Yuwathiyakata Oba Adarenam Lyrics by Billy Fernando

If a young woman loves you,
tell her so.
And if you are too slow to say it,
then put her out of your mind.

You who drift from one hand to the next,
don’t go breaking hearts.
The friend who longed for your love,
don’t deceive her any further.
Love is what gives life its meaning,
don’t go spoiling it.

In every moment of our lives,
be thoughtful and careful.
The water looks lovely and calm on the surface,
but know that it runs deep too.
Before you set out to love, my friend,
think of her as something sacred.

This is an advice song, one friend talking plainly to another about how to treat a woman who loves him. There is no aching narrator here, no sleepless night. Instead it is a steady, almost older-brother voice laying down a simple code of decency: if a young woman gives you her heart, either return it honestly or step away, but never play with it.

The song opens with a clean rule. If a girl loves you, say so. And if you can’t bring yourself to say it, if you keep stalling, then have the grace to let her go and stop thinking of her. The point is to spare her the cruelty of being kept waiting. From there the voice turns sharper, calling out the kind of man who goes “from one hand to the next,” a man who moves through one girl after another without ever meaning any of it. To him the song says plainly: don’t break hearts, and don’t deceive a girl who only wanted your love. Then it lifts to the line the whole song rests on, that love is the very meaning of life, so don’t go cheapening it or dragging it through the dirt.

The image at the heart of the song is the still water. The lyric paints a calm pond, lovely and smooth on top, and then warns that the same water runs deep. It is a gentle way of saying that a woman’s love is not the shallow, easy thing a careless man takes it for. What looks soft and quiet on the surface holds real depth underneath, real feeling you can drown in if you treat it lightly. So the closing line asks the listener to slow down before he loves at all, and to think of her as something sacred, almost a goddess, rather than someone to use and leave.

What you are left holding is less a love story than a quiet lesson in respect. It speaks to every young man tempted to treat affection as a game, and it answers him kindly but firmly: love is the meaning of life, so handle it like the precious, deep thing it is.