Myth, not reality rules love
Oct 21, 2009
AS the world was watching, lovers took it upon themselves to illustrate how vain it is to put all your eggs in a basket of love. First, Akankwasa takes his wife to Rapid Response Unit for interrogation after his money went missing from their bedroom.
AS the world was watching, lovers took it upon themselves to illustrate how vain it is to put all your eggs in a basket of love. First, Akankwasa takes his wife to Rapid Response Unit for interrogation after his money went missing from their bedroom. RRU is as scaring as it is spelt. According to the wife, those iron men indeed roasted information out of her.
Then, some bishop in Kenya finds himself in a Kisumu hotel with the wife of his relative and he has no problems with that. That is until the owner of the wife, flies in from Nairobi to discover them. He calls a boda boda mob which does what it knows best: rough them up, de-clothe, ridicule and march them through the streets to police.
There was a time when we though a husband could not do such a thing to the mother of his children. Back to this side of the fence, a married woman, who had given her boyfriend up to sh500m for business, discovers he is a conman and decides to demand her money back. The boyfriend rapidly graduates from threatening to reveal their affair to actually sending their nude pictures to her husband and the press.
I don’t know how many youngsters are going to get disappointed with this magic spirit called love. One guy, Oscar Wilde, is quoted as saying: When you are in love, you always begin by deceiving yourself and always ends by deceiving others.
Look at love: it rarely works the way we wish it would. The people we love, who are supposed to bring us ultimate happiness, life and understanding, turn out as sources of our most painful emotional experiences. They sometimes leave us with pain in the heart that can’t be cured by painkillers. Look at marriage; spouses tend to be more indifferent, mean, quarrelsome and critical of each other than they are with complete strangers!
In other words, lovers handing themselves to RRU, boda boda and press ridicule is not an exception of love but a direct function of it. The extent to which love goes determines the depth to which it will fall and the evils you will be ready to do to each other. So, beware, it is a double edged sword. The edge that can cut us is sharp but the other edge which would be useful is not as sharp as we hype it to be!
When has being “madly in love†with someone made a marriage last? But we continue deceiving ourselves that romantic, passionate love, the type that makes us run away from home to live with strangers, will live forever.
It almost always fades. And when it does, people often find themselves stuck with a spouse that they may not like or even appreciate. And if love does last, we discover that love, by itself, is not enough to make a marriage or relationship work.
We still need to work harder, remain relevant, add value to each other and generally disorganise our lives to make it work!
Look at our inborn Christian belief in monogamy: Why is it that our thoughts and deeds often wander off to include being intimate with someone other than the romantic partner?
The truth is, relationships supposedly built on love and understanding often cause a lot of hurt, pain and misunderstanding. All in all, fantasy, not reality, tends to rule the day when it comes to love and romance.
Successful couples, who have aged, are just like a pregnancy; everybody congratulates the winning team but nobody knows how many times they were screwed in the process of reaching there!
Then, some bishop in Kenya finds himself in a Kisumu hotel with the wife of his relative and he has no problems with that. That is until the owner of the wife, flies in from Nairobi to discover them. He calls a boda boda mob which does what it knows best: rough them up, de-clothe, ridicule and march them through the streets to police.
There was a time when we though a husband could not do such a thing to the mother of his children. Back to this side of the fence, a married woman, who had given her boyfriend up to sh500m for business, discovers he is a conman and decides to demand her money back. The boyfriend rapidly graduates from threatening to reveal their affair to actually sending their nude pictures to her husband and the press.
I don’t know how many youngsters are going to get disappointed with this magic spirit called love. One guy, Oscar Wilde, is quoted as saying: When you are in love, you always begin by deceiving yourself and always ends by deceiving others.
Look at love: it rarely works the way we wish it would. The people we love, who are supposed to bring us ultimate happiness, life and understanding, turn out as sources of our most painful emotional experiences. They sometimes leave us with pain in the heart that can’t be cured by painkillers. Look at marriage; spouses tend to be more indifferent, mean, quarrelsome and critical of each other than they are with complete strangers!
In other words, lovers handing themselves to RRU, boda boda and press ridicule is not an exception of love but a direct function of it. The extent to which love goes determines the depth to which it will fall and the evils you will be ready to do to each other. So, beware, it is a double edged sword. The edge that can cut us is sharp but the other edge which would be useful is not as sharp as we hype it to be!
When has being “madly in love†with someone made a marriage last? But we continue deceiving ourselves that romantic, passionate love, the type that makes us run away from home to live with strangers, will live forever.
It almost always fades. And when it does, people often find themselves stuck with a spouse that they may not like or even appreciate. And if love does last, we discover that love, by itself, is not enough to make a marriage or relationship work.
We still need to work harder, remain relevant, add value to each other and generally disorganise our lives to make it work!
Look at our inborn Christian belief in monogamy: Why is it that our thoughts and deeds often wander off to include being intimate with someone other than the romantic partner?
The truth is, relationships supposedly built on love and understanding often cause a lot of hurt, pain and misunderstanding. All in all, fantasy, not reality, tends to rule the day when it comes to love and romance.
Successful couples, who have aged, are just like a pregnancy; everybody congratulates the winning team but nobody knows how many times they were screwed in the process of reaching there!