AND SO THIS IS LOVE

Written

by

Tambu Kahari.

If you are like me you sign off all your emails with “love ya!” You end your conversations with your friends either messaging or on the phone with “love ya!” You tell your siblings and your parents and your children how much you love them constantly. We all believe we know what love is. It is a verb. Love is something that you do. It may be easy to do, but it is not easy to define, especially for a girl born in Southern Africa and has to live in North America.

Here is the dictionary meaning of love and I am putting it here just to get it out of the way and have us on the same page. There were fourteen different definition but these will suffice.

Love is: 1.a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person. 2. a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend.3. sexual passion or desire. 4. a love affair; an intensely amorous incident; amour. 5. sexual intercourse; copulation.

When love becomes a verb this is what it means: to have love or affection for another person; be in love.

Different Cultures have different ways of looking at Love

It is agreed that love is a feeling and the heart has something to do with it. It appears though that different cultures have dissimilar ways of expressing the feeling of “love”. There is also a diverse timetable of when this “feeling” is supposed to take root and be uttered. It can be so confusing that one wonders how inter cultural relationships exist.
A friend of mine and I had an avid discussion about love.

He is a native of North America and I am one of Southern Africa. The way we go about putting love into action is as different as night and day. I have to share this with you fellow Southern Africans because this was one of the most amazing discussions I have ever had on that word.

My Southern African view of love.

Southern Africans believe in love at first sight. At the very least it is love after a few sightings. Only when there is love for a person does one approach that person and ask for a date. You date the person you are in love with, or the person who is in love with you. You don’t just go out on random dates. Feelings have to expressed first by one party. They usually go, translated into English, “I have love for you and I want to spend time with you.”

If you feel you could love this person, you agree to spend time. The dating begins. After a few months, if you decide that you are compatible and that your love will thrive, you get married.

The compatibility factor comes after the declaration of love. Without the declaration of love, there is no relationship. It doesn’t begin. It never is. There is no going out to parties and bars together. There is no hanky panky and there is no dreaming about a future together.

Alas, most times it doesn’t work out. Sometimes the love is permanently one sided. Remember that man who loved you so much, yet you would have nothing to do with him because he didn’t fit what you wanted in a man?  After he tried to ask you out on numerous occasions and did all those nice things for you, he hit the road. Sometimes you are the one in love and he is simply not interested. Remember the guy you cooked dinner for and even let him borrow your car because you were in love, yet, he went with another woman?

At times it is a Romeo and Juliet story that is unfortunately more fact than fiction. Your lives just don’t gel, and so you go your separate ways rather than commit suicide. It doesn’t mean you don’t love the person. You do.  When the boxes were crossed and the lines dotted it didn’t balance.

Love in our culture is sacrificed more often than not. It is a painful emotion that brings very little joy and happiness. We ride it out like a disease and then we use our heads rather than our treacherous hearts.

We also believe that love crushes and burns if it isn’t nurtured. In our culture we say love is like a wild tree. It grows where it wants. You can’t stop your heart from wanting and feeling. However, a seed can drop on dry earth and never, ever sprout. Love is that fragile. Remember the man you loved with a passion at one, but, because he didn’t return the feeling and didn’t do romantic things for you, you moved on?  Sometimes you think about him and your heart misses him, but you are probably in the arms of another man now and you are perfectly in love there.

So, in our culture, love leaves a residue, a reminder that once upon a time, your seed fell into his field.

For us Southern Africans there is only one kind of love between a man and a woman. It is the passionate kind that involves sex, lust and eventually marriage and babies. It is intense. It is extremely emotional. There is nothing else between a man and a woman.
My friend said in our conversation that our way of looking at love was polygamous. He said he believed men had created it. I saw his point. In our “love” you can love more than one person in the same time period.

He also said our love seemed to come out of air and wasn’t based on anything solid like same interests and time spent together. That is true. To us, love is a feeling. It is a feeling one can’t control.

My friend’s definition of love

Love is…the reason we’re here on earth.

In my friend’s world, the dictionary definitions of love hold firm. There are fourteen definitions and he believes in all of them. When it comes to male and female relationships, there are two kinds of love.

There is the, “I love Tambu” love and the “I am in love with Hilda” love.

He said to be in love with someone, you have to spend time with them, get to know them through the good times and the bad times. You have to have shared memories, shared moments to solidify this “in love” feeling. Being “in love” takes time. It takes nurturing.

This kind of love is pretty good. You can cross the boxes, dot the lines and make sure everything is dandy before committing your heart to this other person whom you will know is also in love with you because the love is shared.

I also think this “in love with you after so many months” causes too much angst and insecurity to the human heart and soul. I think the heart is eventually not involved with the decision, the brain is. Therefore, love becomes a decision, not a feeling.

I am not too sure about the second relationship between a man and a woman. This is when a man says; “I love Tambu” I am not “in love with her. An ex boyfriend of mine was talking about his new girlfriend once. He wasn’t terribly excited about her. I asked him if he loved her. He said to me, “I love her but I am not in love with her.”

I asked what the difference was. He said he liked being with her. She was great fun and good in bed. He wasn’t in love with her. I redefined his “I love her” to “I like her a lot.”

How many times have I loved under both definitions

Under my friend’s cultural of love definition which affects me because I live in North America, I have never been loved by any man, anywhere. I tend to be the woman they love but are not in love with. I hate that. It breaks my heart. Of all the men who have loved me and not been “in love” with me, I don’t talk to any of them anymore.

Under my definition of love, I have been loved many times over by some amazing, spectacular males. But, when the lines were dotted and the boxes crossed, it just didn’t work out. But the feeling was there. And because the feeling was there, it could have worked out. I tend to still keep those males as my friends.

The bottom line is that for me, this Southern African girl, Love is a feeling, not a decision.

I don’t feel right when it is a decision.

I feel perfectly okay when it is a feeling floating out there.

Am I a Southern African or what?

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