Love, after all!!
What is love? Is it about candlelight dinners and a walk along the beach side holding hands and whispering those sweet nothings into his/her ear? Or is it about my heart skipping a beat whenever that someone is around me — well that has happened way too many times with way too many people!! I have always wondered about love and my experience with this emotion. Love visits us in different forms and from many sources and we happen to show love in different ways to different people and things. Yes, there are many who love things!!
Love — a very loosely used term and one of the most complicated emotions, according to me. From I love ice cream to I love you until death does apart — I have heard this word being used so many times every day. For me, personally, using this word takes a lot of time and effort. It does come naturally when it comes to certain “things” but with people I become extremely careful but why? “Pyar baantthe raho” — this is what I have always believed in but somehow telling someone “I love you” has become more and more difficult over years.
Most often, from childhood I have come across love to be associated with restrictions, possessiveness, authority, ownership and compromise. If we reflect, we ‘ll realise that we actually end up controlling everything or everyone we claim to love. We are obsessed with what we love. And this leads to us not able to give space and not able to let go. As a parent, as a teacher, as a spouse, as a partner — we do this over and over again.
Love is about respect, growth, acceptance and trust. This is true to any relationship. Most of us confuse our sense of ownership over anything we think is ours as love. But that is not love for others but obsession of self. What is mine needs utmost attention, it must be like what I think it should be and must agree to whatever I think or I say. Don’t we do this to our children also? We decide everything for them ever since they are born and one fine day when nature and learning gives them the capability to be free of our intervention, we still do not let go. We do this to each other also. The woman I love should be everything I desire her to be and vice versa. Any deviation in this creates an imbalance. Most often I have found that a relationship becomes nothing but an obligation.
No relationship can exist without differences, without arguments, without adapting, without letting go….we all know this and have said this many times. But yet we end up owning everything we love! We forget that too much of anything is bad. The obsession we have with all that we love hinders growth and leads to suffocation which in turn leads to bitterness and cracks that can never be filled. The fact that we always want the best side of people we love, we always want them to be what we expect them to be is in itself a clear indication of how we are so self centered, we expect everything about everyone who we love to be what we desire it to be and not what is natural to him or her.
“I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe
Any relationship is about embracing in totality and not in bits. A relationship is also about being aware, being in reality and in the moment and not about chasing a mirage. We all create that image that we want to love or want to be with — this includes children too and start living with those images which actually do not exist. We keep building up again and again on this initial image and when we come face to face with reality, we get dejected and disillusioned and then try to change everything to get that image — make it a reality. But alas! Much to our dismay that image just is an image and our denial of this wrecks our lives and others’ too.
So let us learn to give and share, give space to thrive, accept and let go, for this is the only way we can discover love and life.
