me.” Girls are of the idea that once they are dating, it is the responsibility of the guy to take care of her needs. Don’t get me wrong, you can do anything for the one you love but the person mustn’t demand or nag for it. I know a student who gives his nagging girlfriend a monthly allowance of 5,000 from his own monthly allowance of 15,000 & he tells me, it is love. “It is better to live on a corner of the roof than share a house with a nagging/quarrelsome wife.”
Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged: Misunderstandings are acid tests of a relationship, they are inevitable. They help build a “covalent” bond between couples. People often claim to be in love but when a problem ensues, you often see the guy/girl saying all sorts of ‘unbelievable’ things about their ‘boo’, and this makes me irascible. When the going was good & smooth, you didn’t see all these faults but because now the end is lurking around, you’d tell your story to every ear that is willing to listen. The truth is that we all have flaws and it is our ability to stay together despite our respective flaws that makes us say we are in love.
Love never gives up and endures every circumstance: People love due to so many reasons such as beauty, affluence, talent, intelligence, voice, height, size, dressing as the case may be but the one million pound question remains, “Would you still love him/her if all these change?” Abraham Lincoln once said “Everything is in a process of change, nothing endures, and we do not seek permanence.” Let me paint a picture, assuming you are dating your dream girl/guy & one day he or she has an accident & loses a limb or any part of his/her body, would you still love him/her? If your answer is yes, then you are in love but if you answered no, you are definitely not in love.
Love is faithful: King Solomon said it all in Proverbs 20 verse 6 “Many a man claims to have unfailing love, but a faithful man who can find?” Wise words from a wise man.
Love grows: Loving the opposite sex is like loving a song; the more you hear the song, the faster you learn the lyrics & fall in love with the song. The more we stay with each other, the more we cultivate love towards ourselves. For instance, from primary school to tertiary institution, I’ve found out that there must be somebody in my class that makes me trip…This is because I see & stay with the person everyday but this ‘love’ usually fades away once I move to the next class. During the time of our fathers, most of our parents got married even though they didn’t know each other from Adam yet they lived in peace & harmony.
Love signs fail: The butterfly thingy, touching of hair & other things that have been attributed to love are all fallacy. If you doubt me, check this out…They often say feeling butterflies in the stomach is normal when you are thinking or speaking to ‘the one’ but this feeling is normal because we do get cold feet once in a while. I don’t believe anybody is the one and this feeling occurs almost every day when we’re nervous or eagerly anticipating something or somebody.
Love is the advanced form of infatuation: Infatuation is the act of being foolishly or irrationally in love. The above statement is so true because people do stupid & foolish things when they are in love…If you have never been foolish before, then you know not what love is.
Love doesn’t pretend: Pretence is the act of giving an appearance of truth or reality to that which is false or imaginary. People especially girls get in on the act, they show false “good girl” behaviour at the conception of the relationship but when the chips are down, they show their true colours. Guys also pretend to be rich, gentle and nice, anything for the cookie. My advice, never judge a book by its cover because looks can be deceptive.
Love doesn’t listen to gossip: A line from the song “So What?” by Field Mob featuring Ciara keeps going through my head. “They said that I’m this, they said that I’m that…” We often listen to our friends when they tell us things about our partners. Some of these friends of ours may have ulterior motives behind their ‘kind’ gesture. A girl’s worst enemy is her friend. A wise man once told me a story of how the best friend of his fiancée lied to him, the friend had told him that his fiancée had epilepsy so he ended his relationship with the girl and married the friend instead only for him to find out years later that the girl lied.
Love doesn’t compare: Most female folks are the culprits here. Here is a dialogue between two friends:
Lisa: What did Mark buy for you on Valentine’s Day?
Jane: Mark, my knight in shining armour, bought me a new phone (Blackberry bold 5), took me to Marina Resort where we rode the speed bike and speedboat after which we retired to a romantic dinner for two at our hotel. It was so romantic. You nko, how your own dey?
Lisa: Emeka that stingy fellow, he just bought me a card, flower and a necklace…Jane your own better oh!
Girls/women often compare their boyfriends/husbands and this makes me laugh all the time. They forget that all fingers are not equal and even brothers from the same womb have different destinies. Andy Murray of Scotland said after losing to Roger Federer in the Australian tennis (grand slam) open final, “I can cry like Roger, it’s a shame I can’t play like him.” If you really love your man, quit comparing and be contented with what you have alright?
Love is a bird; she needs to fly so enjoy it while it lasts.
