Love -To be or not to be!

This is not for you if you have just given away your heart to someone and are letting yourself soak in the beauty of love, convinced that this is the tiny fragment of your life that was missing and now you’re complete in the purest sense of the word. This is not for you if you’re among the lucky few who have found the perfect partner and want to spend the remainder of their life (and if there is a beyond, then even that) with them.  This is for the broken hearts, the one-sided lovers and those who have been to a major extent broken down by the magnanimity of love. People happily in love are discouraged to read any further. This Valentine’s Day, I am going to sit and talk about every possible reason why it’s terrible to be in love.

Love makes you a slave of itself, corrupts the ability of the smartest of people to see through things logically and make wise decisions. You keep denying it all the while and tell yourself that you know how to balance it out right, but you know it all along that although you know how to balance it right, you cannot. Love, arrogantly and defiantly sits invisibly on the top of your priority list lying to you about its non-existence. Gradually, without you realizing, it starts engulfing your work, your decisions, your people and your free time - the  time you once spent having conversations with yourself, getting lost in the creativity of your thoughts is now spent talking to them and if you manage to get some time off that, you spend it musing about them.

Your choices, your beliefs, your ideologies, your opinions- all of them start getting majorly influenced by them. You start moulding yourself into a person they would want to love and without even knowing it, you start losing yourself, huge parts of yourself to them. You want to do anything and everything for that smile of theirs and before you realize it, they become the center of your world and one by one you start throwing people and things out of your life because nothing and nobody else seems to matter. You want to make up more and more space for them, you want your life to be more and more occupied by them and in the process you have knowingly or unknowingly pushed everything else into tiny insignificant corners. Before you know it, it has become about them and just about them.

You valued your self-esteem more than anything else until you fell for this person who was capable of changing it all for you. You realize one day that with everything else that you pushed away, you pushed away your self-esteem too. You start doing things you felt are too crazy to be done by anyone, you start caring for someone more than you ever thought you were capable of and you start experiencing emotions you never knew existed. The chill down your spine at the sound of their voice, the smile that refuses to leave your face long after they are gone, the happiness that simple conversations with them provide and the pangs of jealousy that burn parts of you-  you experience it all for the first time. Love makes you experience the extremes of emotions. Although, the happiness that it gives is incomparable to any other happiness that you have felt before, what you don’t realize is that the pain which the fights and the separation might cause you will also be more devastating than anything that you have ever felt before. But still, you fall prey to all these emotions and you want to keep feeling them for as long as you can. It’s addictive, and once you have got yourself into the habit of it, it’s very hard to get yourself out.

Then, there is this whole thing about owning people we love. Now, your partner may be the most broadminded person ever and how much ever he/she doesn't want to restrain you; mere mortals that we are, we fall prey to insecurities and jealousy and we want our partner to be ours before they can be anybody else’s and our obsession with it touches an extent where we want them to prove it to us sometimes. How much ever romantic it might seem initially to be told by your partner, “You’re mine baby”, it becomes stifling and suffocating when the hormones have taken a back seat and there isn't enough estrogen and testosterone being secreted to make you hyperventilate as your partner utters it. Whether you want to accept it or not, you lose a huge part of your independence and you actually become somebody else’s before you are yours. You've got yourself so deep into it all that there is no easy escape because you've reached this point where you cannot do without your partner and at the same time you cannot be comfortable with the fact that you are so much theirs.

However, gradually you get used to it and consciously or unconsciously you start liking all the good and bad aspects of love; you weigh them against each other and the fact that you have somebody you may call your own seems to outweigh all the negatives.  And, over an extended period of time when you learn to balance things right, when you learn to appreciate love, one by one bring back all the pieces of your life that you pushed aside in the pursuit of love and start leading a fairly stabilized happy life, exactly then my friend, they leave!

Then, you’re devastated like you have never been devastated before. You’re broken into a thousand pieces like you have never been broken before and realize that you had actually become somebody else’s and you’re incapable of independent existence anymore. There’s a void they leave behind, and you try, try every day to fill it back but you fail miserably every time. You try every day to convince yourself that you’re more than their presence in your life and your friends, family, work and all those parts of your life which you pushed away try to bring back your broken pieces together. And, after a long, long time which seems like forever you become alright and embrace life with all its beauty and ugliness once again but although you never say it out loud, that void remains unfilled forever.

All said and done about love, I ask myself if I would refrain from it. ‘Of course, I will’, my mind replies in an instant but my heart hesitates a little and with its eyes cast down and cheeks blushing a Valentine’s day red whispers, ‘It cannot be all that bad, can it?”