It has been a thought swimming around in the juices that apparently swirl around in my brain the past few days – this notion of “i cannot live without so-and-so who I love”.
And ironically enough, today, my longest-standing girlfriend calls me and says, “I think I have turned into a cold-hearted monster because I am beginning to realise that I can live without my so-called romantic partner. Is something wrong with me?”
It’s interesting how we become moulded by our surroundings even in something as personal and individual as emotions. We know how the ‘acceptable’ way to feel/act is, but how many of us really do feel the way we should be in a particular situation, and how many of us are honest about it, to ourselves, before we even begin to talk about whether we are with the people around us?
When we look up what philosophers have to say about love, most talk about it as a separate, isolated sort of emotion that seems to exist in a kind of vacuum. It almost takes on a ‘lonely’ sort of persona. Philosophers speak of people in love as loners, they stay away from crowds, they do their own thing, lost in their own thoughts, non-present, as if part of a different world. In books which were written in the romantic era, the lover is a lost soul almost, who wanders aimlessly with no real direction, nor any consciousness of his surroundings.
Love, when stripped of all the excess baggage the world has burdened it with, to me, is like an emotion so selfless, so beyond the self, that there really ARE no conditions. No required responses. No “ifs” and “buts”. I suppose, love, like everything else that is to remain in sync with the modern world, has had to take on a practicality. It has been moulded into a phenomena which can co-exist with the rest of the modern world.
Which is what confuses so many of us lovers when we decide to take that leap of faith and allow ourselves to fall in love. (Practicality talking again: whoever said love could be allowed/disallowed from happening? A topic for another day perhaps.)
We get so confused because there are these notions of how it ’should’ be, how it ’is’, how we ‘want’ it to be.
How it ’should’ be in the modern world: an emotion which translates into an experience – physical, emotional, mental, spiritual – it turns into something more than an emotion. But it has to be an experience which can co-exist with the other aspects of life, it is non-intrusive, non-interfering. It must exist in harmony such that life can continue to move as it ’should be’.
How it ‘is’: an emotion which translates into an experience in SYNC with the ways of the world – we don’t say how we really feel because we are afraid of ’scaring the other person away’ with the depth and intensity of feeling, even though high chance is the other person is feeling the same way. we play games, play hard to get, follow certain ‘rules’ to not look too needy, not look too distant or not look too anything.
How we ’want’ it to be: Simple. Uncomplicated. Easy – we get to say how we really feel without a hundred thoughts of the impact it might have on how the other person feels. we get to do what we really want without a hundred thoughts of what it will look like to the world. we get to be ourselves.
ourselves. i wonder if this part of us ever really does come out in a romantic relationship anymore.
ironically enough, this is the relationship we would guess we should be able to be most ‘ourselves’ in.
how many of us have heard something along the lines of “to love is not about being loved back, it is simply about loving.”
We should be able to live without the person we love. We should be able to live without ANYONE or ANYTHING, for that matter, if the need does arise.
We form a relationship between love and companionship. Love takes on ritualistic manifestations.
But can true love, real love, whether romantic or unromantic, truly take on manifestations, and yet maintain all its depth, intensity and meaning? It is like trying to translate Urdu or Tamil poetry into English. One may get the general idea and meaning of the words, but so much of the essence is lost in translation. Similarly, when love is manifested in these varying forms, surely it loses so much of its spirit, its essence, its trueness, to the limitations of actions and words and sounds and semantics.
It is interesting how the most important things are the ones you can neither hope to explain fully, nor understand fully.
