The concept of ‘love’ is one that has lived with man for such a very long time now. Notwithstanding the fact of this long period of mutual(?) co-existence, man has neither understood its source nor is he fully familiar with its meandering.

But how did love first come into play within the realm of human interactions? I mean, who invented love? This I do not know. If I had known, I would have listed him amongst the greatest inventors of all times. I say ’him’ because I am so certain it was a man. No woman would have thought of such things and even if she did, she would have thought twice before mentioning it.

Although the woman has come to be the greater beneficiary of the modern clone of the concept, uncertainty and slack-footedness would probably have prevented her from venturing into the open with such an untested idea. But man at that time was more bold, more daring and adventurous, especially if such ventures were, in his thinking, to the good of the woman created for him.

The original concept of love was truly pristine and illuminating. It was invented as a tool to create the balance between man and woman. Such balance was necessary because, since man was created with great power and strength, he would have become self-destruct without a weakling into which he could civilly empty his excess energy. Love was therefore the tool to tame man’s power; to teach him the civil use of his strength; to direct his passion to create and not destroy; to procreate and not be extinct; to warm and not burn; to build and not pull down; to gather and not scatter. Love was to teach man how to apply power gently and positively.

For this reason a weak woman was created for him. She was the reservoir into which man was to empty his extra power lest he be consumed by it, and the empty woman needed the man’s fullness to fill her void . She needed his strength to survive the harsh environment, and he needed her weakness to reduce and control his excesses.

The man’s strength was for protection and security. He was the military and she was his territory, such that without the military the territory is vulnerable, and without the territory the military is without relevance. While the 'cold' woman needed the heat generated by the man’s power for her warmth, the 'hot' man needed her to cool his furnace. The vague woman needed the man to give her an identity, while the definite man needed her to expand and explain his definition. The man, created from the earth, needed the woman to reach the heights, and the floating woman needed him to cover the grounds. Relationship was give-and-take: the man had the tangibles and the woman the intangible.

Love was the nozzle of transfer. It was the software that made the tough man capable of handling the soft woman without breaking her. The man was the first and the woman the last, but love came in as the continuum (life without end). Indeed, the original love was good, it was beautiful. Can you see it? Man:- too strong, too aggressive, too powerful, too full, too hot, too grounded, definite. The woman:-too weak, too soft, too empty, too cold, vague, floating, terminal. Love:-the blender, the balancer, the equaliser, the stabiliser, the binder,the continuator.

The man, on his part, took his task of providing protection for the woman with pre-eminent seriousness, and mustered strategies to ensure that he succeeded. First, he built a hedge around her. Within the hedge, she became not just his ‘woman’ but his ‘wife’, such that he could kill or die for her if the need arose. He developed cultures that curtailed her circulation so that she may not wonder into the way of harm. Because of her frailty, he kept her from work. Because of her high value, he kept her within his chamber, away from the snatching hands of the outside world. For her soft and gentle voice he prevented her from talking in public, which required force and authority, and so on.

The man would need his wife to cool him down when he returned from confronting the severity of food gathering and securing his territory. He would need her to reset him and prepare him for the next day, and if such tasks as cooling and refreshing him were too tedious for just one wife, he would bring in more, for he hated that the woman should suffer. He loved her.

However, over the millennia of human existence, the woman started seeing the man’s hegemony and his strategies as enslavement. She reasoned that she had to break free from the man’s pampering grip to also be counted as an equal in the human community, as if she wasn't already. She knew, though, that everything she was and everything she had came from the man. She no longer wanted to serve her naturally assigned complimentary role, but started developing the idea of also becoming the source, (the gatherer) rather than just the beneficiary and the dispenser. She wanted equality with the man; to be independent and self sufficient; to be free from the man for whom she was created. This idea brought the need for her to start stockpiling what she was receiving from the man - those things which she thought made him 'the man'.

To achieve this, the woman had to introduce a one-way valve at the nozzle of transfer. Love was compromised. Love was twisted in favour of the woman. The relationship was no longer symbiotic. Man no longer received corresponding compliments for his offerings. Now the man had spent himself supporting the woman who could not be contented; man was emptying himself into a void that would never be filled; he was burning out his furnace for the one who would not be warmed. The man had expended his energy hefting her over himself she was becoming the head. The one who was to give a name could himself no longer be defined without her. His furnace was freezing. Also, because she dominated the heights she also determined the grounds. And worse, the strong started soliciting support from the supported.

The woman now became the owner of both the touchable and the unseen; the boss of the physical and the immaterial; the tangible and the intangible. It came slowly. Subtly. But now man started sensing his diminishing relevance. He noticed that he could no longer get the warmth from even his own heat. He had to beg before he could use his own strength, and so on. He looked around and became wary. Therefore he became tyrannical. Then the woman sensed that the man had discovered her treachery, therefore her fears increased. Panic ensued. And pandemonium.

The woman now had to plug the holes of her sins with even more treachery. Therefore she started building James Baldwin’s “density of passionate connections”, gathering the heat from as many men as she dared with the hope of eluding possible loss in the event that any of the men would succeed in taking back his stolen heat. Unfortunately again, she hid these men in closely packed cubicles and believed the men would not notice each other. But, why not? She even covered them with flimsy layers of over-rehearsed lines - (I love you), and expected that the men, despite their proximity, should not over-hear the lies. Again, why shouldn’t they?

