By Kwangu
Sometimes you think all it will take is one ball, one night, a glass slipper left behind and the next day, prince charming knocks on every door looking for a maiden whose foot fits the glass slipper. My sister met her husband when she was 15 and that was around the time she was in secondary school she didn’t know that they would get married but now they are. Take my friend who has an on and off relationship, what amazes is the ability that these two people have, they always find their way to each other. It is definitely different each one of us. But does that mean that there is a version of love that is better than the other?
At one point or the other we have been in love. Or we have felt what love is even if it was for just a brief moment. We have experienced it from our family, our friends or even that significant other. And if you were to ask different people what love is to them, you would get many different answers all depending on who that person is and what they have been through. Usually people will present the concept of love in a way that is beautiful. They will tell you that love makes their heart melt or gives the butterflies in your tummy. They will even say that they cannot describe it in any way that will make you understand what they are feeling.
Usually it is what we don’t say about love that gets the best of us. We express love in highlights and not what happens in the background we see this all the time on social media, our conversations with people etc. love is made to look perfect. And let’s face it, who doesn’t want the perfect love, from that perfect man or woman that fits all our many standards.
Nothing is perfect.
Being in love strips you of your armor. Those walls that you spent years and years building around your heart begin to fall. Brick by brick it all goes down. This makes us vulnerable. Love is about being vulnerable.
I would like to grow old with my childhood sweetheart living on a ranch somewhere sitting on the front porch sipping on some lemonade. I may want this but maybe that is not my story. Every love story is different. It happens at different paces for each one of us. I read somewhere that sometimes love comes like lightning quickly striking you, and almost instantly you are aware that you are in love, but sometimes it’s like a creeping stem that grows so slowly and creeps all around you wake up one morning and realize “Gosh am in love” For some it happens real quick they know who they will someday marry and spend the rest of their lives with but really for most of us we are just trying to navigate our way through love.
Where it all goes wrong is when we start to compare our love stories that are obviously on different stages, see some are on the developing stage while others are on the advancing stage. We expect what happened to other people to also happen to us. We see public displays of affection on social media and we want that to happen to us. We want our partner to write us love poems or little notes of them expressing how much they love us. We want our partner to play video games with us because our homie’s girl is a gamer and you ask yourself why not me. You may have this preconceived idea that you and your next girl will party together or be stoners together but then you get into a relationship with someone who doesn’t drink or smoke. I mean you are lucky if you find this but more often than not we don’t find this.
In social psychology, there is this theory called the social comparison theory. It states that we human beings have a tendency to compare ourselves to others in attempt to learn attitudes and beliefs. We either compare upwards (-usually to people we think are better off than ourselves regarding a certain trait or ability) or downwards-(to people we find to be worse off than we are regarding a certain trait or ability).
Comparison breeds expectation. These expectations may be good, sometimes they will make us become better versions of ourselves.
But most times they are Bad expectations. Expectations that are heavy. Bad expectations yield frustrations. We are all not exempt from this because sometimes we do this automatically so much that we are not even aware we are doing it as it is happening subconsciously.
We expect people to just know that this is how they are supposed to respond or this is what they are supposed to say in this situation sometimes we even make them take tests. The other person is not even aware that they are taking the test, how do we honestly expect them to pass? Truth is that human beings are not mind readers.
Honestly, most of us have not yet figured out this love thing. We are probably just having a go at it using a trial and error approach. We were not given a set of rules that would govern us in how to love. I mean that would be easier right? If we knew the simple do’s and don’ts of love. The only thing we know for a fact about love is that it is innate need that all human beings have. We all want to love and be loved.
Love your love story. Love is custom made and as unique as the people that behold it. One thing for certain is just like everything else, Love eventually everything fall into place.
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