Bastardised and abused, distorted and fragmented, mistaken and misunderstood – Love has been through all these and even more. It is about the most talked about phenomenon, yet ironically the least understood. Everyone gets to hear it, yet no one seems to see it. It is not just the reality of its abstractness but its obvious absence in practice.

Over the centuries, it has brought in its wake joy and pain, happiness and sadness, life and death, sanity and insanity. It has sent many to their early graves and many others to fulfilling their dreams. According to proven statistics, it has sent more folks to psychiatric homes than drugs. If love is this beautiful and that ugly, this lively and that deadly, why do many still desire to love and be loved? Why is man’s quest still as it was several millennia ago…to love and be loved?

The building blocks of many relationships, the mortar that holds the fragments of corporate vices, the ever-ready tool of modern politics, the saving grace of errant wives and husbands, the foundation of all evil – Lies (an act of perverting the truth, an intent to mislead, to deceive, to create a false impression) as it seems , makes the world go round. Men survive on lies. It has become so usual, it is normal. It is the un-admitted norm in modern society.
Lies have usurped Love as the central tenet of our common humanity.
That Love has become what we no longer believe is because lies have become what we long to believe.

When a young girl or a lady agrees to date a man, the next line is when they get to form the beast of two backs – in essence when they get to have sex. From what I absolutely know, that could even be before a verbal agreement to date. In essence, it is just as normal to get down with a guy who is your boyfriend as it is to with one you’d love to be one. Forget the exceptions of one-night-stands and unusual scenarios.
The age of grey areas – where everything gets defined as relative and non-absolute – allows for the acceptance of anything as morally right.
You needed to tell a lot of lies about love to make your girlfriend finally agree to unhook or allow you to help with her bra and strip-off her pants, which had to be off for anything to happen (unlike the ease today’s strings allow) when lies were the unusual in times past.

Today, you will need to show your love, not by lying to her about it, but to lie with her to prove it. If you are in a relationship and you don’t try to lay your partner, she thinks you don’t love her. If you lay her at every other place, every time, then you must be crazy about her. Today, that is what holds true, it is the normal and the expected.

It has taken centuries but Lies have eventually supplanted Love, not by reason of their excellence but due to popularity and usage. They are the reason we have more broken hearts than already mended ones. Lies are the reason you won’t be mistaking to think the next stage after marriage is divorce, instead of the expectation of happily-ever-afters.

Living-happily-ever-after is not an absence of disagreements and arguments, rather it is the presence of an absolute knowledge that, your love for your partner comes first and last. After all said and done, Love is what stands. That is abnormal in our world of ‘‘anything goes’’ and ‘‘shit happens’’ – an admittance of the previously unthinkable.

To be abnormal is to be unusual, to be unusual is to be novel; to be novel is to be exclusive, to be exclusive is to be valued, to be valued is to be expensive. Over the years, the expensive has been the desired (Diamonds and other jewels remain the objects of human desire and obsession mainly because they remain scarce). Desire is a prerequisite for Love. No one can truly love another without desiring that person or that for which the person stands for.
In an ideal world, desire could and does result in sex, but in our usual world, sex results to desire. Partners desire themselves because of sex, not have sex because of their desire. The product has become the result and the result the product. That is today’s reality.

Before you let your heart off the tether of your mind, always decide whether you will just go with the flow and do the usual or you’ll stand out and be the unusual – the one for which Love is all that matters. Whether it is Love or it is a Lie lies in your ability to see beyond the normal. It takes more than just seeing with your eyes, it takes seeing through your eyes. The difference lies in your mind, your conscience and your expectation of Love. See things through your eyes with your mind and conscience and not exclusively with your eyes. That is the difference. As long as mortal men remain, Love, Lies, and Sex will always help to make or mar the world. You can be the unusual!