This Sunday, I and two other members of our barangay Lupon Pangkat shall try to solve a case that should be a walk in the park, as they say, if it’s just a question of settling debts, like with some disputes that regularly confront community residents. This particular case, however, involves two teen-agers, a boy and a girl, and it’s not about having to compel one to pay back money owed the other but about the boy claiming his supposed right in the upbringing of the little bundle the girl is cradling tightly in her arms.
Alas, another love story gone sour. It’s sad because this coming February 14 is Valentine’s Day and the children of Eros will go overboard in the celebration of love.
For sure there’s going to be soaring sales, and prices, of flowers, red roses, particularly, mushy-worded Valentine cards and boxes of chocolates. Not to forget prophylactics.
For sure also rooms have been reserved in advance in all the trysting places in Sta. Mesa, Pasig, around the alleys in Qiuapo, Cubao and neighboring towns. The restaurants and eateries at the malls, the eating digs in Ortigas, along Timog and other snooty streets in Makati will be full to capacity and one would be lucky to be lower than number 10 on the waiting list of diners very hungry na. Also the lines at the movie houses are going to be long if not longer as that of irate commuters hitching for MRT rides.
All these in celebration, even for just one day, of that ‘great, big, marvelous thing called love,’ as writer ‘Live’ divines it and who got 1,560,000 answers on Google to her question, ‘What is love?’
Right she is when she says love ‘will be the one thing left’ after everything else go pfft!
Really, who could resist the ‘euphoric feeling’ of love which is akin to the ‘effects of cocaine or heroin?’ asks Dr. Lucy Brown, a professor of neurology in her studies of brain activities of people in love.
Indeed the pursuit of love is so intense and strong that supposedly ‘intelligent people’ do ‘idiotic things’ going for it, according to Dr. Brown.
Like searching for love and romance in the Internet where there are hundreds, nay, perhaps thousands of bleeding-heart apps worldwide to help lovelorn searchers.
Fine, except that with the hits are the thousand-fold misses.
Incompatibility, true, is a main reason for the misconnections but those in the know point to scammers as the culprits. Savvy back alley operators know that people yearning for love and companionship oftentimes act and think irrationally. They respond only to what they want to hear or see and these are what the scammers give them. Bankbooks and hearts, broken as they are, are lost in the process.
As there are thousands of grieving hearts who rued the day they became users of dating sites and apps, there are thousands who have come to terms with being jilted or with the demise of their loved ones. They are moving on and with a smile remember that the times they had with their beloved have been simply amazing.
This Sunday I will ask the young couple why their relationship ended so early. At his moment I can guess theirs was just mere attraction to each other that needed time to nurture, for it to bloom into real love. There should have been formal courtship first like – don’t giggle – the old-fashioned but tested panunuyo where the wooer and wooed get to know each other until such time they would have attained the Japanese ‘wabisabi’ – seeing ‘beauty … in imperfections.’
But I am afraid the youngsters rushed from Dunkin Donuts through a narrow hallway to Sogo hotel one evening and realized the morning after one was just somebody the other used to love.
Photo credits: www.flickr.com/photos/vinothchandar