Rise and fall of first love and the grace of lasting affection

I pity the current generation who are struggling to love when everything around us screams individual independence and selfishness. This has made love transactional, especially for the upwardly mobile urbanite Kenyan.

“What are you bringing to the table?” is the question. In such a scenario, relationships will struggle because life is lived forward in seasons and understood backwards in its entirety. Each season requires a host of skills to navigate, which gives life meaning in retrospect.

Love is a very complex phenomenon because it revolves around our subconscious, where our logical strings does not reach. Everyone has that first love that came with a gush of emotions in early adulthood. Yes, the love consumed every bit of you and kept you awake all night. Containing the butterflies and anxiety was a problem and so love oozed out of everything you did. Today, young people can chat or talk on the phone for hours, then ask the other to disconnect first if they want to end the conversation.

This is the type of love I recently heard about a lady who carried a gas cylinder in a bag to Rongai to go and cook chapatis for the love of her life. It is the love that we do stupid things. The heartbeats and rush of hormones whenever your object of desire was nearby could make one scale the highest fence in the middle of the night for a hug. Stupidity includes cancelling our parents and siblings who can see red flags everywhere around us. Their worry is not that the love will end because it will, but how to help you minimise the hurt.

Hurting it must. It is part of the growing, but when it is a lady, and then it is worse if a baby is part of the hurt package. It is the love that remains etched in everyone’s psyche for a lifetime. The foolish things we did and how we felt that our parents were foolish, and our friends and siblings were jealous that we were in love.

Then the love comes tumbling down. Too painful if you are dumped, a bit manageable if you were separated by the growth in life. If you are dumped for another person nearby, then there will never be another painful character development to go through. The pain and looking foolish come with juvenile shame that is awful and deeply painful in the moment. Especially if you have to see your former lover with his new catch often.

One could leave the scene to go to college, fly abroad for studies or to another town for work. The healing is easier as one doesn’t feel inadequate but blames factors beyond the control of love for the separation. This first love is like fireworks; it lights up and rises fast into the sky in excitement and then blows up and disappears.

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The next type of love is a candle; it still burns, but gently. The wax is also a bother, as you now have experience that the Kenyan line, mtawachana tu, is real. You don’t give your all, but still do your part. The candle love is known to bring out more heat than light. It also burns slowly, which in most cases makes it boring.

This is the learning phase of love, dating without purpose but to fill a social gap. To have someone you can be angry at and show love sometimes. More often than not, we bring our best foot forward and impress others with acquired traits. It can cover several people over a long period because commitment is rarely the focus for both parties. In most cases, when someone brings up commitment as an option, the other party blows out the candle and disappears into the dark. It is a phase of discovery where one learns about oneself and the other gender.

Then the mirror love for the mature stage. This is the revelation of love, where the other party reveals us to ourselves. These are the people we open up to and become vulnerable. The challenge is that if they are not ready for this type of love, you come out as needy. They will get scared and flee very fast.

The mirror reveals our weaknesses to us in a way that we have to rise, mature and accept ourselves as we are. Moving the mirror to the side makes it a rear-view mirror. This is the relationship that will bring out the traumas of the past because of the feeling of safety. Upon reciprocation, mature love blossoms, which is very different from the first two.

It is the type of love that lacks excitement but fulfils our deepest needs. We love, receive love and grow in all areas of life. It is full of grace, stable with a long-term perspective. The lucky few love one person through all these phases; most of us grope in the darkness of a romantic labyrinth with different people.