Bongwadi Bja Go Rothotha Bobodu

By HE Magane


What is love? The question reverberate the corners of history, psychology and more as it does the very same people who say without any form of examination; “we are in love”.
The mystery of love is as an illusion as the constructs of time itself. Today, you delve into one of the deepest and yet infamous analogy that parallels the similarity to answering the most difficult question of all human relationships. HE Magane examines the nature of this illusion, and he describes the context in which he will be doing so.

The Beginning

May I remind the reader that the purpose of this piece of writing is to inspire thought and thinking, which means that the writer will feel free to be as extreme…
The writer was inspired by an article titled “What is love?” by Pabalelo Asser Mabilo. So you could say that one man had a thought and that thought inspired thinking.

The Context

The type of love going to be discussed here is the type that people experience or are under its influence when they are in a romantic relationship i.e. when a man loves a woman. The writer expects that all are familiar with this type of love and it is for this reason that he wish to put forward his thoughts about something everyone is no stranger to.
Be warned that this piece of text represents the thoughts of one man, if you will, as he forges the comforts of thought promiscuity and that they may not always represent his true and most private thoughts about love as a whole or partially described here.

Part One

What is love? This is a question that we cannot easily answer and I don’t know anyone who can give an undeniably beautiful answer as to the question to a degree, whereby a good majority agrees.
So you might find that everyone has their own way of describing love like they like to describe things like “respect”, “honor”, and “integrity” including many others. The English dictionaries don’t even enter into it. What is it that makes answering the question above such a dense jungle to go through?
Perhaps the question itself is flawed.
For example: you can’t ask a flawed question like “what is beyond the north pole?” and expect to get an answer. You can’t ask a question so flawed like this one: “what’d be a color of things if all colors were removed?”
The latter question is impossible. Maybe, just maybe, the question of love is impossible as well that we’d have to erroneously convince ourselves that it’s okay to try to think of answers for it.
But it must be a matter of perception and acceptance to think that we know what love is. I now unveil part two.

Part Two

We have already described the context from which we discuss love above.
To successfully discuss love, you’d have to have studied love and observed how it changes people when they are in a relationship; their actions, interactions, body language, words they use to communicate with each other, and their general behavior. Also, consider a relationship that lacks love.

I say love is relative. Love is relative in what way? One might ask, in this sense; when one factor exists love can therefore exist. When one factor does not exist, love is threatened or it does not exist. In other words, love on its own cannot prevail. There has to be a precondition for which sets the grounds for love to prevail.
I am aware that these statements may not be easy to accept or let alone understand but if there is anything I’ve learned is that people have a way of protecting their opinions about something even if those opinions are wrong. And they should, why shouldn’t they?
The good thing is now we are going to be looking at examples to help elaborate further my notion. Yet hypothetical are the examples but not totally impractical.
In a romantic relationship, one man loves a woman and the woman loves the man as well. But really, the man loves something about the woman and the woman loves something about this man. They may not be aware of it; it might be something that happens unconsciously. But the reality is their love for that person is paired to something. Their love for that person is there because something was there first.

The woman may love the man because he gives her satisfactory pleasure, because he has lots of money, because he has a high social standard and connectedness, or because the woman is able to manipulate him for her needs. Same goes for the man, the man loves the woman because her beauty is superior to the women of his friends and that makes his friends envious, because the woman is a good investment for spreading his genes, because the woman is smart and funny and keeps good company, or because the woman is submissive to her man.
Here, you see scenarios that the writer paints but upon a closer examination of each scenario, you also see that there is pairing at work. Love paired to desirable qualities, elements of self-concept, or sociality are all evident in every example above. So now, you begin to appreciate the relativeness of love. Can love be without there being a pairing factor, can love assume a role of an independent variable?
You are likely to answer this question as “no”.

If love cannot exist without any precondition, therefore love is an illusion. However, preconditions are always there as inevitably as the qualities associated with fostering romantic love.
By reason, you’d conclude that love will always be there since those fostering factors are always in existence. You’d be correct but, again, you’d be wrong. I did not purposefully mislead you to believe that love exists or does not exist, I merely wanted to harbor a thought that will attempt to answer the question of interest; what is love?

Love is a human illusion that manifests itself as a feeling of attraction or desire when certain psychological conditions are met. Human illusion means it happens among human beings. Certain psychological conditions mean conditions which may not be adequately defined.

Illusions have a way of not lasting forever. When human beings couple love with all sorts of beliefs and mental constructs, it is transformed beyond its simplicity. For example: a woman can blindly be your slave because she loves you. And a man may kill himself for a woman because he so dearly loves her. Look at the tragic ending of Romeo and Juliet’s love. Love engraved deeply in flames of passion it hurts, your stomach turning up and down, your head ramming like a monkey under thread. It is a scene so disturbing yet everyone who has been in it, rejoices at its memories applauding it as “true love”.

Part Three

One of the ways of approaching an issue or idea fairly is by doing so without any preconceived and biased subjective views. By being open-minded and approaching it with a clear mind having space in your head to think about that issue and being able to, at the end, formulate a pure, informed opinion.
You can achieve that by not having to prioritize morality on every subject matter because morality can be highly dependent of context and/or perspective. Either it being a religious perspective, neoliberalism perspective, or a perspective based on evolution or some occult doctrine.

In other words, I don’t want to paint love as a bad thing because it has positively brought people together. Love is kind of like a form that makes connectedness among human beings sensible. It can’t be all bad.
Without love you are an organic robot, a biological machine, a primitive design and functionality of nature.

On The Evolution

Our primitive forefathers came together to reproduce and procreate.
It is likely that it wasn’t because they “loved” each other; they did what they had to do to survive and live forever through the spreading of their genes. They had no idea what love is. They didn’t even talk about love; that is, if they were able to communicate at all which I doubt.
For them it was a matter of looking at the body structure of a potential partner and trying to assess the success of their genes coming to make viable offspring. And so when the female has made her choice and feels fertile enough, it was a score time for the male. Simply so, they connected and they enjoyed the pleasures that came with such an experience.

What do you call that? It is natural selection at its best. The female ancestry was not that smart enough to methodically engage in a form of assessment. That is a job for the advanced. She was just like executing a program and the program doing its job. Natural selection had made it so that when she looked at the male’s masculine body, his gait, and deep voice be magically hypnotized into a state of feeling like a woman that needs a real man to handle her good. And this magic, as time went on, would slowly become so addictive to the female that she’d want to keep the male around her longer.
She had the freedom to upgrade her partner though, if she was tired of him – she’d leave with the offspring for a much better male. And on the part of the male, it was not like he just obeyed. He’d go and hunt for days and days on end or get killed by some predator.

And then, their children became smart and well adapted thanks to a series of mutations generation after generation. They found a way to stick together for longer than before, henceforth the emergence of the human relationship archetype. As they developed further, so did their connectedness and relationship which in turn spurred a complexity created by the human mind termed romantic love.
For this reasoning, love is there to maintain connectedness and assurance of the progression of the human species. But again this does not mean that love exists because if it meant so, I’d be contradicting myself. Rather, this assurance can be referred to as physical attraction, desire to belong and feel connected and be part of the pack for security, the spirit of togetherness, the need to became more of yourself (self-actualization) through others, or the covert worshipping of pleasure (pleasure-centeredness). The list can go on.
In particular, what is it that is likely to make a person believe that this is merely love?
Well, a concept known as confirmation bias.

In conclusion, I therefore restate that love is relative and that it is an illusion created by the human mind beyond any form of measure and it is as not provable as felicity, virtue, honor and veracity.