Chances are high that before your 25th birthday you would have told more than one person that you love them (this doesn’t include members of your family, your pet, Xbox or play station as the case may be). I’m talking about a human being you might have met on a course, in a bar, or as is becoming more common, online. But have you ever really thought about what loving someone really means in the context of a relationship?

Unfortunately, for the most part we have been educated on love via the media in the form of songs, films, books, and other less accurate and often misleading mediums. Kinda like how we are educated on the art of sex via porn. Our parents will not discuss this, and even if they did their era and ours are of different views as regards to love and romanticism. Schools will have us learning how to put condoms on bananas and cucumbers but a lesson on the emotional aspect of one of the most fundamental part of our well-being remains amiss in the classroom.

 The result of this is a world of the blind leading the blind and hence a series of heartbreaks, finger pointing, and general misery ending with the conclusion that all men are the same or that all women are the same (deduced from the not-so-accurate statistical sample of the insignificant few out of the billions).

No one can tell you what love is because no one really knows. People can only tell you what works for them but that is no guarantee that it will work for you. Up until very recently relationship advice have been on the model of one size fits all, but in a progressively individualistic society it becomes more and more clearer that this idea will not help us solve our relationship issues. Through the course of my posts I am hoping to discuss current trends in the dating and relationship playing field and how we can take advantage of social studies (not the type you learned in school) to improve our chances of finding, keeping, and maintaining a healthy relationship.

William Ifeanyi Moore