Love is a feeling, deeper than just a definition, and it has left more people perplexed than a board exam.
Yet through our youth, we end up saying “I love you” to different individuals, genuinely, and also throw it around casually amongst close friends and family. So what is this “love” exactly, which has more meaning in relationships and almost no meaning in real life?
The hype created around ‘falling in love’ is sending us all into our own wonderlands
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Manmarziyaan
It starts at a young age where teens dream about their ideal romance and their picture-perfect love life. More than a person, it is the butterflies in the tummy and the feeling of being loved that overpowers their rationality. A lot of debate surrounds what love is after that age – Does love always need to be reciprocated? Is unrequited love better than an exhausted relationship? What happens when the love fades? There is no such thing as love, it is just lust? Can I find love as an asexual?
It is all about being in love with the idea of love after a point. Life teaches us in its own way that our care, affection, and expectations are our own understanding of love and people will always let us down. This feeling then becomes more personal than something you share with another person.
Something you cannot put in words is easier to live with than something which is complicated by meaning.
When you keep looking for the feeling you haven’t felt in a relationship
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A friend of mine came up to me and said she was confused about her relationship. She felt she was in love with two men. One who she has been dating for a few years now, and one who she met once in her life. She couldn’t leave her loving boyfriend to explore the possibility of an unsure romance with a complete stranger, whom she was afraid to approach.
It wasn’t her stable relationship that was holding her back or her fear of taking the first step that left her torn. She was looking for a feeling she still hadn’t felt in any of her relationships. She was going to risk it all just to feel something she had read about or seen in movies and her favourite Korean shows.
According to her, she was looking to feel the same emotions, the same giddiness she felt in the first three months of her relationship. For her, love was the first three months of meeting someone. And she was willing to go through several such first three months to “feel alive” as she put it.
Different people and their different perceptions about love
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This makes “love”, “falling in love”, “being in love” and “falling out of love” very subjective. For someone, it could mean finding that one moment on which they can ride their whole relationship. For others, it could be a recurring emotion that they crave.
And for those who are going to be in love with the idea of love, they will always be those pinning their hopes on the next relationship. They aren’t non-committal, they aren’t scared of love, it is the exact opposite for them. These people can keep falling in love over and over again, with different people and that’s just how the ball rolls in their court.
Lead Image credit: Manmarziyaan/Anurag Kashyap
