A Treatise on Sweetened Falsehoods - by Oluwatobi Kolawole

--- When people lie, we are sometimes indifferent about it, and it's because we have a directional response towards it. A vectored premise that either evokes a feedback, or leaves us ethically lost or even nonchalant, as the case may be. We worry if, as a preposition, the lie is at, about, for, or against us, and we echo its relevance afterwards, most times, immediately. We don't hate lies or liars; we just permit or ignore the direction it is aimed at.We see it, the way the eyes blink rapidly, and how difficult it is for the words to gain a tinge of congruence. A unanimity that lives far from the ground they stand. Veracity is distant because subterfuge is an acquaintance. We see it, and if humility has any iota of hold on the speakers, they'd notice it, and weep for themselves later on.A close friend chose the earthly consummation of love this past week. The prelude ceremonies to the betrothal had little effect on me till I saw her in white, dancing for, and at an audience with so much culinary pleasure in front of them. African weddings are also vectorized performances. Just like lies, they are permitted or ignored by some. They become the black box for the beginnings of whatever way the rehearsed romance turns out to be. Sweet or sour.Within that love-bombed environment, I used humor to shroud my struggle with coming up with an encomium for the one I'm a scion of. My childish affections are all around me; I fear I'd lie. Years ago, a friend said poetic statements carried too many hyperbolic words, and for her, that was an issue. A whole existence, and ego inflated by words. Once it bursts, one can even slip into depression.People don't know how literary engagements leave me undone in whatever version they come up as. The science of it is fascinating. Even a line that houses meanings, and coated with phrases like brevity is the soul of the witty, takes a lot of effort and adventure into a memory span. But as always, I hope it comes to me soon, so that I can piece together an eulogy for him, because it is so well deserved for a man like him. The king of dads. It's the eve of the event. I've handled all memories gently. With a subtle desire to gentrify the rough edges of hard times. Ready to offer an ameliorated version.In this country, where home finds a space, the people here, just like the way I disguised my struggle, practice Gallow humors in response to unfortunate events. When foreigners study us, they refer to us, most ironically, as the happiest people on earth, and no one would doubt that, not in the slightest bit. Here is a redolent of unreasonable happenings. You won't get the explanation, even if it was broken down for you like you were a two-year-old. We lie. We die.We call chubbiness evidence of good living. In other climes, the uneasiness attached to it requires medical emergencies. Fat-burning Tabatha and high intensity trainings. When people take morning jogs, we mock them as jobless. Portion control is a myth. Not at Iya Latifa's Booka. Dinner is not dinner until it's a truckload of carbohydrates mixed in bleached, seasoned oil with leaves fighting for space in the midst of chopped up animals. ifitness is just a counter-narrative, the real heroes might be dietitians.Part of our mastered humor is to look towards the hill of our political history and present governance, and decide that banter must be given more relevance than the acquisition of voters card. Parallels are so easy to deduce, because as it was in the beginning, so it is, world without end.The thorn in the flesh of the feminine gender here is being betrothed in the most committed way that brings to reality wearing a white lacy dress that sweeps the floors they walk on as they walk into those well-built cathedrals, most times empty, with someone, almost like a overburdened servant striving to ensure that the flowing gown does not sweep too much dust. Leave a little for the cleaners of the cathedral. Generosity.Older women hit younger women with the question that ought to sound like a loving concern, but never is, that suggests that a spinster should know the geographic location of a prospective spouse. Where is your husband? The feminists, I say this with a smirk on my face, have crafted a rebuttal that displays the unhappiness of a lot of aged women who claim marriage is the way, the truth, and the life, and that it's supposed to make them, or any other woman, happy. The data was published, and now the tone of those calibrated askings has been mitigated. Aura for aura. The aged still lay claim to happiness with a slightly opened door of escape, where they claim the young do not understand. We lie.Everybody is chasing money now. Including the men, the aged women think they should have a location tag on them. A location-based push notification initiative where a geofence for single men is established holds better water than the basket of dating apps. I understand Ikoyi and other lucrative vicinities might get so much cluster and visits, for hypergamy sake, and the fact that Pareto didn't postulate his principle for nothing, we must allow it. Let's wallow in the lie that love is the bond that keeps everything together, while the rich steal the love objects of the poor.Perhaps, a geofence on single women would flip the narrative, too. I speak as a man.Everything, including pain, tastes better with a level of acceptance. Knowing the human condition didn't only bring us this far but also constrained us to believe that que sera, will always sera. --- Author's NoteI did not write this piece to accuse anyone. Not the liar. Not the lover. Not the bride in white. Not even the country that laughs in the middle of its own storms. I was simply trying to sit with a question that has stayed with me for a long time. Why do we tolerate some lies and resist others? Why does the direction of a thing matter more than the thing itself?As I wrote, I kept returning to the idea of performance. The small, rehearsed answers in everyday conversations. The grand rehearsed romance at a wedding. The public humor that hides private fatigue. We are all editing ourselves in one way or another. I am no different. If anything, I recognize my own fingerprints all over these pages.The wedding stirred something tender in me. There is something about seeing someone who is a good friend step into a new life that softens you. But it also reminded me how fragile words can be. I have always been wary of exaggeration. Not because I dislike beauty, but because I have seen how language can inflate expectations until they become impossible to live inside. This note is my admission that I sometimes struggle to say what I feel without fearing I might overstate it.When I speak about food, politics, marriage, and money, I am not pointing fingers from a distance. I am inside the circle. I laugh at the same jokes. I eat the same meals. I have hidden behind humor when things felt too heavy to name directly. If there is irony in these reflections, it is affectionate. If there is criticism, it includes me.I am also aware that I write as a man shaped by his own experiences and limitations. The thoughts about marriage and expectation are not verdicts. They are observations from someone trying to understand the theater we all move through. The jokes about GPS and geofencing are not really about technology. They are about our longing to make complicated human desires feel manageable.At its heart, this essay is about acceptance. Not the kind that shrugs and gives up, but the kind that looks at the human condition honestly. We contradict ourselves. We disguise pain. We celebrate loudly. We sometimes tell ourselves stories just to keep going.If there is a hope in all of this, it is simple. That we might hold truth a little more gently. That we might allow ourselves to be imperfect without pretending otherwise. And that in the middle of all our performances, we can still recognize what is real.

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