Love, a Plaything

"Love me, love me
Say that you love me
Fool me, fool me
Go on and fool me"

Lovefool (1996) by The Cardigans

I don't fit in very well with the rest of the guys, I think, and that's really odd because I spent 11 years of my school-life being forcibly ironed in with them. That's right, I was in a single gender school from 1993 to 2007, spending the most impressionable years of my life surrounded by an atmosphere of solid maleness. Maybe my Mom thought that I, being the only boy of my generation of the family, required more masculine influences in my life (either that or she secretly always wanted a queer son, you can never tell). Still, I didn't quite fit in then either. I always felt like I can't connect properly with boys of my age. That's why all my best friends now are girls - there's just something that's not there in a guy-guy friendship. Something basic is missing. Something like, I don't know, a common ground?

It's no accident that most of my readers are girls. If I say half the things I write here to a dude, he'd call me a fag. I feel how a girl would feel sometimes when she's trying to connect to a guy because his emotional pool is just that shallow. He can't quite grasp at any feeling deeper than say, the exhilaration of a goal scored by his favourite footie team (which is invariably Manchester United 90% of the time) or frustration at his girlfriend for telling him that he doesn't know how she feels. Empathy, people, is something males don't have in great supply. That's why they aren't very good listeners or nice friends to talk to about your problems. More importantly, they aren't very capable of feeling other people's pain.

Yes, I'm finally coming to the point of this post.

"All guys in a long distance relationship sure will gatal one," said this one guy in my clinical posting group. I disagreed with him, and said that I'm not like that. Just me, though. No other guy contradicted his statement at all.

He laughed at me. He laughed at me because he thought what I said was an absurdity, some concept that he simply can't understand in his tiny emotionally primitive male mind. If it was a girl, she'd probe further and ask me why. Not a guy though - a guy just ridicules anyone or any idea different from his. That's his reflex. And that's one of the biggest reasons why I hate talking to guys.

I know many guys who cheat on their girlfriends in a long distance relationship and some of them are, I am deeply, deeply ashamed to say, friends of mine. I can only guess at their motives. Is it because they are just weak and their fortitude caved in? Is it because they are looking for assurances of their own attractiveness by seeing how many stupid girls they can string along in their harem? Or is it because of peer pressure - because all the other guys are doing it too? I started thinking about this not so long ago when I learned about the exploits of a certain batchmate of mine who cheats on his girlfriend back at home almost constantly in the two and a half years he spent here in India. Let's take him as a case study here and for convenience's sake, we got to give him an alias. Let's call him... Son-of-a-Bitch.

Son-of-a-Bitch tells everyone unashamedly that he enjoys flirting, saying that his girlfriend does not mind him doing so. What I think she would mind is that her boyfriend is bringing some of these girls he flirts with back to his apartment to spend the night. From what I gathered from his housemates, he would, at times, talk to his real girlfriend on the phone on the balcony outside while another girl is in his bedroom. I heard that the current slut he's seeing actually knows that he's a taken man. For the rest of this post, that's what I'll call her; The Current Slut - y'know, to emphasise her temporariness, and also because, y'know, she's obviously a slut.

A guy in my clinical posting group considered Son-of-a-Bitch his god, presumably for his prowess in fucking around so much. A girl who knew him better than I do said that it wasn't Son-of-a-Bitch's fault because his mother brought him up that way - his mother is the one who told him not to settle for just one when he's all young and shit. See why I called him Son-of-a-Bitch? His mom is evidently a Bitch (so that's what I'll call her for the rest of this post). She actually taught her son to toy with people's love and trust, to hurt and possibly destroy other girls' lives. I don't pray but if I do, I pray that that Bitch's husband will pork some prostitute, contract AIDS and give it to her. If she has a daughter, I pray that she would get fucked by some asshole who already has a girlfriend somewhere and then dump her, leaving her so depressed that she eventually kills herself. I pray that the same thing would happen to Son-of-a-Bitch's daughters too if he has any next time. I'm not being malicious here. I just want that Bitch to experience the full scope of misery and wretchedness of what she unleashed in the form of her son on this world. I have a sister, and I might have daughters in the future, so my anger is totally righteous - which is more than what I can say for that Bitch and her son.

I asked many girls in my class for their opinions of cheating boyfriends, and what would they do if their own boyfriends cheat on them. Here's what I got;

Most of them told me that it's normal for a guy to cheat on his girlfriend and that they expect such a thing to happen - so they'd probably forgive the guy for his "momentary lapse(s) of judgement" Only one girl said that she would never forgive such a thing. ONLY ONE. Imagine that. So, it's now socially acceptable for guys to be unfaithful, is it? Is that why I can actually overhear guys brag gleefully to each other out in the open about how they cheated on their girlfriends these days?

That's the fucking problem. The only reason why guys think it's okay to cheat on you is because you girls let them. It's not that men are completely incapable of resisting the temptation (I'm the fucking living proof) - I'm telling you that they can. They just willfully and knowingly choose to gamble your happiness away for a bit of fun because, let's face it, you've been practically encouraging them to do that to you from the start.

I remember when I first got together with Phoebe, she told me "If you cheat on me, please don't let me find out. So long as I don't know, I'm happy."

"Is that the best you expect of me?" I remember replying. "You expect too little. I'm so much better than that."

Phoebe, I will never ever cheat on you. If Love can make people do impossible things, it can definitely make me do something as simple and easy as staying faithful to you, regardless how far apart we are. Whatever sort of boyfriend I might be now or later, this is something I will never compromise.

Girls, if your boyfriend cheats on you, he doesn't love you. Absolutely no question there. What he has for you is either just lust, infatuation, empty commitment or selfish possessiveness - call it whatever the fuck you want - but it isn't Love. To call it Love is to cheapen the meaning of Love. Stop deluding yourselves. Stop giving him your approval of his lying, cheating, licentious ways. If he cheats on you, grab a kitchen knife, slice his dick off, and shove it up his ass. That's what I told Phoebe to do to her future boyfriends if she and I don't work out. That's what I'm going to tell my daughters too. If Lorena Bobbit got away with it, so can you.

There's this book I read by Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun, which tells the story of the life of a man named Hajime. He had a girlfriend when he was sixteen - a sweet and outgoing girl called Izumi. Then he cheated on her with her cousin, of all people, and when Izumi found out, they broke up and he never heard from her again. Hajime later bumped into an old classmate when he was thirty six years old, and had made a success of himself in life. That old classmate then told Hajime that he ran into Izumi a while back and said that Izumi is "no longer attractive" and is living alone in some apartment. He said that no one in the apartment building had ever spoken to her, that she would just walk past people who says hello to her and that the children "are afraid of her face". That old classmate refused to elaborate why, saying that Hajime would have to see her for himself to understand. He did meet her later on, of course, and he was thoroughly shaken by what he saw. In Hajime's own words, he said,

"Her face had nothing you could call and expression. No, that's not an entirely accurate way of putting it. I should put it this way: Like a room from which every last stick of furniture had been taken, anything you could possibly call an expression had been removed, leaving nothing behind. Not a trace of feeling grazed her face; it was like the bottom of a deep ocean, silent and dead. And with that utterly expressionless face, she was staring at me."

It scares me. It scares me how each of us has the power to utterly ruin someone's life when that someone trusted us to hold their heart in our hands and not break it. It scares me how utterly we can break it.

Don't cheat on the one who loves you. Please.



One Love,
k0k s3n w4i