“You’re mine”.
“I am yours forever baby”.
These words… sound magical, intoxicating even. When we are falling in love, this is all we want to hear. We want to belong to each other….forever. Till eternity…
But…then, reality hits.
I believe this strange need of ownership, this desire to ensure exclusive possession of your partner’s heart, mind, and above all, the body is what is the harbinger of the eventual undoing of a relationship.
Maybe it’s how society has conditioned our highly impressionable- or should I say compliant brains. The entire social structure has been built upon institutions like Marriage, which in itself creates the most restrictive and diminishing environment for an emotion as volatile as love.
Every time we fall in Love, societal conditioning steers us in the direction of the eventuality of marriage or living together, or mating for life…whatever you want to call it.
I feel it’s all such a huge mistake…
This ownership, possession, or belonging soon transforms into obligation, pressure, and enforced feelings.
And amidst all those petty, insignificant, stupid social rules and regulations, love and passion die…a painfully slow death.
Why can’t we let love be just love?
Love doesn’t have to be forever, don’t cling to it.
The moment we experience even a faint glimmer of love and emotion, the slightest flutter of the heart… our immediate worry is how do we make this last forever, how do we make sure this never ends….
So, we cling, we set rules and boundaries. We hold on so tight that without realizing it, we end up stifling and throttling those emotions and love right out of the relationship. It is heartbreaking to see this happen again and again all around us.
My life, my mistakes, and my experiences have taught me this about Love. Love is effervescent, capricious, and most unpredictable. The intensity of love which we experience, at the ultimate high of any relationship is almost certainly impermanent.
It is not made to last, it will inevitably change or end. Change is the only constant. No matter how hard you try…in fact the harder you try, the tougher it will be to accept that.
It’s like those bridges where lovers put locks with their names on it, and throw the keys into the river. Imagine you being locked into a seemingly permanent situation with the key gone…
My marriage is a shining example of that. We live like roommates. In a few weeks, we will complete 16 yrs of marriage. There is no passion, no touching, no romance. We are just co-parents who have a basic comfort level and are too tired to try and change our entangled lives or go through a divorce in hope of finding new love. Funnily enough, my husband and I now secretly share laughs when we hear of people getting married, even more so for people who make the effort of doing it a second time. It seems rather ridiculous to me. Why would someone do that?
Do all of this again?
Anyways that’s my personal story, and I hope no one else has to endure this kind of emotional upheaval.
Don’t get me wrong, I have experienced love. The best, most intense kind, which makes you tear up and want to live in that moment. Love which makes you want to stop time. My love story ended abruptly, coz… he died.
But I am sure it wouldn’t have been that intense forever. If I imagine what would have happened had he lived. Yes, we would have gotten together. The intensity would have waned after a while, but the friendship would have held us together. This is all my imagination though, coz I will never really know…
What I have learned is —
Love lives in moments.
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That moment when he looked at you and smiled, and you felt your heart flutter as he held your hand…
That moment when you pulled her close for a kiss and she lifted her face to you and closed her eyes…
The moment when you both made love for the first time, and you couldn’t stop saying her name over and over again.
That moment when you were upset and he sent you a text saying, “you can say anything to me, you never have to worry. I love you”. You had tears of happiness when you read that text.
That moment when you met after ages and he scooped you up in that tight embrace of his, in front of all the people in the parking lot.
The feeling you got when he told you he would always be there for you, no matter what.
Love was present in all those moments and more…I am sure you have so many of those. And maybe they are not all with the same person. But that’s completely natural you see, Love doesn’t have to be a permanent thing. It cannot be.
Love also almost certainly happens more than once, there are so many different instances and moments of love in life, it is pretty mindblowing and enlightening to experience.
Friendship, companionship, and a sense of duty can be permanent. And if we accept that, perhaps we will learn to be more satisfied in our mostly drudgery filled lives.
We all need to stop trying to hold on too tight to the person, the relationship that gave us all these magical moments. I know it felt amazing and it’s hard to not want it all the time. But no one person is capable of providing a constant flow of romantic love and passion to the one partner for an endless period of time. Such people do exist but I am sure they are extremely rare.
I know at the end of the day it’s always ‘to each his own’……still, I think the world would be an easier place, and our hearts would be happier if we could consciously remember to not cling on,
Just feel the magic in the moment…Love and Let go…
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Previously published on medium
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Photo credit: by Nick Fewings on Unsplash