Why Love Anyway?

I sometimes wonder whether love is an emotion fabricated by religious powers, Hollywood, and societal norms, or if it is really something we humans seek. Because every relationship I have been in, seen or witnessed, once the Honeymoon Phase dies, it becomes pure torture. What is love, anyway?

Love, from a scientific point of view, is to facilitate procreation. That’s it. Romantic love’s main role in human civilisation is to preserve the human gene. Nothing else. Everything else that we believe about love is born from the social systems that we have created to give some understanding of procreation.

Religion, social rules and everything in between try to govern the rules of procreation. But these rules are human-made. They were created by humans. They were not created by nature.

If we were to look at nature and at the habits of most humans, the concept of love as we know it is flawed. Powerful, rich men (and even men who have power but live in poverty) are never faithful to their wives. They have concubines, mistresses, side pieces and everything in between. They have children with multiple women. They are not monogamous.

If we look at powerful, rich women (and those who are extremely beautiful but live in poverty), they tend to have a single man they are attached to. But that man is the woman’s slave. She owns him. She uses passive-aggressive methods to hook him to her love. These men might enjoy the connections and money the woman bestows on them, but they are miserable.

When we dig deeper, we also realise that society has always placed women in the backseat of love. In marriage, for the longest time, wives were husbands’ property. They were equivalent to slaves to slave owners. Yet somehow, women were sold the dream that marriage is this beautiful thing they had to have.

African women today would expect a handsome lobola that was once offered for virgins. I once dropped a woman in the talking stage when she said that she wants to be married but doesn’t want to have children. Why in God’s green Earth would you want to be married and expect a man to accept it without giving him children?

In today’s world, social institutions like marriage have completely lost their meaning. You realise that most women actually want the wedding, not the marriage. They want the bells and whistles, the cake, the venue, the dress, the ring, the glitz and glamour, but not the drudgery that is marriage.

If dating and being in a relationship are a teaser of marriage, then marriage is nothing desirable. When you speak with married men, they are often very resigned. They glamorise the supposed ‘vigour’ to give up your dreams for your wife. They make it seem like a badge of honour to sacrifice your life for this woman.

For some men, this gives them a sense of purpose. This gives them something to live for. And if the woman is a good woman, then she will appreciate her man. She will reward him for his sacrifice. She will honour him, and so, his badge is, in fact, legit.

But boy, how these women are so rare. I have been dumped twice because I had to relocate after finding a better job. I have had severe bouts of depression numerous times, and every woman I was with during those times just made me want to kill myself. One actually succeeded, but I failed miserably, as I am still alive today.

A woman once told me that she would rather date a player than a man who cries. I don’t know how many times I would sacrifice my pleasures to make a woman happy, only to be told: “That’s what you're supposed to do”. One girl, I had not seen in a year and a half. When I organised to meet her, she said I was planning to kill her. The same girl I later found on Tinder. I have written about this in a different essay. I have lost count of the times I tried to extend myself in the name of being a “good guy”, only to be brutally hurt. Brutally made to feel insignificant.

And you can’t really say this to anyone. You can’t open a discussion with your partner about it. Because most women will turn around and say, “stop being weak”. Most women will spin the story. “I am a bad girlfriend,” she will say. No. You made a mistake that needs to be addressed. You are human after all.

And this I have seen, even in marriages that seem to be functional. The men are functional alcoholics, nicotine addicts or dope heads because they have no platform to share their emotions. What vexes me about the drywall is when she will say “be open”, only to desert you when you do. That is a story of another day.

Accountability is not just about acknowledging your mistakes. It is taking the steps to remedy the damage that those mistakes have made. Contrary to popular belief, both men and women suffer from this. I dated a girl who cheated on me, said she was sorry, lost her phone, I (a student at the time) bought her phone, and with the very same phone cheated on me once again. In the same breath, I have male friends who wonder why their relationships never work out, but when they say this, they have two or three women they are actively talking with. And yes, they are not polygamists.

And so, why do I want to be loved? I am slowly giving up on the emotion. I have tried many times, and each time I have been hurt. I am tired of the hurt. Love has no meaning for me, especially in today’s world, where your love as a man is an expectation and not an appreciation. A world where close to 60% of women end up filing for divorce anyway.

Love is losing its meaning. A meaning that we, men and women, never understood in the first place.