I love love. Its existence, processes, manifestations and even its conclusion. I love love so much that I research it, what motivates it, how the human mind interprets it, how it is defined in different societies and to different ages. I have probably watched more romance movies than you can name, not limiting myself to any country, in a bid to know and understand love.

In my reality, love exists all around me. I see it in my fathers eyes; I hear it in my brother's laugh; I taste it in ice cream shared with my best girl Bolu and I smell it in the cologne that wraps around me in the warmth of Ife’s hugs. But falling in love is hard for me. Even with all my knowledge on the complexities and processes of love, I cannot understand the how of falling in love, not because I do not want to fall, but I fear that in falling I will lose myself.

Philophobia, the fear of falling in love.

This fear plagues me when my heart skips a beat at the sight of a pretty boy. This fear lays on me like a blanket when my cheeks heat up and the corners of my lips turn up at the voice of a crush. I am an expert at crushing, on good days, I have a new crush every week because I see the wonder all around and the beauty of God in people and I find myself inexplicably drawn to that. But, when it comes to truly falling in love, I falter.

You are probably wondering why? What exactly is so scary about love? To that I say nothing and everything. There’s this saying. “It is better to have loved and lost, than to not have loved at all.” I consider that saying to be wrong. It is easy to say that when you have not felt the pain of a love lost. 

The three times I have loved in the past, I have lost them all and that’s just in the area of romantic love. Even out of that with friends and family, I know what loss feels like and it scares me how much I can change because of that loss.

Love is sacrifice, giving yourself and receiving from someone else and I would rather not try than to lose so much.

The irony presents itself in the surging desire to fall in love again. As I reach the plateau in my season of romantic apathy, I want to love some one, not everyone. This desire reminds me of the joy that love brings me and it evokes the memories of bliss that love brought me in the past leaving me with a conflicted spirit.

At the end of the day, love, like the enigma that it is, has a way of sneaking up on you, the butterflies move so stealthily that you do not feel them flutter until there is a whole kaleidoscope in your belly.