The greatest gift anyone can give the community is well behaved children. Dr Amos Wilson’s teaching on Love is amazing and this post is dedicated to him. Dr Amos Wilson teaches that love doesn’t flow naturally from the heart but it is taught through our experiences and environment (family and community). It is our community that defines what love is, but what if our community says they’re ‘Drunk in Love’, ‘Crazy in Love’, ‘Dangerously in love’ (I know they’re all Beyonce song titles but she has one of the largest platforms to influence at lot of people), and if we are not any of the above it can’t be love. Society has taught us that love is a feeling and if we are not in a state of euphoria all the time with our other half then we want to part ways or get divorced.

How we love is influenced and shaped by our social/political systems, hence if you want to destroy a community, you need to destroy their ability to love one another (divide and conquer). Good parenting and love is a gift to the community, as a teacher there is nothing more pleasant than teaching a good child, they are a delight and I look forward to meeting their parents. Love is necessary for community functioning, your love relationships particularly between a man and a woman should influence the people around you, they should be driven to unite and commit to others around them, this is what helps to support the nature of love between community. Love shouldn’t be merely the concern of you and your partner but should be part of a wider community of living, I’m not talking about the plethora of Instagram or Facebook posts of what you and your boo are doing but is your love so genuine that it inspires others to either renew their love or pursue an new love.  Your love permits others to develop their potential, it’s like what sunlight does to plants.

Marrying for love is quite a new phenomenon. The institute of marriage use to be about keeping wealth within certain families, marriage was a business. Some parents would pick out the marriage partner of their children while they were still children and this is still  practiced in some cultures to this day. Although the idea of marrying for love is more popular today, is love enough? (“Love ain’t gon pay dese bills” *in my best southern American accent). Most of the time love is based on fear, fear of rejection so I’ll just have his baby and maybe then he will love me, fear of loneliness so I’ll just settle for her even though she wasn’t my first choice, fear of self he or she makes me escape reality, that’s why we smoke,drink and get high together. None of this is a healthy type of love.

To develop healthy relationships, our community needs to redefine what love is. It is in our best interest as a community to model what healthy relationships and healthy love looks like. It’s all about growth and development, anything that you love will grow and develop and this should be expressed in all relationships, self love, romantic love, family love, community love. Love is goodness and healing and if you want to see something grow and develop your concern will be to disseminate honesty, openness, kindness. Ultimately you will produce good, open and honest children and as a result the cycle continues. What does love mean to you folks?