Now, the man became desperate. Very desperate. As his furnace cooled, the man was simmering with rage at such treacherous breach of trust. He was terrified by his obvious vulnerability, his paradoxical and very real helplessness. He had to do something. And so, he set out to do some things, controlled only by his burning rage and abject desperation.

The man started to steal back. Since the path to the woman heart passes directly through his purse size, the man also had to start stockpiling to fatten his purse. This meant to get more than he needed, or could ever legitimately earn - stealing everything from everyone - money, name, cars, houses, influence, positions, governments, land, the sun, moon and stars, even gods. Stealing brought fighting, and more fighting. Fighting brought killings, an more killings, until a vicious cycle was established - Chinua Achebe’s 'widening jeer'. They even started cultivating intra-gender passion in order to escape the fury of the other.

Now the man also started collecting the women, coddling like a baby between their breasts with the hope that even if he could not steal back his stolen heat, he would, at least, be able to diminish his chill. He pretended not to see his fellow men hid in neighbouring cubicles, nor to know the lies. He had become a mirror, reflecting only what the women wanted to see. He became to them what he wasn't and declared to them what he hadn’t. He even told the women how 'beautiful' they were when he meant to say how 'terrible'.

Another type of alteration had again been introduced at the nozzle, now skewed to favour the man. The result was that love was now totally mutilated and defaced. It was no longer impersonal. The grounds of love had been made so slippery and muddy that those who now ventured out had to 'fall' in love instead of balancing and becoming stable in it. Love had become a fraud - there no longer exists 'Love at first sight' as it were, but men now 'love at bust sight' while women 'love at purse size'.

The men now started stealing from each other, and from the women, and from God, and from everybody else; and the women started stealing from each other, and from the men, and from God, and from everybody else. Oh! What a Rat Race. The children produced in the process were sons and daughters of fraud, who only came to carry the misdeeds of their forebears to higher levels of stealing and stealing back. But is there any point in stealing at all if, at the end, one cannot steal back ones stolen property?

The now bastardised and counterfeited 'love' uses one of its most deadly offshoots called ‘sex’ to perpetrate some of the worlds most daring abuses and deadly diseases. The need to stockpile in order to meet the fancy of the opposite sex has been the reason for most crimes of the world today. Women are ready to do anything just to be told they are beautiful. Wives run around the places with boys who can sweat them for hours, paying for their upkeep with the husbands' money. Husbands prefer girls their daughters' ages while their wives are only good for display at functions. Violence between rival school gangs most often erupt in protection of or revenge for ‘lovers’ of their members. Most suicide bombers do so in expectation of sexual rewards with the ‘seventy virgins’ in the hereafter. Undue desire for sex has resulted in population explosion the world over, and under-aged pregnancies, and abortions, and maternal mortalities, and hunger, and deaths. And on, and on, and on…

As it stands, the whole idea of equality and being independent, of being free and also becoming the source, the heinous strategies for stockpiling, the vicious circle of stealing and stealing back, the interpretations of the now mutilated concept of love, and generations of products of the fraud, have left a history of violence and bloodshed that span through millennia. Wars have been waged because of 'love'; nations have been destroyed; widows, widowers and orphans are made every minute; parents have lost their sons and daughters; even religious books have been rewritten to accomodate its lust. Kings and rulers have been brought down, and ordinary men have met untimely ends because of this bastardized concept. 'Love' no longer bears the light of its Divine mastermind, but is arrayed with the garment of the destroyer. Love has lost its original touch. Indeed, there seems to be no family of the world left that has escaped from one or the other of love’s poisonous stings.

The only way out of this corruption is to proscribe what is now known as ‘love’. Yes! Ban 'love' the world over, same way cocaine and marijuana and heroin, etc are banned. Afterall, 'love' and its obnoxious corruptions - sex, lies, hatred, jealousy, robbery, anger, etc - have claimed more lives and destroyed more people than these deadly drugs put together. Therefore I prescribe that the dead sentence be passed on anyone found to be engaged in this illicit relationship. Until the original and God's version of the concept is re-enacted and every man and woman on earth is capable of giving and experiencing the true Love, let this demonic practice be done away with.

The harmful touch of this vice is no respecter of persons or office, colour or race. If still in doubt, ask the first son of the Biblical Jacob; King David and his son Solomon; ask Samson the warrior; President Clinton of USA; Boris Yeltson of Russia; Moshe Ketsav of Israel; Governor Elliot Spitzer of USA; Dominique Straus Kahn of the IMF, Obasanjo of Nigeria, and thousands of thousands of known and unknown victims and culprits. The list is endless and still growing and the devastation is ever sweeping, ever ferocious. However clean one may be, one gets muddy when he/she 'falls in love'.

I am sure this project is lofty and we should implement it. I am sure 'love' should be banned and will be banned. When the right number of the right names have come on the list, when the devastation has sufficiently surpassed this pandemic level, when humanity can no longer pretend about this evil, then the whole world will rise in unison and announce the end of this gimmick called 'love'. Till then, the fire rages on, not relenting, until everyone in its path goes down.© FrancisUdo