Boys lied through their teeth, it was 'sweet’ in the girls’ ears

When I see infatuated kids dripping with dramatised affections, my mind takes me back to the days of the yore when love was the way we read it in the cheap Mills and Boon paperback novels (they were popular with girls. Boys enjoyed crime James Hardley Chase and Nick Carter) and the way soap operas depicted it to be.

My high school headmaster called this kind of sloppy love “puppy love.”

In our time, we wrote endless letters, wrote poems, and talked ourselves hoarse, reciting “lyrics” that, looking back, could not impress a monkey on cocaine.

There was no internet or mobile phones. Indeed, mobile phones were the reserve for aliens from outer space.

The girls loved it

I have never been a woman, and I have no intention of becoming one soon. What puzzles me is that women swallow men’s lies line, hook, and sinker.

Men can lie through their teeth, and many women do not stop to validate such lies.

In those days, we wrote to girls, telling them that we were so in love with them that we could swim across Lake Victoria for them even when we were afraid of drowning in the bucketful of water.

Our lies were so good that girls believed that we neither ate nor slept because we were so in “love” with them, our gleaming health conditions notwithstanding.

All that time, we ate heartily and slept like pythons after swallowing a hefty meal.

Whenever they showed up at home after Sunday service, we would play Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’s country music (we were so naïve about music, and the village in us knew nothing better).

Some of us joined the church choir even though our voices could not be differentiated from the croaking of thirsty toads just to be near our “loves.”

Then came the college years, and we were “married” to this or that fresher. We had stupid haircuts and dressed freely.

Girls dressed like the downtown prostitutes and boys donned styles that would make our parents back home turn away in shame.