What's the nature of love?

Love is a four letter word, which is as vulgar as it gets. Women are particularly fond of using the "L" word, especially when it comes to trying to get something out of men. How many times, for example have you (guys - heard this, girls used this) had the following phrases heard:

• If you really loved me, you would buy me a diamond ring?
• I love you that's why I am with you?
• Do you love me?
• If I didn't love you, I wouldn't want to spend time with you?
• You don't love me anymore!

Seriously, love is a word that is used so often that it cease to have any meaning unless there's something to be gained out of it - women are guilty of doing this and men are especially guilty of being suckered into it. - Oh yeah, I hear the guys say - but rest assured, even the most ardant playboy ends up being suckered into that all powerful female trap known as love and marriage.

What is love really? Women, it seems, think of love as a permenant attachment, while men, we think of it as something that makes the hormones in the nether regions rise to the brain. While men are accused of thinking about their trouser snakes too often, I'm inclined to think that the greater sin is that we think with our trouser snakes rather than think about the little trouble maker. If women are supposed to suffer from "Penis Envy," I believe that the greatest curse on men is actually - the Penis, which is both the man's best friend but at the same time, also his worst enemy.

But what would I know? I am, as they say, just a mere cynic, a fool who knows the price of everything and yet, and yet makes the choice of the suicidal and insane. What could I possibly know that messers Thomas, William and Harry don't?

The answer is a tragic nothing. Personal experiences with that four letter word are best left in to a night of getting drunk and lying naked in the gutter, as Raymond so often says. I've seen love turn tragically wrong, blissfully happy and .............so on and so on.

So let me try and sum up what the nature of love could be in the modern context:

Love is:

• When you can't stop thinking about a person
• When you start to notice and take pleasure in the most minute and silly detail of that person.
• When in spite of having no common language, you find a way communicating.
• When you'll do things so just to see the other person smile.

So there you have it - love summed up in a few short lines - easier to send it in memo form than in the words of a poet.