Love

Probably one of the most written about things in history.

Some swear about its magical effect in their lives, others swear at how it has destroyed theirs. Some insist that the meaning of life and even life itself is nothing but love, others deny its existence. Millions have wondered about it and a million others insist you are not even supposed to think about it, just feel it.

So what is this strange entity? With so many people doubting it, does it even exist? Is it measurable or has to be taken just on faith? Can it be proven?

About whether love exists - it is statistically impossible that billions of humans have passed on their genes to future generations merely out of an animal impulse. You can think of love as something that merely facilitates that drive or as the primary cause behind that drive. Either way, if even one couple has experienced what we conventionally think of as love or what we might disagree about is love, then logically it exists. And we have countless examples of it happening over centuries. People getting attracted to one another and bringing lasting happiness to one another.

Regardless of the statistics or the dry logic, I believe that love exists.

Biologically, chemically (maybe at the neurotransmitter level), psychologically and perhaps even mystically in ways we haven't understood yet, love exists. It can be a very beautiful emotion, elevating you to such highs as you've never felt before. And it can make you feel crushed and depressed when your expectations are not met. Sometimes, even if nothing goes ‘wrong’ per se, love can be full of a strange agony.

(It might be obvious by now that I'm not talking about the love we feel for our parents and siblings and friends. I'm talking about love for someone we might want to spend our lives with, have sex with, and perhaps even give in to the biological impulse to create little versions of ourselves.)

This love I'm talking about might look something like this. (Try telling them what they feel for each other is not real and doesn't exist.)

Or it may be very silent, insidious - not spoken about for years or acknowledged in public (not a very healthy way to be) but felt and noticed in little everyday things.

Now, to talk about something so 'all over the place' (in more ways than one), we need to define it, so we can wrap our heads around the concept. And this is where we hit the first roadblock.

No one knows how to define it, no one has the apt definition.

But then if something is so pervasive and near universal, is it really possible that no one knows how to define it? What if we flip that idea - maybe everyone knows how to define love. Maybe it's a malleable thing, which has something common at its core that everyone recognizes, but outwardly takes on as many forms as there are people out there experiencing it. Given how little we understand of this idea, I tend to agree with the latter viewpoint.

As such, I found the definition provided by Dr. Robert Peck in 'The Road Less Traveled' as a simple one; yet one that captures the very essence of the whole idea.

But before we go there let's look at some assumptions widely prevalent about love and which in my opinion distort the idea and have probably damaged a lot of people.

1)      Romantic love is the real/true love. More on this later. For now, suffice it to say that this is like saying climbing upto Everest’s base camp is equal to conquering the mountain.

2)      Love happens in a certain universal way (conveniently portrayed by most movies and books) and if it doesn’t happen to me, it doesn't exist. That is an understandably frustrated but nevertheless very childish (or teenage-ish) view of things. When an adult thinks like this, it's usually from a wave of anger and self-pity. They want to defend themselves against disappointment and hurt. The longer this wave persists, the more you can be sure they will entrench themselves deeper in this sorry mentality. And I'm guessing many people do spend their entire lives thinking like this, being bitter. Feeling love for someone is a very intimate process and by extension, it can be very different for everyone. We’re not dealing with a universally true thing like gravity, where it applies equally to everyone (heck, even gravity acts differently on different bodies). If someone has a restricted, uncompromising view (a view thoroughly embedded in society's psyche through popular culture) of how they want love to happen to them then it’s simply their loss when it doesn’t turn out that way. Obviously, they are closing their minds to other possibilities and opportunities. If you can’t process the disappointments and compromises that are almost inevitable with love without letting it poison your attitude to others, then maybe it isn’t for you. Which brings me to …

3)      Everyone falls in love. Maybe. No one knows for sure. But I doubt it. It is far more likely that everyone gets attracted to someone at least once in the course of their lifetime. Maybe everyone feels romantic love for someone. But it is perfectly normal to not feel love or go through the process of falling in love or living with someone as a result of it. There are so many singles who live happily and maybe die happily too without going through that process.

