Those six words are in strong contention for the most frightening words to say or even hear. Half the time (I'm not trying to be stastically accurate o, just using a figure of speech) a guy would rather not say it; all the time a girl would rather not say it. Sometimes too, a girl would rather not hear it. Weird thing is most of the time the girl wants and prays to hear it and the guy wants very much to say it but the fact is once those words are spoken and heard, nigh on everything changes however much everyone wishes nothing does.

For a guy, saying them is, in one way, staking a claim; for the girl, hearing them, in the same way, is being claimed. It's scary to stake a claim and have it thrown right back in your face, much more so if the thing you claim is something you have come to associate with the center and purpose of your existence. Maybe that's why guys are built with the ability to take rejection.

Conversely though, it can't be any less scary for a girl to feel claimed by someone she's not into however much she might like him. Girls may like to have a man who is all theirs, totally ga-ga about them and all that but what good is that if you're not into the guy too like that? You end up pitying the poor schmuck and feel guilty for liking his more suave friend more. Who wants that kind of complication na?

But it is a complication some can live with.

What is one to do na? Should we stop falling in love? Can one help it? What is this "falling in love" thing sef? How's one to know that they have fallen in love and it's the right person too? Abi, are those not the big questions?

Few things can damage people as badly as love issues can. Once we come into the realm of the heart, we are squarely in a large land mine with the mines packed veeeeery closely together. Delicacy is the only language here and at the same time it is the worst language to speak.

Human beings are built to love not merely across sexes but across all divides. It's natural to us to want to be loved and natural for us to love. Companionship, buddy relationships are vital to us. I'm absolutely sure (Dettol's kind of sure + 0.00000000001% to bring it up to the hundred mark ) that I'm not the only one that movies and novels that end up with someone somehow cut off from everyone else orhaving to leave behind friends and family or losing them in some way depresses. I hate such stories from the depths of my being. I just can't stand being the only man or human being alive or getting stuck with perpetual strangers.

My point is, we like to have people who are special to us and everyone hopes to find that one person they can be completely nakked with without fear of getting hurt maliciously. We want to love and be loved. We want to give and be given to. We want it so bad that we'd rather live and not die even when we've grown so old that we've lost all our teeth and can barely get out of bed at any time just because, well, she's still here too or he's still here too.

Is this the thread where guys pour out their lovey dovey feelings and frustration?

I'm hanging around

Smh

I saw the title by I then the last post was made by J and I started dancing, another relationship from Nl

lol Gracie stop tryna matchmake woman

HumbledbYGrace: Smh

I saw the title by I then the last post was made by J and I started dancing, another relationship from Nl

these six words have a deeper meaning...

cut it to half, the three words..."I love u" and u have a safer landing when professing your feelings for the first time..

So we want it. Fine. But how do we know we've found it when we have?

I started a thread some time ago to ask just that question. There were pretty solid answers then but I couldn't thread them together at the time perhaps because I was struggling with my own heart at the time and when you're in that kind of struggle you're not at your best intellectually. You have to contend with numerous fears, doubts, hopes, ambitions and whatnot that it's hard to tell a nose from an ear then.

Anyhow, I figured it out eventually. Not that not knowing it well inside ever prevented me from preaching it It so happens that the beginning of the question of love is: is this what you want? If you can't answer that coherently, you probably shouldn't be messing around with the issue at all. Feelings come and go, passions flare and die but when one has come to know who the guy or girl in the mirror is, what one wants is what decides where one is. So, do you know for sure that that guy or girl is what you want? Why do you want them? is the question that helps you understand if indeed you do. But allow me to explain this a bit more.

I sat beside a nice-looking girl in a bus yesterday. Now, I've got quite an eye and know that if I'd been other than a Christian I might have figured out a way to get in her pants. I let her get away although something I noticed made me feel she wasn't particularly overjoyed that I did. By certain standards, I would probably be honest if I said tht she's what I want because she was my taste in women I would bed but then the bed is not nearly the only piece of furniture in a home, is it?

What I want goes well beyond what my eyes like. It goes well beyond what my friends and family think will suit me. It goes beyond what I may look good with. It goes well beyond the externals to what I want to do with my life.

Love oooo,hia, love oooo... Love is wicked sha. singing Flavour's Adanma

This post has been hidden till further notice.

