Beloved brethren, love shouldn’t be a burden.

Allow me to be your preacher today …

Beloved brethren, love shouldn’t be a burden. It should be one of those feelings that you are happy to carry with you. A feeling that brings you pleasure and an inner peace so deep and a lightness so light that you feel giddy and immensely grateful to have been so afflicted.

But in society today, love is no longer a desirable feeling. Society places on us a burden to continue to unconditionally love worship and adore the person that we fell in love with many years ago. Even though you have changed significantly.

Woe into you if you have dared to achieve this growth and become so different as to see yourself as morally or intellectually superior to your once adorable partner. Even more woe into you if some of that growth was spurred by your partner’s efforts. If for example they paid your school fees.

Society chains you so deep that you would appear a sod to no longer love your partner.

How often do we read letters to Dear Dolly stating without preamble “What should I do? I went to college after we got married and I have bettered myself and my slob of a partner has remained stagnant “.

Answers to this question which is as old as man himself finally conclude with the firm admonishing that you owe your partner the rest of your life. For after all they met you when you were a nobody and they have stuck by you till you became this new person.

And hence is born a love from gratitude. Held together by the shackles of the policing society. The very worst form of love. The kind that is full of guilt and tears at the heart and lends itself to tears on the pillow and teeth gnashing as you constantly chide yourself “I can’t leave this person. I am forever indebted to them. They took a chance on me”.

And if you are a half decent person you wallow silently in misery hoping to one day have the courage to break those invisible chains of gratitude. If you are ever lucky enough to break those chains and realize that you can love this person freely of your choice without societal imposition or the dictates of good manners and norms, then and only then can you genuinely say “I LOVE YOU”

Brethren, this would be the appropriate time to interject “preach!!! Sister! Preach!”

Do I hear an amen?

Get out from under gratitude and learn to love…