The young guys of these days know next-to-nothing on the art and science of catching correct babes of their choice.
The dashing bachelors are too wrong-headedly romantic for their own good such that they almost always end up missing the essence and falling in love with an accident.
Back in my days, before the Pentecostal pastor became a sorcerer’s apprentice, I was a rugged reporter who had only one torn jeans trousers as the only article of sartorial elegance.
A colleague of mine had all the super-duper suits, ties, shoes, cars – in short, the whole works of modern deportment.
Now a story is never interesting if there is no babe inside.
There was this cool lady trained in America who my colleague had an interest in. Fine guy was forever taking her to lunch, movies and whatnot.
But we all knew that he was making no headway in the vital department of getting the babe to surrender in the manner that Margaret Singana sang: “I do surrender”.
“Go and teach that fine bobo who is wasting everybody’s time a lesson in how to make a babe surrender!” It was an order to me by another colleague of ours, a boon companion of mine who like me had only one pair of torn jeans trousers, only dirtier than mine!
I laughed in conspiracy with my companion as we chorused like we always did: “If you give a babe dinner, she gives you ndina!”
There is the Yoruba folk story translated by Bakare Gbadamosi and Ulli Beier which blasphemously declared: “Not even God is ripe enough to catch a woman in love.”
In my case, however, God was quite ripe enough to catch the babe in love as it did not take any time at all for me to strike and make hay.
To keep this short story very short, my colleague of the fine suits became very devastated when he saw that the angel of his dream was now coming to work from my Ikate shack!
He complained to not a few friends that I had used juju!
The rumour spread fast and free that I had procured the “Touch & Follow” otumokpo charm from a dreaded juju-man in Agege, near Pen Cinema.
I had a good laugh with my goddess from America as we departed hand-in-hand to my shack after every workday.
Some colleagues even remonstrated with my catch thusly: “Why are you following that Oshodi boy?”
“It’s the natural Oshodi in him that I adore,” replied my jewel of surrender, much to their chagrin.
She became fond of buying me Star lager in numbers, and insisted that any competition done by Nigerian Breweries on the Star brand that’s not won by me must have been rigged!
The point is that romance has no formula.
One particular formula never fails: try the horror movie!
Now that I have mentioned movies, let me tell the love story of a favourite actress of mine, Diahann Carroll, who died recently at age 84, and played a leading role to break racial barriers in America alongside the first black Oscar winner, Sidney Poitier.
The interesting story is that Diahann and Sidney P fell in love while acting on a set.
They decided they would divorce their spouses and get married.
Diahann promptly divorced her husband.
Sidney did not have enough guts to divorce his wife.
When Diahann started a relationship with another man, a jealous Sidney warned the new lover to stay off his babe.
Well, Sidney eventually divorced his wife.
Then Sidney & Diahann went off to get married but quarrelled on the way and never married in the end.
As I have given the example of the disaster of a romance between the film stars, Sidney and Diahann, I will now come to the crux of my argument: Don’t take any babe to a love film in the bid to win her love!
A friend of mine once made the mistake of taking an intended to a very romantic film. When the smooching by the film stars got very heavy my friend felt he had got the girl hooked. He tried his own smooching and got a hot slap in reply. The girl walked away from the film hall in anger. End of romance. A tear for lover-boy!
The real wise guy takes a babe to a horror film such as Dracula, The Exorcist, The Omen etc. Once the vampire appears, your girl will out of fear and fright hug you, hold you tight and surrender entirely to you for protection.
It’s then incumbent on you to hold her for keeps, for life.
A horror film comes with nightmares, so you must continue to protect her from the raging vampires upon matrimony.
Matrimony? Now, that’s the real horror movie, for as Ambrose Bierce states, “Love is temporary insanity curable by marriage!”
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a renowned poet, journalist and author