Why I hate love

Abubakar Sulaiman Muhd

Love is a pleasant thing if you are in a nice relationship. It is painful if you are in bad. It is also interesting if you are watching from afar. You often wonder why so and so person you hold in high esteem are behaving in certain ways. Love is a funny thing. It drives people crazy.

Different people have different meaning for love. Whatever kind of meaning you give to it, one thing is certain. The destination. The aim you want to achieve. I am not the one to tell your destination or the aim you want to achieve but the destination is always there.

Whether you are a president, a governor or a top government’s official, great men are daily threatened by love and have their career destroyed.  Take Sani Abacha for example or a man who was badly in need of kiss and furiously grabbed public phone in his office and called his female secretary. Are you crazy, you want me to mention a name? You also want to have my career destroyed. I won’t.   

In achieving his aim and destination, that university professor was possessed by desire for something. Of all the places on earth he couldn’t find any rendezvous to make love with a girl other than to masquerade as a lady to get into the female hostel. Love pulled him down.  Another person was caught in outrageous scandal inviting his female student for special lessons in Organic Chemistry and in the end the whole business ended up in Organic Matter. The other man, overwhelmed with love, had no prior thought for venue and simply chose a public road believing it was a perfect place to make love.  And he was caught.

Granted, love is something beyond human control and all these pent-up emotions do not augur well. When you have something in mind and you suppress it, your soul will trouble you until you express it consciously or unconsciously. So I embrace love. I embrace love anytime a chance presents itself because emotions bottled up don’t yield good result. But I have a problem.  

Relationship is notorious in depriving people of their freedom and liberty. You need to watch your steps from dressing to walking to speech mannerism. A lot of pretensions to conform to the demand and culture of love community.

My problem is that I am a person who recognizes my individuality and struggles to defend it, at least in my mind. I don’t accept some attributes that people will throw at me to define my life, and love is notorious in doing that. I want to live authentic life and I will begin to behave defiantly the moment I learn that someone is trying to control how I behave. I want to be a full human being. Unpredictable. Inconsistent. Because I need absolute freedom, I sometimes struggle with the idea of the kind of battle my wife will have when I get married. I wish that the woman will be understanding.

So when I see a girl but could not summon the courage to approach her, I learnt to bear my anguish in silence. My eyes will coolly appreciate her until she realizes that there is something unusual.

My silence is not because of cowardice. It is because I am meticulous about my dignity and there are problems of dignity crisis here that may arise. What if I talk to her and she ignores me and it is in the full view of the public? It was enormous disgrace trailing after ‘Yar Gidan Hajiya with all the public eyes on me. I no longer have such moral courage now.

In our part it is men who mostly make the first move and strive to maintain the relationship while women always want to be in control. Most of the girls I meet are relatively below my age and I feel uncomfortable to have the whole of me and all my intelligence controlled by a girl the same age with my sister.

Women sometimes want to make men fool, unintelligent and unperceptive. For you to remain in love you have to sometimes be a deliberate fool and pretend that you don’t know anything.

To ni fa matsala ta ke nan! This is what I hate. I don’t have a big heart to tolerate everything. I don’t tolerate anything that will hurt my esteem. I don’t tolerate an open deception. I don’t accept a vivid lie. I don’t tolerate a move from someone trying to hide an open secret. I hate pretension even though it is human nature.

Mata ikon Allah! See this girl. We communicated on phone and agreed that I was coming to see her at night. You would pity me how I abandoned everything and covered miles to reach her place. I arrived there and picked my phone to tell her that I was right in front of her home. When she picked up the call she told me that she could not come out.

“But you knew I was coming.” I said to myself in staggering amazement.

I carried myself all the way to your place and this was my reward. I felt hurt. Yet I somehow managed one more time to tell her that I could wait if she would come out when she had finished what she was doing. She told me once again that she was caught up in a schedule she could not get out of.  

 “I am busy,” she said, “but we can meet tomorrow. Good night.” I was just listening, feeling a kind of acute low esteem.

“Thank you,” I muttered grudgingly. You are not allowed to complain. It will backfire against you.

I dan za’a so ni to a so ni but I hate pretension. If she does not love me why taking the pain to have good wishes for me and suggested that we should meet tomorrow.   What is very amusing is that it was the girl who came to me when we first met and initiated the conversation that eventually led to our relation. I didn’t need to hire a Harvard Symbologist professor to explain to me the message she had been sending.  I hate pretension and that’s the reason why I have parted with ‘Yar Gidan Hajiya. I am not picking on her, this thing is not the monopoly of Hausa girl, it is everywhere among Nigerian girls.

It is very easy for me to part way with pretentious girls. The reason why I don’t go deep into this love business as a whole and take it seriously is that I don’t see love at this stage of my life as something very important. It is waste of time. I am not ready for getting married. I am not believer in doing love without doing anything. Just meet, chat and leave without doing anything tangible. Where is love in this? Maybe I will be deeply involved when I am ready for getting married. By that time a new generation of beautiful girls was borne. Rush is bad business.

What is disturbing now is that the girl would narrate the whole story of what she did to me to her friends. I heard a low voice at the background when she told me she couldn’t come out. Those friends of hers who have been looking for a chance to establish an overture would come out the next day and feel that they have triumphed over me. They would be happy by what one of them did and they would giggle and have pity for me. They would say “Allah Sarki, of all his dignity, look at how he has been disgraced.”

Why women are doing this? They believe that they have something you want. I would say women are playing into the hand of negative stereotype for narrowing their understanding and definition of self into a severely limited view. I would also say that when they allow a man to strive for the love alone, they are, in their subconscious mind, submitting that men are stronger than women. Don’t eject me out I’m still a feminist. They said we should all be feminists.

Why am I saying this while I cannot say ehem somewhere? It is because I believe that whatever I say here would not be gossiped back to the girl I am talking about. Even if somebody carries a word to her or any other girl they think I have a relationship with, she cannot see herself in this story and the only explanation I can offer is what you have read here. So, let’s stop speaking in whisper and have a conversation on this.

(@abubakarsulai13)