February is the month to celebrate love. Schools will be dressed in red and white on the 14th to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Romantic partners will shower each other with gifts, shops will sell out red roses on the day.
But what is love, after all?
Instagram and Tiktok are full of video clips about love and how men and women must treat each other in a relationship. Most of these suggestions are scary. Here are a few suggestions for any guy who wants to keep the lady attracted to him according to social media:
- Ignore her
- Don’t talk to her
- Don’t care about her
- Don’t be nice to her
- Don’t be a simp
In a nutshell, manipulate her, these are the pieces of advice that seem to dominate our TL for the guys. And for the ladies, there isn’t much except the following:
- He must be monied
- Wear a particular brand of clothing
- Be able to afford you
- Drive a particular car
- And be able to take you to expensive places
As a guy, to be in a relationship, you need material things, but most importantly, you must drive a particular car. You cannot just rock up in a VW Fox. And for girls, you just have to be pretty. This is scary when you consider the amount of cruelty towards women by men who have been put under so much pressure to achieve all these materialistic things to get a shot at “love.”
And when someone else with a bigger and better car and a healthy bank balance comes to the scene, the other guy loses the girl, and all hell breaks loose. The emotional turmoil clouds their logic and they make destructive decisions such as Sibusiso Lawrence.
Girls have become sexual objects waiting to be bought; social media has become a catalog for these women, they advertise themselves by dressing and dancing in an extremely provocative manner. It seems as if the girls have understood the assignment, which is to get tongues wagging and eventually attract certain types of men, sleep with them, and come back to the socials to brag about it. This makes other men who may not be in her targeted social status to lust after her. A destructive sexual cycle is created which is the reason why South Africa has become the rape capital city of the world.
With this type of influence, many young ladies have mirrored their lives with that lifestyle, and it has cost them their lives.
According to the social settings, the meaning of a relationship is sex and more sex. Unfortunately, once the guy knows that he has free access to your body, he gets familiar with it, gets bored, and looks for a new person. While you are left with emotional scars and bitterness. These are the types of relationships that have no soul in them, they lack depth and substance. People in these relationships are shallow and have no value, this is why they cannot be satisfied with one partner.
Men see women as “things” to satisfy their sexual desires. This is why they do gruesome things to them. At the center of it all is toxicity which comes from poor parenting and family structure. Both girls and boys should find value at home not on social media. A girl who knows her value and has a healthy relationship with her father will not seek validation from men who have the intention of getting into her pants. She walks around not as a birdie but as her mother’s words of advice; as her father’s pride, and most importantly as God’s beloved daughter.
Likewise, boys who know their value do not walk around with their zips wide open. They do not sleep with as many girls as possible just to nurse their small egos. How they treat girls reveals the relationship they have with their mothers or sisters. When they are around girls they are well-mannered and self-controlled enough to put their sexual drive last and the safety of the opposite sex first. As a guy, I understand the struggle of the eye and the sexual drive that we have to deal with daily. But as a highly valued man the honor you give to her, not only does it earn you respect but also represents your family with the highest degree of respect in society.
Both men and women need to make a conscious decision to respect and honor one another and when they fall in love, let it be for the right reasons and let it be genuine and not self-seeking.
What should love look like?
First of all, love is not a feeling! Love and feelings are two separate things that always get confused with each other because they are intertwined. Love is an actionable series of choices that you make driven by conviction that transcends feelings, doubts, and fears; that is my definition. This means that you choose that person when there are feelings and choose that person when there are no feelings because feelings change along the way. When feelings change, what remains? A series of choices driven by the conviction that you love this person even when it does not feel that way.
Love is companionship, a people who want to spend time with each other and create lasting memories. Out of this companionship, you build your tribe through multiplication.
Love does not demand anything from you except a heart that is already surrendered to the vibrations of another and the two hearts dying to beat as one. Love is when a man is willing to lay his life down for you. It is when a woman commits to him no matter his social status. She nurtures him into kingship because all she said was, “I believe in you,” and meant it.
Love is when the other person matters more than anything else. When their bad habits make you shake your head and smile. When you have a bad fight but still choose one another. It is when you do not know what the future holds but choose to explore it together because you know that no matter what life throws at you in the future, you will still choose this person amid all the other potentials who may turn out for better or for worse. It is a once-in-a-lifetime experience that you choose to share with this one individual. This leads to a life of gratitude because you were chosen out of a room full of other choices.
Love is not the absence of fights, frustrations, and strong disagreements, but it is sacrificing your strongest point and conviction in an argument, it is committing to peace. And this can only happen because God is at the center of that relationship. A relationship without God is a tragedy in waiting, you are in a nuclear rocket headed for explosion.
I hope that in this month of love, you look at yourself in the mirror and realize that you were conceived at the highest climax of the expression of love, therefore you deserve a heart that is solely yours for eternity.