‘I wish I had met you 10 years ago,” my lover cooed, after our love-making session, in that unmistakable coquettish tone that lets a guy knows he “done it right”. As she squeezed me tightly in her arms, I realized that a decade ago she would not have touched me with a bargepole. Alas, I was a lout who thought love was a humbug commercial spaceship and had qualms about going down on a woman.

However, I fully understand that her wish to turn back the hands of time is expressed out of sheer frustration about her fear of being caught. For hers is a double life that is spent on borrowed time, guilt-ridden pleasures and cryptic SMSs that would make the Fibonacci code seem amateurish! Indeed, the love of my life is spoken for. She is the “regimented wife” of another man.

Obviously, we are both aware of the hazards of being involved in a “generally corrupt relationship” (to use Justice Squires’s apt phrase) that flies against every social or religious convention. Hence, it was with great pain and emotional trauma that we indulged the feelings of our hearts. Personally, I was reluctant to engage the vagaries of the heart because such relationships can get ugly when the other party finds out. Also, in certain societies, the lure of a forbidden fruit often results in the loss o f a dangling appendage. In fact, this triangular love affair would be easier to handle if it was inspired by mere carnal gratification rather than the fact that we love each other deeply.

Still, those who experience love as a second-hand emotion will be quick to jump on their moral high horses and spew reproachful recriminations about something they cannot fully fathom. In fact, these philistine advocates of moral ambiguity will perpetuate the idea that a heart is merely for pumping blood and nothing else. They will conveniently espouse the silly notion that a man can be taught how to have an erection. To these people only a mind that has snapped can get romantically involved with somebody w ho is stuck in a wheelchair. Only a sick, twisted mind can make one fall in love with a person who is HIV-positive. Moreover, the idea that two people can hook up on an online dating service and fall in love with one another is fanciful imagination. Yet we know that these things happen because, as one sage summed it, “when Cupid strikes everyone is a fool”.

Mind you, most of us dream of getting attached to somebody who is not only agreeable but loves us more than we love them. I am more convinced every day that she is the one for me. She fills me with such blissful contentment that whenever I am in her presence I find myself experiencing what the mystical writer Paulo Coelho referred to as “the desire to be in one place forever”.

We can talk about everything under the sun and seem to connect on the Shakespearean standards of a “marriage of true minds”. And because of the limitations of borrowed time and lack of a proper tryst, we have discovered the mind-blowing beauty and art of telephone sex. Methinks, only a telepathic understanding can make a woman reach her sexual peak on mere hypnotic suggestions.

However, nobody really knows what tomorrow holds for us. Of course, I would love to make an honest woman of her. I would like to engage in a relationship where a hug, a kiss and a telephone call are not pilfered on the incidental absence of the husband. But, quite frankly, I am not naïve enough to imagine that she would forsake the commitment to her husband for this great thing we have going. As Ingrid Bergman demonstrated in the classic cult film, Casablanca, women are very practical. Women would rather of fer fidelity to a dull man who provides them with security than be with a stud whose illicit love makes them reach dizzying erotic heights.

I live with the painful apprehension that, with my rotten luck in love, I may end up clutching feathers while the bird has flown away. But I find comfort in the expression that even if the worst happens, “’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”.

Thus, like an out of form batsman who suddenly finds boundaries where single runs are usually located, I will milk this love for all it’s worth!