What Love is about
When we talk of love, many people would say it is one of the most important human emotions. Yet despite being one of the most studied behaviors, it is still the least understood. Many people would also say love is a set of emotions and behaviors characterized by intimacy, passion, and commitment. They say it involves care, closeness, protectiveness, attraction, affection, and trust. This class of people insinuates that true love can still be possible.
Still, on the same topic, others would say love is to be expressed, enjoyed, and consummated at all times. The concept of true love is not clear to them. However, some truths hold that Love can vary in intensity and can change over time. It can have different meanings to different individuals depending on the dimension of their approach to what love is all about. Here, in this write-up, I would like to revisit the context of love again with the young, giving my own views on how love should be.
Love begins when we start maintaining healthy relationships, enjoying being with others, developing friendships and intimate relations, caring about others, and letting others care about us, contributing to our community. Love includes the dimension of relationships, emotions, and striving for unity. Love is also where the meaning of human life is most easily known through our heart desires.
In my own conviction, I would like us to examine the different relationships we should talk about as far as love is concerned or that give different meanings to the concept of love. The relationships I would like us to pay great attention to their meaning in relation to love are Friendship, infatuation, Exploitation, and love relationship.
FRIENDSHIP: Normally, we need friends at every stage of life. Some need many, some a few but one cannot have more than one true friend. People make friends of all ages, different backgrounds, colors, religious values, ideas, and sex. Yes, this is good, and I believe that’s how God created us His children to be. “One cannot be an island”; as my people would say, meaning one cannot live in isolation.
INFATUATION is love at first sight. A stage of being temporally filled with intense unreasonable love emotions for a person. Infatuation is motivated by the physical look, skin color, or dress of the person you are seeing at a particular time. Common with teenagers because of their stage of life and their growing strong emotions. The strong emotions or feelings here float, that is, they are strong and move from desiring one person to another. All these are normal and sincere expressions of what teen boys and girls go through but can be confusing with true love, thus, being dangerous if they are too preoccupied with it and forget their other responsibilities, or fail to channel this energy in the right ways.
So, Young boys and girls should not confuse this strong emotional feeling for love and thus go astray. The consequences of the wrong use of emotions here are pregnancy, abortion, difficulties to have a future husband, prostitution, masturbation, etc. We can now ask ourselves whether we had been victims in this regard and what are our efforts to readjust our lives.
EXPLOITATION: This in the name of love is when you use someone for your own interest or purpose. An example is the practice of “sugar mummies and sugar daddies”. That is People who deceive young boys and girls with little gifts or big money to flirt with them. A selfish relationship in which you use somebody and get what you want to get without any respect for the person’s self-dignity or gratitude for the person. This exploitation kind of love gives rise to rape, pornography, prostitution, child abuse, etc. Such sexual abuses leave deep emotional wounds, especially on young people. A short definition of this kind of love is “Taking”
LOVE RELATIONSHIP: Love is a deeper and more steady relationship that is not floating from one person to another. Many love relationships are without sexual intercourse, e.g. parents and their children, brothers and sisters, true friends, honest and holy teen boys, and girls. Love is the most beautiful of all human relations when approached the right way it should be or how God intended it to be. Love is God himself because God is Love. A brief definition of this kind of love; TRUE LOVE, is “Giving” (caring) while false love is ‘taking’ (exploitation). In true love, I would always want to help the one I love to grow and be a better person than when I met him/her. Much of our happiness depends on the depth and constancy of our love relationship. We spend our whole life learning to love truly. This is what brings true joy and happiness that we long for every day, not our millions. True love is still possible nowadays for those who love to live it. A love relationship actually is supposed to be true just as God created it to be.
To conclude on what love is, I would say, remember, “True love is Giving while false love is Taking”. As young boys and girls nowadays, we should ask ourselves how far have we lived the concept of love. Have we been victims or victors of the above relationships? Is there a need to correct our lives, make amends, reconcile or adjust our ways? In which relationship are you at present? Are you/your partner giving or taking? If he or she is “taking”, then reconsider your love relationship.