The pic refused to appear. Guess i lost the magic wand.
Click on the link to see it pls.

If I don't know what I want out of life, how I want to invest my days on earth, what defines me, the meaning of me, I can't ever truly tell what I want. I will want what other human beings advise me to want. I will desire what other human beings desire. I will want what circumstances tell me I should want. Not what I want.

I guess that means that the beginning of the love question is "what do I want?" which question itself demands a clear definition of who I am. Once you know who you are, you can tell what you need and what you want. And you'll be attracted to such things. Trouble is, these days "I" is a quantity we have largely forgotten how to define. In my opinion, we're getting so smart in our days that we're winding up abominably stuppid. And believe me, I'm in celebrated company with that opinion. If you feel like challenging it, feel free to explain who you are and how you discovered the information

In any case, what follows an answer to what we want? I can't forget who it was on that thread that insisted that what matters in a relationship is that both parties work hard at it. She was so very on point with that. Love may first of all be a feeling or an emotion, but it is meaningless as such without the strong backing of a "willfull" commitment to make it work. Love isn't just an event that happens to you, I told a special person once, it's a decision you make. I learned that in my last relationship.

Guys, the op is still evolving o!

which one be evolving again

Ihedinobi: Guys, the op is still evolving o!

lol... I knew it!
The point is not yet clear without a long epistle.
UJ, thats what he meant, he has not even started posting his mind yet.
These are introductions.

"I've fallen in love with you" is what you say when you know you're ready to go in with both feet and you know that you're prepared to take what comes out of saying it. I guess that's what it means to man up. You don't say it because you think the girl you're talking to never takes a shitt or she is made of diamonds and could never fart or burp or snore in her sleep or be crazy like every woman is wont to be every now and again. If you say it for that reason, man, are you in for one hell of a shock. You say it because you know that no downside to her is sufficient to turn you away except of course she's not into you the way you're into her.

We can't none of us stand angels. They're impossible to relate with because they're holy. We wouldn't even have a relationship with God if He hadn't deigned to come down Himself and share in our weakness and empathize with us. If He'd never done that, we'd always feel misunderstood by Him and won't know any basis for which to relate to Him. We can only relate to beings that appreciate our situation. For this reason, no one really wants a "perfect" person to love. We all want that perfect [u]partner[/i] to love. That person that we can relate to and who can relate to us.

So that she's got this annoying way of talking or he's too fond of this or that is not what turns us off. What does is that those qualities do not resonate with us at all. They have nothing to lock into in our own qualities. To explain, I loved my ex more than I'd ever loved anyone romantically in my life. In fact, I tend to refer to her as my first real love although there were others before her. But her tendency to not talk about anything, her penchant for sweeping unpleasant issues under the carpet had nothing in me sympathising with it. I could handle much about her that I cannot list here for decency's sake but I couldn't take that reluctance to be in a situation with a person, fight over issues and settle them and move on especially when said issues eventually showed up in the future to cause all kinds of trouble. There was no quality in me that could respond to that. So we both suffered in the relationship - she from a feeling that I didn't understand her or something like that and me from a need to communicate and relate with someone I loved.

Cool it na, guys. Na wa o

so dis one na just preamble?

idnoble135: lol... I knew it!
The point is not yet clear without a long epistle.
UJ, thats what he meant, he has not even started posting his mind yet.
These are introductions.

So it is not the downsides, the not-so-nice qualities that are at issue. The issue is "can you connect with that person?" How readily can you share yourself with the person? We only want a home for our roaming hearts, not merely motels. Funny thing is, owning a home translates to the responsibility of maintaining a home.

When you know where you're headed with your life, you're ready to tell who you'd like to get there with. And when you find them, you'll fight to win them and keep them. I'm just explaining how it naturally works out. However strongly we feel about anybody, something will always fall out that we'll find less than pleasant but if we have bought a home in that relationship, we'll stay and work/wait it out as the case may be, but if all we did was rent a room for the night, well, come morning light, everyone will head home. Or if it's only a vacation at Obudu Cattle Ranch, the magic'll end eventually maybe because the food wasn't right one morning or some machinery failed to work or something and all of a sudden we realize we would rather be home. What a word - home, eh.