4)      The love portrayed in romantic comedies is fascinating and can (should) happen to me. Yes, it is fascinating. But as I’ve written previously, it is better to look at these kinds of movies for what they are – a cleverly marketed product that is designed to be believable and sell to you a certain warm and reassuring fantasy. For one, they merely focus on the minor idea of romantic love and imagine it to be the real whole thing. If you take them any more seriously than you take science fiction movies, it’s your loss.

Probably the biggest disservice that such movies do to people is they help create an insidious mindset of entitlement in those who believe in their ideas. Suddenly, otherwise normal people start believing in the fantastic idea that some vague force called the universe should conspire and bring to them what is rightly owed to them – true love. This is lame and lazy thinking. I wonder if this ‘universe’ also subsequently conspires to bring about divorces or when someone murders their spouse for whatever reason.


No, it need not happen to you:
No one owes you love. To create and experience it with someone, (much as I hate to use the phrase) ‘you have to sell yourself’ and be wanted by the other person.

If you can offer what the other person wants (or thinks they want), and if they have what you desire then love might happen. The key ideas here are creating and making it happen. Go somewhere everyday and meet/ be social with new people. Or do daily things that make you a fascinating person.

Yes, it can and does happen without trying too (the idea portrayed in movies and books of how two people just fall in love irrationally) and if that is what you want, happy waiting to you. My best wishes; it just might happen.  

A much more rewarding experience is to make yourself desirable for yourself, doing things that make you a better person in as many ways as possible in your eyes. (Thinking in a bit detached manner, would you really like to be in a relationship with someone like you?) Understand and evaluate what you are bringing to the table and whether it is something that the other wants. And keep your eyes open for someone you like.The selling part will then happen with less effort, because the product is then pretty good (and trust me, the 'market'/demand is almost always up in this case). When rejection happens as it mostly will, love hasn’t ceased to exist as an entity or idea nor is it that you or the other person has suddenly turned undesirable (assuming of course that either of you did not do something assholey or are jerks by nature). What happened is simply a rejection of what was on offer. Either find a new ‘buyer’ or improve the product (you). Or don't! That's perfectly fine too if you can live peacefully in that manner.

Romantic love could be a great start to creating actual love and is an experience to die for in itself, but it is definitely not the whole thing, nor is it a mandatory step towards feeling love for someone.

Going back to the analogy of climbing used above, you can fly to the Everest base camp and begin your journey from there (I guess that's what happens with arranged marriages!). The thrill of climbing still lies ahead. Arguably, a more fulfilling experience may be to undertake the journey from sea level to the top. But it isn’t the one true path, because there is no such thing as the one true path of love.

Romantic love isn’t the end all and be all of love (which is exactly the opposite of what most romantic comedies portray). It is the business card or résumé that gets you interested in a person. Making the contents of your résumé very attractive (being very romantic because you want someone to fall in love with you) can get you places and lead to some fun times during the interview and early days of the job. But when things start getting real, what matters is whether you deliver on what you've promised. Much better to have a real, admirable résumé that will increase the likelihood of getting you the kind of opportunities that are fit for you. And let romance be the bonus to that.

Now that we've seen what love isn't, let's try to see what love is -

"The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth."

I admire this interpretation because it is simple and intuitively feels true to me. It acknowledges that you have to work to make this come true, there has to be a will, you have to extend yourself. It describes love in the context of the impulse and force that drives all humans - growth. And it isn't about just giving or receiving alone. Love has to be selfish at times as it is selfless. Dr. Peck clubs together all sorts of things into 'spiritual growth' - but for the purpose of this already too long post I interpret it to mean growth as a person. Spiritual, personal, physical, financial, sexual, psychological and all different kinds of -als count towards making a person whole. The more you and your partner fulfill your respective growth potential in these, the stronger will be your love.

So if you truly love someone, you will help them grow as a person (referred to conventionally as bringing out the best in someone) and expect nothing less from them. That is the part that takes hard work.

Once you sit down to write about love, it's hard to stick to a word limit. But I'll stop here for now. Perhaps more words will come later.

Romantic comedies

I enjoy watching romantic comedies. I really do. Who wouldn't? They're funny, feel-good, lighthearted and often tell a good story.

