ỌLÁWỌYIN Ọlamide Samuel

Love is love. Commitment is commitment. Commitment is a quality. Love is a sensation. We don’t need to conflate both terms. Unfortunately, marriage is a self-imposed obligation. You don’t need a “different” kind of love in marriage. You just need more qualities—commitment, etc.

It’s hard to define love, my friend. We argue a lot about what it means, because there’s no way for all of us to know if we’re all feeling it the same way. There is no way to know, for instance, if the love I felt for Susan is how you felt it for Adanna. We both say “we were in love” but there’s no way to know HOW much we each felt it. One person may say love is just a choice. That person probably just woke up one day, looked at a list of potential lovers and picked the one who seemed to be most interested in him or her. To that person, love is a choice. All he or she had to do was to stick with the original decision. I don’t advise it, obviously, because somewhere down the line, without a much deeper affectionate connection, it’s hard to be committed. To any thing, really. Be it a job, romance or anything really. Another person may say love is a very strong feeling that makes you want to serve the interest of another. This person probably never expected that he or she would become so engrossed in someone the way they eventually became. To this person, defining love as just a choice, is bizarre. Because somehow they keep feeling like they had no choice in the matter—they probably even actively tried to let it go but they couldn’t. So you see, my friend, it is precisely difficult to agree on a definition because words have no meanings, we humans do. Words are like tags. We used them to identify something but the words themselves do not always convey how we each understand what is going on. For me, and based on how I have felt it for different lovers in my life, love is a perpetual warmth; an eternal fondness in a person. It ensues from a remarkably delicate connection—an ability for the person to take you places where no one else seems able to take you. The eventual decision to be with them is both a choice and not at the same time. For people like me, love is not just a choice. A choice is a choice. The actual love itself is an inexplicable chemical reaction in the brain that reveals itself primarily in the form of good intention, fondness and devotion towards the cause of another. To quote Fyodor Dostoyevsky—to love someone is to see them exactly as God intended them.