SENSUALITY AND LOVE

I’d see it if you show it to me. I’d hear it if you tell it to me. I’d taste it if you feed me. My nerves will race and let me know when you touch me. My senses tell me a story, they reveal the truth, but sometimes I lie about those truths.

I admire beautiful paintings. What I really admire in ‘beautiful’ paintings is the dedication and the sense of style of the artist in creating an image of a high aesthetic value with the right combination of themes, forms and colours. My fine art teacher once pointed out that it is the dedication and the sense of style in an art work that qualifies it to be ‘fine’ art. The painting - Mona Lisa - is famous because of Leonardo Da Vinci’s dedication to combine the contradictory themes of a smile and a stern look on one face. By saying something is beautiful, we insinuate that something can be ugly. That means an art work can be deemed ugly when it does not please the aesthetic senses. What do we really mean when we say a woman is beautiful?

Ontologically, everyone is beautiful. People’s look is as a result of the combination of genes from their parents. Nobody really sat down to design everyone, God allowed the genes to combine in whatever way as he gave liberty to anyone to marry anyone without restrictions to appearance. Again, ontologically, everyone is beautiful because we are beings with similarities though differences exist in forms but not the themes. I once sat with a friend of mine by a street. I noticed a girl passed us by and my friend only glanced at her and looked away, next another girl walked by and he immediately stood up and started heading in the girl’s direction. When he got back I asked him why he chose to approach the second girl but not the first, he simply said the second girl was beautiful while the first was ugly. I immediately asked him why God would make some people beautiful and make others ugly, thereby favouring some with approaches while others live in the stigmatisation of being ugly and shunned? He couldn’t give me a reply, partly because he was a christian and wouldn’t want to say anything that ‘would be held up against him in the court of law’.

During my undergraduate studies, I met a girl I deemed beautiful. There was something intriguing about her. She had a good sense for fashion and also had a beautiful set of mannerisms especially in the way she talked. She spoke carefully as if she was counting her words, she smiled all the time and had good manners. She conducted a magical aura about herself as if she was celebrating her life at every moment. She liked the Italian way of dressing and was always formal though not gaudy. It was always fun to be with her and we had a strong bond when we found our we were both avid readers and usually exchanged novels. She was very beautiful, but for the most part, she was very ugly. She was ugly because she wasn’t understood, she was ugly because the people that termed her so didn’t know or understand her. She was ugly because its conventional to term someone ugly when their face does not look like one of the celebrities or when their facial characteristics does not seem to please the ‘artistic sense’ of people. Maybe she was ugly because God was thinking about other important things when designing her. She was beautiful because she created a personality for herself. She was beautiful because she developed a great sense of style and art in the way she behaved. She was beautiful because she had a beautiful mind that was  creative enough to let her become successful in school and after school. She was beautiful because she had great tastes.

Back in school, I once told my roommate that I will take a night class in school and return the following morning. When I was preparing to leave, one of our female student-neighbour was in our room seeing a movie. I got to school and started the class but was very tired to read through the night so I had to go back home. It was about 12:30am and I got home about 15 minutes later. I got into the room as silent as possible because I didn’t want to startle anybody. I didn’t even switch on the lights. I used my phone’s home screen to light my way around the room. I found out the female neighbour was not in the room. I slipped under the duvet and tried to sleep. I noticed a hand going up my hips, I shifted and thought maybe my roommate is sleep-swimming or something of sort. I shifted away. Next the hand moved directly on my body and caressed my chest (I used to gym a lot at the time so my chest was bulky and would pass for…). That was when I jumped up and switched on the light. He also got up and I could see the surprise look on his face. He apologised and said he thought it was the female student-neighbour. The following morning, the whole block heard about it and it became the latest comic story but one thing stood out - my roommate had imagined caressing a female neighbour and he ‘enjoyed’ it while it lasted. He felt disgusted about it that night that he couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night.

In describing the fantasy figure of women, different people have different specs. Some would way they like chubby women while others would prefer the slim or skinny ones. Same goes for the ladies about men. This means if they happen to be with people who have these fantasy figures, they would have the time of their lives. When we were young, we were innocent because we didn’t seem to understand much like we do today. We would see naked people and it wouldn’t resonate a thing in us. With time, with movies and stories, with older and experienced people encouraging us to try somethings out, our minds became open to the new world. We would later begin to look at the opposite sex while our minds rummages over video clips we would love to act.

Activities like kisses and romance are purely sensual much like enjoying a tickle and laughing in the process. It has no connection to love. Love is the commitment to be good to people, to respect and to be loyal to people and to live a way that profits everyone. Relating love to sensualities of looks and romance is the greatest seduction history has had on almost everyone. Everything we know about sensuality is what we learnt as we grew up and not what our minds recognised from its inception unlike love that is reckoned with our conscience. The problem is that sensuality constitutes a fallacy. How a person looks is a matter of the probabilities of the combination of genes and has no influence over the mind. Physical beauty does not make people good or better than others, its a fallacy to think that because a woman is physically beautiful she would be naturally graceful and good. Most times, we simply hang out with the so called beautiful people to win the approval of others. It is stupidity to live to gain approval from people who don’t feel your hunger in their abdominals. It is fallacy to think that a relationship is mostly about sex and to try to get the person with the fantasy figure as a friend or a spouse. I guess experience has a bunch of lessons on that already.

I’d see it if you show it to me. I’d hear it if you tell it to me. I’d taste it if you feed me. My nerves will race and let me know when you touch me. My senses tell me a story, they reveal the truth, but sometimes I lie about those truths. I lie that a beautiful face is a creativity from the mind. I have created definitions for love just to incorporate sensuality. Who knows the great people that came way and I never met them because of my sensuality.

Sensuality - the enjoyment, expression, or pursuit of physical, especially sexual, pleasure.

Dedicated to Elizabeth Essien, a buddy with a beautiful mind.

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