Valentine 2006.

Happy VALENTINE!!
Even though given a chance would have loved anyone of you (recipients) to be my valentine….apart from the bulls; I found you condignly fitting to share this abstract text with you! Don’t take it personal! You can judge me however if you so wish! It’s just an intellectual opinion not based on prejudice but a desire for an honest healthy debate.

LOVE is arguably the most complex phenomena that has befallen man.
It is so abstract and mythical that it has elicited hot debates, sent artists of all sorts into studios to spend sleepless nights writing movies and songs about it! It has exposed cruelty in humanity yet also defined the human soul to greater levels. It has caused untold suffering and hatred yet has bestowed magnanimity in many!
It’s a faith, religion, and a defining philosophy of the 21st century.

But there is one big problem with it.
It’s built on a string of myths and lies. Seemingly to many its propaganda wrapped in a blanket of lies and based on deception. It’s a hoax bordering on a list of conspiracy theories like the Bermuda Triangle.
Friends, we are conditioned to believe that romantic love is eternal, the same all over the world and as basic as breathing, eating and crying. But wake up and smell the rotten bouquet your valentine sent you-IT’S A DELUSION!

For me, if it’s true that love exists, it’s the greatest thing that one can receive and give! Absolutely!! This is all with its sweetness!
But I also contend that with its withering weakness, LOVE you and I as understand it, is the most excruciating pain one could face! (Read “The Road Less Travelled” By Dr. Scott Peck).
I was doing a cyber sojourn and visited www.postsecret.blogspot.com on Valentine day and boy…couldn’t believe what I read! People are in pain though others are rejoicing in the LOVE WORLD!!
But the chemical compounds that manufacture a cloud of concupiscence have never ceased to puzzle me! I am weakened by an urgent, surging infatuation and enchantment to a point of wanting to spend the rest of “myself” with another person! That’s crazy!!
Does it make sense to want to breathe, live and “eat” a stranger for the rest of ones life (call it marriage)??

May be that’s were we derive meaning from just like other mystical and mythical aspects of life! To understand is to get bored!!
But why do we seek to make it permanent; lasting until death?
If all good things as they say come to an end, why should love be otherwise?? It should receive the same fate as the Broadway dramas, a good session of love making (sex), listening to “clocks” by Cold Play etc. At one point, just like life, these all come to an end! Its normal, its nature and so should LOVE!!
LOVE as derived from Eros is the desire for self preservation and uninhibited enjoyment that in the Freudian Theory is one of the two primal instincts. The other is Thanatos (desire of death).
www.Wikipedia.com(latest rival to Britannica) further tells us that LOVE actually means a burning desire for another person that “does not or was not meant to last”!
Now who brought in the marriage concept to complicate our lives?? Someone should explain to me!! May be it was a plot to preserve the fire and prevent it from extinguishing!! SAD!!

But I bet, whoever came up with it was the first victim of the concept. Its must have backfired in their face without any recourse!
Marriage as one day I may find out is based on duty, responsibility and respect! But as men, these are some of our biggest weaknesses and I wish women come to realise it! But how come women are more inclined to offer the above without any effort?
The egalitarian of love assumes both parties enter freely into an open contract and walk away when another stops pleasing them. It dissolves the deadly demand of duty-drudgery and subservience with no end in sight.

Seeing it as everything, why when love is gone, we easily forget the duty and ditch the bitch (bastard) like 2 ply tissue running down a toilet bowl? For me, the confusion emanates from a party’s ability to walk away with impunity and all too casually! How does one do that from said “burning fire”? That means you told a lie that you loved me but make no mistake, karma tells me that you too will be told a lie one day!! Everyone is lying to each other! It’s the way of life!

How about a situation where I fall in love with someone’s wife? (God forbid)! Scary and disgusting as it sounds but some find meaning in it just like you did from the chocolates you got!
Truth: Romantic love-our religion, our purpose, and our first thought when our lives are threatened was just invented just like the Manhattan Project invented the A-bomb! I suspect that someone is bankrolling novelists of Mills and Boon , Sweet Valley, Temptation, Bryan Adams and the producer of When Harry Met Sally” to popularise the theory.
The intoxication is too much that it blinds us to expect more from each other perhaps more than we can give.
Aware of the history of your ex-, why day-dream about settling down forever??
The lesson is also no to give up in search of the elusive! We should live a life of Alchemy.
For LOVE is pain, joy, giving and receiving! IT’S LIFE!

By hannnington.
Acknowledgments from Pretoria News 14 Feb. 2006.