Things no one tells you about love
Have you ever been in love?
Yeah? What kind?
Our definition of love usually evolves over time. But in the very beginning, and may be even for the most part…
Love feels like a big dollop of yearning.
It’s the sort of longing for someone or something that seems almost within reach, yet not. Love feels like butterflies in your belly. It sometimes feels like a knot in your groin. Love makes you warm. Love makes you shiver, love makes you calm. Love makes your heart swell. It makes you giggle silly. Love makes you cry. It blurs everything else in the background. The thing about love is that it’s so amorphous that you can pull it and squeeze it into any shape you want. There are no instruction manuals, or operating protocols, you make your own recipe on the go.
You can fall in love once, twice or a million times. You can love a man. You can love a woman. Or anyone else in between. You can love yourself. You can even love multiple people at once. Love has no boundaries.
Love is so independent and free spirited, it scares us. It makes us want to tie it down. We like to define it so love knows its boundaries, and then we beat the shit of it till it shakes and till it complies - love is not Indian, you can’t love anyone and everyone, you can fall in love only once, you have to marry who you love, you have to keep loving after marriage, you have to stop loving after marriage, and you can’t hand it out like a flier to anyone who walks past.
We are a society that loves to act righteous, maybe because it helps soothe our own insecurities.
Things that make us feel pious.
Love is not Indian, so you can’t love. At least, you can’t love everyone. You definitely can’t hand it out like a flier to anyone who walks past
Given that we’ve been in love with arranged marriages for at least the last 6-7 decades, we think love is alien, not indigenous to India. Making peace with any other form of marriage has been quite a journey with us currently wading somewhere in the middle about love and arranged.
So, you say -
You can love someone, as long as they are the same sub-caste. Ok, no, caste is fine. Or wait, maybe let’s broaden that a little bit till religion? Because what are the odds you’ll find someone on your own? After all, I am a hedgehog.
How about a 3 year age gap? Ok no, anyone older will do. Not too old though.
Better be a girl. We’re not in an American fantasy movie. Such things don’t happen in India, at least not in our families.
You can fall in love only once
This is the sort of bullshit that media feeds us, and we love this trash. It feeds our deep-rooted belief that there exists a soulmate for everyone, and in a perfect world, we would have a perfect match. Also, if Shah Rukh Khan said it in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, it must be true no? Imagine if you used Monte Carlo simulation to find yourself that perfect life partner (assuming such a thing exists), wouldn’t you do a few thousand iterations before you found your soulmate? Then why love only once?
You have to marry who you love
This is very tightly tied to virginity, and gene propagation. We have this fuckall belief that making love to someone is the ultimate culmination of our feelings for someone, and this act better be reserved for the person you want to propagate your genes with. Now, these are all independent little things, that need not be done with the same person, at least theoretically.
You can love anyone
You can make love to anyone
You can propagate your genes with anyone
Why does it have to be with the same person as long as you have some form of contraception, and healthy child care arrangements?
We don’t have sound institutions set up to tackle each of these acts independently, at least not yet, and hence, we sell them in a bundle, and call it marriage.
You can only love after marriage
This is the standard conservative middle class fodder that we are all raised on. It’s a sin to fall in love with anybody before you are married to them. Because, what if you don’t end up marrying them for some reason? You’ll be breaking the other rule of loving only once, no? Even if you did love someone before marriage, assuming that you are sure to marry them, it has to be when you are no longer living off your parents’ money. And even if that doesn’t happen, it better be once you have joined a “professional course” and your life is on the path of being settled. So, I’m not sure where we draw the line today, but surely we do somewhere. But honestly, who cares when you love. But love, you must.
You have to stop loving after marriage
Have you ever been in love with someone, and not married them? Has it been easy falling out of love? Of course not. Wait, should you be falling out of love? Yes, of course. I mean, isn’t that what you are supposed to do? What if there was no need to? What if you were allowed to continue loving? So what if you are the only one still loving? May be you were in love with the feeling? May be you were in love with yourself for loving? So, why should that go away? Is it because you are now with someone else, and it feels unfair yo your current partner? Is it because the other person is with someone else, and it feels unfair to you? Are you scared someone will find out that you haven’t stopped loving, and will judge you?
You have to keep loving after marriage
Marriage, as we know it, means you spend the rest of your life with someone expecting them to fulfil all your needs. Yes, all. Nobody wants a spouse, we all need generalists, who can learn everything on the job, and have infinite willingness to do everything. And if they don’t, we aren’t even allowed to sub-contract the job. That sucks. What if they want to lie in bed all weekend, but you want to go out and have fun? What are you supposed to do? Obey the husband, whichever one it is. Or the wife, depending on what the norm is.
So, we all just carry around lots of voids in ourselves that our spouses can’t practically fill, yet we can’t find other people to fill those voids. Why?
…because, partnerships aren’t being sold unbundled. At least, not yet.
I watched this movie the other day, called Unfaithful, where Diane Lane plays the suburban housewife who is in a seemingly stable marriage with Richard Gere, or at least one would assume based on the one scene before introducing the subject of her affair. Her first encounter with this stranger is rather sensual. So is the second and the third. The fourth time around, they end up making love. It appears as if some deep seated void is being filled by the affair. At no point do you ever doubt her love for the husband. Eventually, the husband kills Diane’s lover, and she sobs on hearing the news. You still don’t doubt her love for the husband. She loves her husband. She loved her lover. Both in ways that can’t be compared, and not easily fathomed. I think.
But shit like that has no excuse in the real world. At least, not yet.
So, are you suggesting that we unbundle marriage?
Honestly, I don’t know. May be it’s already being sold unbundled in some parts of the world, including ours. But I think it’s too early to say how that would compare to the mega institution of marriage. I think we got here after several iterations over the last thousands of years. We are here for a reason, one that I am not a 100% sure about, but is there a better solution? Only time will tell.
Until then, god save relationships.