Home is that place where the magic never ends not even when you've got bills to pay, bawling children, sick dogs, overgrown fences and whatnot. The magic is always somewhere underneath. Crises come and they go and the connection is stronger than ever. "I'm in love with you" is what you're ready to say and hear when you know that however many seasons come and go, however rainy a particular period is or dry the Harmattan gets, you'll still be there for him or her in every way you can possibly be.

it's high time we started 'rising in love' instead of this abused 'fall in love' which most times are expressed too early in a relationship as a result of lust.
they 'fall' prematurely in lust/love, and after all said and done, they break their hearts, legs, hands, heads etc
anything that falls breaks, and the hearts being fragile break when it is lust fully and deceptively fell.
I rise in love o

uj_sizzle: so dis one na just preamble?

lol... Yea, you should know him and long posts. I can guess all his post should fill the whole first page or more.

Well I know how it feels
I know some would rather not say it for fear of disappointment
And some would rather not hear it for fear of being tied down.
It's the most enigmatic feeling of all times.
Joy,happiness,pain,affection,jealousy,
lust,passion
Are all present in this feeling called love.
Hmm
I've fallen in love with you.
Are you ready to take the roller coaster ride with me?

lorretta u: Well I know how it feels
I know some would rather not say it for fear of disappointment
And some would rather not hear it for fear of being tied down.
It's the most enigmatic feeling of all times.
Joy,happiness,pain,affection,jealousy,
lust,passion
Are all present in this feeling called love.
Hmm
I've fallen in love with you.
Are you ready to take the roller coaster ride with me?

Na which person son you wan deceive like this na?

Once those six words are spoken, everything changes. They're not words with which you make friends. Nor words with which you make enemies. They're words with which you name bonds. The tricky part is this last. What if the guy or girl says them and the girl or guy is not game? What then?

Courtesy, human kindness, or more truly hope says to be just friends and keep going. This is the least precise part of this whole issue. The truth is that human nature branches out here. At least, so I think. Some people will be able to settle into a friendship and just go on and eventually things grow into the love they desired at first. My feeling is that this is how it works if the two were only recently met and one needed time to be sure.

Other people will find restraint almost impossible and even though they'd like to be reasonable and give the other person time to discover them and find the, well, resonance or correspondence they themselves already found, they can't help the jealousy that consumes them when they see the object of their love giving equal or more attention to someone else. For them, love very easily turns into obssession and a very unhealthy one at that.

I think those two are the two main possibilities and they mix and overlap in many different ways, I imagine. For instance, someone might play the friend and suffer great jealousies and pain and hold out still in the hopes that the person they fancy ends up with them. Imagine what happens when they don't. Another might play the friend and eventually give up waiting, find someone else and really become the friend (sometimes, about the same time, the object of their affection is ready to love them then). It can get messy, very messy once those six words are said.

I think that's why men try to read women and understand when they're signing that they're interested in them and women read men to try and figure out whether they are available and seeing the signs they're putting out. It's a very delicate game, far more complicated than the arranged marriages our parents and their parents and those before them and some cultures around the world favored, I'll say.

I might even go as far as to say that it's probably why the world is mired in promiscuity today. *shrugs

To wrap this long-winded job up sha, it's best to live in today. Plans for the future are good and very welcome but don't paint a face and name in until you're sure they want in too.

If I were to advise based on what I've seen, it's best to say those words when something can take your mind off the emptiness you feel if they aren't ready to hook up. Not that I think it's easy to hold it in. It's a risk, a really big one, but if it pays off, it's a lifetime's haul-in.

What has worked for me? I'll tell you when I find it.

Ciao

tpacalipse: But it is a complication some can live with.

Wow! Tuale for anybody who can deal with not being loved back o!

HumbledbYGrace: Smh

I saw the title by I then the last post was made by J and I started dancing, another relationship from Nl

Relationship fire!

y-fo:
these six words have a deeper meaning...

cut it to half, the three words..."I love u" and u have a safer landing when professing your feelings for the first time..

What's the difference na?

teeo: Love oooo,hia, love oooo... Love is wicked sha. singing Flavour's Adanma

Abi! Don't know why we bother with the thing sef!

idnoble135: The pic refused to appear. Guess i lost the magic wand.
Click on the link to see it pls.

Which link again na? You don hide the post ni!

idnoble135: lol... I knew it!
The point is not yet clear without a long epistle.
UJ, thats what he meant, he has not even started posting his mind yet.
These are introductions.

You no well!