What's love got to do with it?

My naïve 15-year-old cousin stormed into my bedroom one afternoon and acknowledged the shock of her life by a sudden silence.

My naïve 15-year-old cousin stormed into my bedroom one afternoon and acknowledged the shock of her life by a sudden silence.

As soon as she came up with the total from her calculations, she proceeded: "Coz, what is love?"

And she asked with an urgent air of excitement.

You know that ventilation that got you a smack if you grew up in the 1980s? Now where I come from, such light in the eyes calls for family planning (they should stop using this name) appointment. Instead I decided to be an adult and gasped for air before asking: "What do you mean?" I felt so old.

"I mean what do people feel first before they say they are in love?"

She thinks there's just one answer to this rocket science question.

Let's see. Uhmm, love is when two people meet and although the other is still licking wounds from the last loud illiterate, she lets her guard down.

She takes him in, he proves to be a domestic star, he starts cooking and he engages her with an expensive rock.

Two months later he gets an involuntary transfer and they never again share a bed, even today, even though they are still lawfully married. That's the number it did to a neighbour.

Love is sometimes as sweet as it is bitter. Take this bloke who gets seduced by the preacher's daughter and gets besotted.

He dumps his varsity studies to work for her. He buys her heaps of chocolate boxes, lingerie and all that her heart desires.

They shag like mad, everywhere, and with each expedition he promises to marry her, to her delight.

One day he tries to kiss her and she turns the other way before coming clean that she loves someone else. A married man. That's love kicking my cousin in the eye.

Or how about this sweet tale of joined-at-the-hip friends who grow up thinking they will go to the same college and go out with brothers and live in the same yard and . yuck.

All is hunky dory and they hold hands walking towards their history class and get periods on the same day ... Until a man comes into the picture and makes them arch enemies.

Sometimes love makes you lose dear people, or is it the other way around? Same results; ask a woman who knows.

I think the sterling, shining example of love straight from Cupid is the story of a woman who so loved her man she gave up her dreams.

She stretched herself on a dust road and asked this man to use her as his red carpet, forgoing all her interests.

One day she came back from work and found him naked with their maid.

"The only thing I looked for around them was a condom and there weren't any."

So this man had better respect for the maid. "She's got pride ." he explained. That's love telling you to have eyes in the back of your neck, like it did to my aunt.

Are we making progress yet? Let's take out this one about a no-good man who meets an equally bad-news woman.

He stays with his granny and so does she. They make a total nuisance of themselves, bunking college, smoking cigarettes and in the end they manage to make an ugly baby.

Three of four months later the old lady comes knocking on his forever-locked door. She demands some respect and he decides he knows where his bread is buttered so he succumbs to her new iron fist, much to the disgust of baby's mother.

She, having long given up on a bright future, decides to hell with both the baby and him, she's going to join the lucrative streets of Hillbrow and make something bad of herself.

Instead she is knocked dead by a stray bullet and she comes back in a coffin. They say she was always walking next to the 10 Commandments. I say he cemented the notion by taking her as she was.

Ain't that love turning bad girls into brazen whores?

For Romeo and Juliet it took them to the grave.

For Adam and Eve, it introduced the concept of sin and death.

For Samson and Delilah it led to the concept of betrayal regardless of feelings.

Imagine someone you sleep with and they take money to hand you over like a sheep to the slaughterhouse.

I didn't see any sign of concession. Instead my cousin gave the look that says just because I'm pushing 40 and my booty no longer makes waves, I must not make it her problem.

But one day my advice will come in handy and I hope it works before she is left holding a snotty, fat baby and a photo of the father who bailed out the minute he got that SMS.