How could two romantic extremists morph into bona fide anarchists? Dozovich and Jessica were inseparable like a Religious zealot is with bigotry; the two couldn’t exist without the other.
The once perennial love habitat that they occupied now resembles a war-torn country that would make Iraq appear to be a land flowing in milk and honey.
What happened to Dozovich and Jessica?
One would ask that exact question after witnessing their indivisibility just three months prior.
What happened to the promises that were sworn on each other’s life?
Promise; another grossly abused member of the English vocabulary, a word often never kept, like an unwanted pregnancy.
The two would tirelessly refer to each other as ‘Sweethearts’ but now they refer to themselves by whatever word that alludes to the opposite.
The two often sought to satisfy their desire to close the gap between themselves rather than the gaps in their stomachs, causing their anatomies to malfunction.
But three months later, after God vehemently ignored their prayers to send the other to an early grave, Dozovich and Jessica decided to pull the plug on the already dead union.
So, what happened to their love or rather did the love actually exist?
So, there it is, love is the most abused word in the English vocabulary.
There are eight different types of love namely, Philia, Pragma, Storge, Eros, Ludus, Mania, Philantia and Agape.
For the sake of this article, I will only scratch the surface with some of them.
The word love is often lost in interpretation hence its abuse by most.
Take a few seconds to draw a mental picture of love if you could. It would definitely resemble a beautiful garden, with kids happily playing and a rainbow gleaming colorfully.
That definitely represents purity; hence by its very nature love is pure.
Of course, I am not focusing on the love between family and friends, but rather the love that exists between man and woman.
As a pure phenomenon, which types of love best describe it?
It definitely would be Agape and Pragma.
Agape is the selfless love that rejoices in the joy of another, while Pragma is the enduring love between a couple which blossoms through constant acts of affection, as well as enduring tumultuous times.
But the skewed view of love stresses on the physical attributes of another which slowly matures into deceit, selfishness and jealousy, these attributes can be best described by Eros and Mania.
Mania is the possessive kind of love which could lead to unhealthy actions such as murder. This stems mainly from the obsession with a person’s physical appearance which is known as Eros.
The truest form of love stands at a safe distance from Mania and Eros despite being classified as such, in fact, these characteristics are closer to infatuation than love.
Unlike infatuation, love transcends human emotions, it is also cognitive. Emotions come and go, but a coherent decision is implanted to stand the test of time, despite the mental bombardments that might push one to fall out of love.
When emotions fizzle, divorce cases, infidelity and crimes of passion increase in numbers.
Infatuation happens while love grows. Emotions and physical appearances might be the catalyst that leads to love but its final destination is more profound, hence negating the oxymoronic theory of love at first sight, due to the time and effort that go into cultivating love.
Love is passionate about the individual as a whole, unlike infatuation which is affectionate about certain aspects of another such as personality, wealth, appearance or intelligence and many others, while also magnifying the negative traits.
Once these aspects wear off or are no longer appealing, the passion dies down. Love on the other hand appreciates the individual as a whole, accepting both the negatives and positives.
Love is a seed that germinates through the constant irrigation of kindness, warmth and sacrifice if it is to fully blossom. When it does blossom, it sprouts forth a relentlessness to cross any river for the sake of the recipient.
Speaking of sacrifices, the story of love throughout history cannot be told without the stressing the importance of sacrifice, as history is rife with those incidences that exemplify its purity.
Jesus Christ is a popular figure in the religious realms who is said to have died on behalf of mankind, but I’m hesitant to use him as an example due to the fear of ramming into a brick wall known as the Antichrists. Therefore I suggest the beautiful display of love by Jack from the Titanic where he put her life before his but then again some would argue and say that there wasn’t enough room for the both of them; hence he had no choice but to die. So I will rest my case with the classic tale of Romeo and Juliet, two young lovers who died for the cause; but wait, that’s fiction.
Despite not having the best historical examples, I believe that I have painted a vivid enough picture of what love might look like. It is more than a feeling which exists at a mere glance, it grows over time and of course, it’s prone to death. Love being a cause that many would die for obviously proves that it has more lives than a cat.
Love is a proclamation that is made by many with an inadequacy of thought. Love is the entanglement of two souls, bonding together to create a web of affection, which strengthens its strings as the hands of time rush forward.
In conclusion, love ought to grow stronger with time, like a fine wine it gets better while the opposite case alludes to the existence of something entirely different.
Allan Shawa is a Zambian writer, with an ability to craft poems, stories and songs. Growing up amongst a population that is content to achieve mediocrity artistically, his inspiration has always been to see how far the mind can be stretched in order to reach the levels of the legends who engraved their names in the history books.
Wonderful. I didn’t know that love is of 8 types. Got to know so much in this ?