16/09/2025
As I browsed through my mother's bookshelf, I found a magazine titled 'The Daughter's Voice' and discovered her thoughts on 'The Essence of Staying in True Love.
*THE ESSENCE OF STAYING IN TRUE LOVE*
(1989)
What is Love? The word Love means a lot of things to people. Some people take love as an existing act in the midst of two people for the satisfaction of their needs. But whatever definition they give to it, that is their own understanding of love. I stand firm to say that “Love is a personal self-forgetfulness and self-acceptance that exists in the midst of people but not only two. By the way, how many types of Love. Very many of them as everyone understands. Basically, there are only three types of love:
(1) Erotic
(2) Filia
(3) Agape.
Now let us examine them one by one.
*Erotic:* type of love is the love for the satisfaction of man which is sexual urges.
*Filia* is a love that exists in a family i.e. between a friend and his friend, parents and the children.
If you want to love others, you must first of all love yourself, that is the starting point of love. Some people hate themselves and by so doing, they will like to have other people on their side, people take erotic type of love as the best love but I hereby say that it is the worst love I have ever seen. When a boy is telling a girl “I love you, I love you more than my mother” you know what that person is saying is the opposite, that is he hates her more than himself. In this type of love, the jobs start at the beginning but ends in agony. You can see with me that any person who engages himself or herself in this type of love ends in agony. It ends in agony because, any boy or man who is in love with a girl only for the purpose of satisfying sexual urges, eventually may end the girl in unwanted pregnancy and thereby it will hinder her education or if she is very shameful, she may try to abort the child and endanger her own child’s murder or she may die from there. You do not die while loving someone.
If you are in doing it means you are having ill feeling about it, then there is some bad in it. For a true love to be seen, it must be seen and made known to people even your parents.
*Agape* is God’s Love. But among these, you will ask yourself, what type of love exists mainly today. You can see with me that the existing love to which people of today practise is Erotic type of love which is the false love. In the life of students and most young people, that is the type of love they take as the best love. From my own definition of love, it involves self-forgetfulness. By that I do not mean that you will forget yourself totally but I mean that if you are in love with people you are not doing it in the sense that you will derive anything from them.
When a boy is in love with a girl, what he bears in mind for loving that girl at times is just to satisfy himself any time he wishes to do so. But that’s not the way. By forgetting yourself, you do not look to yourself as a rich person or poor person while doing something, but you have to help that person at any time.
I said also that it involves self-acceptance. Now many people today do not feel free in the midst of people because they think that they are ugly or when they speak in the public, they will be laughed at. No, that shows that the person does not love himself. You must be proud of yourself even if you are blind or deaf because it is given by nature.
For students, I am encouraging, if you want to engage in love with someone, you must not hide. You must try to make your parents and the person’s parents know that you are in love with him/her. That’s the true love. Often time you see some people especially students telling other student that they have not seen anything in love. In the actual sense, the person saying so is the one in blindness while the other is the one who really knows what he or she is in.
The bible says “Love everybody as you love yourself”
But people love in a wrong way and they take love as reproductive agent.
When you ask them the reason why they are doing so. They will tell you that the bible says that “Go to the world and multiply”.
But I am telling you that if you want to multiply, you have to multiply in the right way, at the right time and in the right place.
My beloved people of God, if a boy sees you and tells you that these two girls, one is his friend and the other one is his friend and other one friend and the other one is his girl, whom actually do you think is his true friend;
The one he says that is his friend is actually his friend, while the one he calls his girl friend is the one he *uses in satisfaction of his emotional feelings*.
It is said that “A friend in need is a friend in deed.” And what exists between friendship is love. So the *essence of staying in love* is to rejoice with people during time of joy and agony and also to help other people when they are in need of help. And not to sin.
Finally my friend, *genuine love always demands steady and costly reciprocal sacrifices* made naturally and freely as a part of the relationship.
**By Ngozi Onwughara
(Student of our School)**
Innocent Tino Legit.ng
