Becoming Jaded

One night many years ago, I remember being on the phone with the love of my life a dear friend of mine during one of our many deep and long conversations, when the topic somehow drifted to love. I remember saying that I couldn't understand how boys like myself ( I was about 15 then ) could go around using the phrase "I love you" so easily. I had seen love - true love - in my parents, in my grand-parents, and in my extended family, and just by observation I knew that it wasn't as simple as all that. Yet every other second my guys would vomit this phrase to one girl or another and she would be head over heels. Knowing what true love was, I just couldn't bring myself to do that - even in the greater interest of my libido.

Now I have always had more female friends than male. Both older and younger than myself, and it has been my great fascination to observe and study them. Women intrigue me, and from them I have learnt many things. Still, there is this one thing I have learnt that I feel is such a shame and I wish there was something I could do; and that is about how passionate girls... become jaded women.

You see when we're younger, the fastest way to get a girl to take you seriously is to tell her you love her. It is guaranteed that doing so will make her fixate on you. In fact to drive the point home, all girls fixate on love much in the same way that guys fixate on sex - and therein lies the problem. Because in all likelihood, it is a guys fixation on the sexual that will motivate him to chat up a girl in the first place. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to then understand why any self respecting guy would use an "I love you" in the process.

And for the entirety of a man's life, he remains strongly motivated by sex and the intimately sexual. Such that by the time a woman is of an age like mine (23), she has heard all the "I love you"s and its various variations that she can stand - and none of them have worked out like the fairy tales she used to read as a child. No happily ever after, no forever and ever, not even a tragic double suicide; and so she has learnt (quite regrettably), not to believe in love - or at least, not to count on it.

She has learnt that if you love with all your heart, there is a 99% chance it will be shattered to pieces. That love at first sight is a myth, that men are not to be trusted, and most depressing of all, she has begun to disassociate love from good relationships. And the longer she goes without finding true love, the more all these disastrous lessons become ingrained into the very fibre of her being.

That soon turns to bitterness and that's when you start hearing phrases like "I don't need a man" and "We must learn to love ourselves first" and "Men ain't shit" and it gets worse. Things are further accelerated by beauty and sexual appeal. The more beautiful a woman, the more men that will be attracted to her, the more variations of empty "I love you's" she will get to experience.

So what all this means is that by the time a woman is 35 and unmarried, she is so bitter that few men will be willing to go through the trouble of re-educating her - and make no mistake, re-education is what it all comes down to. Because whether you find your true love at 23 or at 45, as a man you will have to spend a decent amount of time overcoming the demons of her past. That in my opinion is what courting is all about {and I've heard whispers that men have baggage too - shhhh}.

Something needs to be done about this sorry state of affairs:

1. Women, there is true love. It's out there, and you will find it - but bitterness and pessimism won't help you in your search. If you're 45, already completely jaded, and not even bitter anymore, it's still there for you. I truly believe so.
2. And Boys! You scallywags! You scoundrels! Honestly if you're skilled enough, you can get a girl without an "I love you". It's really not that hard. Stop trashing the word so early in life. Trust me, it will serve you better when you actually do fall in love.

Passion is momentary, but love? Love is timeless. So why shouldn't the phrase we use to communicate it be timeless as well? I would like my "I love you" to be as effective today, as it would have been a decade ago. I would like to marry someone my age, not 10 years younger because she has less demons in her closet. I would like to be able to say "I love you" - and mean it - and be believed.

So let's all try, to reverse this process of... becoming jaded.