I like them the way I like science fiction, superhero, horror and slasher movies. Knowing that the things they show are far from real makes these genres more enjoyable. They fulfill one of the prime purpose of movies - to paint as glorious a fantasy as possible and let you revel in it. And from a distance too, if the fantasy is gruesome and dangerous.

Where romantic comedies differ is in the blurring of that line of fantasy and reality. The characters in these movies are ordinary people like you and me (although far more attractive....the creators of these dreams want you to aspire to being like them obviously). They have fairly normal lives, with events and situations and flaws that many of us can identify with. The characters laugh and weep and are vulnerable just like us. Sometimes they show our emotions better than we do. This makes the movie and the people in it very relatable. It is far too easy to see yourself as the office guy falling for the good looking girl or seeing someone cute at a wedding and pursuing them. These things happen everyday all around the world.

And this is where the problem starts. These characters are sometimes too close to real life. This leaves you with a strange combination where the characters are very life-like but the plot is still a fantasy. Much as I marvel at the capacities of the human brain,  I'm not sure it is rational enough to keep all of this sorted and well-delineated all the time.

How can we be sure that what we see and identify with and aspire to for a long time during our formative years (how many rom coms have you seen from the age of 14 till today?) hasn't impacted our ability to think and take decisions in a certain manner? Who is to say watching many movies like these doesn't introduce a systemic bias in the way we perceive relationships and other people? That they don't affect our expectations and assumptions about people?

In many of the romantic movies, an external force - God, Nature, Destiny, Fate, Serendipity - essentially something out of your control and (surprisingly) with your well-being and happiness at heart intervenes at opportune moments to bring people together. If the movie is particularly well crafted, we often miss this element and it is weaved very subtly into the narrative. But it's there always. This element, which is out of your control, forms the core of the 'fantasy' part of a rom-com. And by definition, it is extremely unlikely to happen to you in real life.

But many people miss that part, knowingly or unknowingly, because the canvas on which writers and directors paint a beautiful picture of your life is so very broad and oh-so-charming. In between all the adorable 'awww's and the poignant tender moments designed to open you up to beautiful possibilities in your life, it is easy to miss the element of fantasy that is holding up the entire picture.

As one trademark pithy Calvin and Hobbes truism goes:

Why isn’t my life like a situation comedy? Why don’t I have a bunch of friends with nothing better to do but drop by and instigate wacky adventures? Why aren’t my conversations peppered with spontaneous witticisms? Why don’t my friends demonstrate heartfelt concern for my well-being when I have problems?… I gotta get my life some writers.

The more effectively this element is hidden and blended into the movie, the better the final illusion. Alternately, a movie like serendipity might take a contrary approach and flaunt its supernatural element as its USP. It then becomes free to make its characters even more vulnerable and helpless, while retaining their charm by showing their struggles against their fate.

When someone starts relating  too much to movies and novels like these, while missing the fantasy part, I suspect there develops an undetected sense of entitlement, even in an otherwise self-reliant person. When things don't happen the way they do in the stories, that person might start asking questions like 'why doesn't something like this happen to me?' But underlying this question is the hidden assumption that something like this is supposed to happen to you. As if it is the norm or at least that it happens with a majority of people. Wanting things to happen to you, hoping for signs to guide you the 'right' way and other such wishes where the  locus of control is with some outer unknown power, are often seen in such cases.

Very few, if any, of these stories show the hard work that goes into making a successful relationship. They focus on the chemistry between couples, which can (if present in real life) be merely the first thing that brings people together. Arguably, it is neither the writer/director's job nor their intention to show how to build successful relationships. They want to entertain and sell you a story and they do so using whatever they can - it is fair to show an arbitrary fate bringing people together (supposedly meant to be with each other) in mysterious ways. But the way these stories are sold with the 'coming together' as the final step in happiness and bliss is deceptive at best, damaging at worst. And it isn't the seller's fault that you are deceived or damaged by this.

We all want to believe. Especially when a path to reach our soul-mate is shown to us in charming colors and sounds. Who doesn't want lovely dreams?

But as the cliché goes, the best way to realize a dream is to wake up.