Grieving lost friendships!

I sometimes wonder why we don’t accord similar level of importance to friendships as we do to romantic relationships. I like the social awareness around the space and respect given to grieving romantic relationships – lost relationships, failed relationships, complicated relationships, long distance relationships or relationships that just drifted apart. I like the lack of awkwardness in asking, ‘What are we’, ‘It feels different’, ‘What changed? We changed. Can we work on some things?’, ‘I need some more love. Can you give it to me?’. While the whole beauty of friendship might lie in the lack of concrete definitions and social norms, I often miss the definitiveness of romantic relationships in my friendships. How close are we? What are we? Are we Friday night drinking friends, are we Sunday morning deep-conversation friends? Are we friends-of-convenience filling our lonely lives with some insincere affection? Are we soulmates of some sort? Are we I’ll-always-have-your-back friends? Are we all of them? Are we some?

I believe in soul families, not soul mates. I hold a lot of people– most of them friends, dear to me. Falling apart from them is painful, often more painful than breaking up with my romantic partners. However, I’ve missed being able to grieve it, being able to talk about it. I miss taking the refuge of music, movies and poetry to grieve about friendships lost – the way I can for romance gone bad. I miss being accorded a shoulder to cry for all the friends that got left behind. I hate my pain being dismissed because drifting apart from friends is such an ‘expected’, ‘natural’ part of life. I wonder why my grief over a break-up of one-year relationship gets more validation versus my multi-year friendship gone sour. I hate my grief not being validated enough.

How to talk about the pain of not being able to hug your friend as often as you’d want to, of missing growing old with them, of not being able to call them up to tell them about your day, of not having the right to call them after a bad day. When friendships end, the reasons are rarely defined – most times they just end mysteriously or sometimes they don’t end at all but just fade away. Sometimes, you just drift away because of distance or evolved priorities. Sometimes, you just grow out and become incompatible – you grow out of the activities, values or commonalities that held you together. Sometimes, you just hurt each other but neither of you want to have the difficult conversation to address the issue, so it let it go till both the problem and the person start hurting less. Sometimes, you just get too busy to make time for all the friends you have made.

It irks me, though, to not be able to get that closure for myself – to go through old pictures, old memory lanes, old cards and wonder, “I miss them. Do they miss me too?” Sometimes, I type out a whole message and then delete it because it seems too corny. I want to reach out to an old friend and say, ‘Hey, can we work on our friendship? Can we pick it from where we left it off?’, but I fear lack of reciprocity and drop the idea.  I like how it is socially acceptable to be embarrassing with your ex-romantic partners. I miss being able to send awkwardly corny messages to my drifted friends without it sounding annoyingly cheesy.

As I am writing this, I am wondering why I care about these social constructs at all. I am not sure. Looks like I am not all that non-conformist as I believe I am, and the years of social conditioning has played its part. What is the point of this post? This is probably me validating my pain for all the lost/distanced/forgotten friendships that I am grieving, and extending a virtual hug and shoulder to everyone in similar shoes – "Your emotions are valid, and it is okay to feel deep pain for lost friendships."

Knock, knock! Are you my soulmate?

The terrible thing about growing old watching Bollywood romance and reading dozens of love stories is that you have a larger than life expectation out of romance. You grew up watching Shahrukh Khan and Madhuri Dixit in ‘Dil Toh Pagal Hai’ where Rahul and Maya eventually find the soulmates they had envisioned throughout their youth. Aishwarya Rai in ‘Taal’ found love in Akshay Khanna and their love stood the test of time, class conflicts and rivalry; it conquered it all because they were soulmates. Veer found his Zaara and Raj finally got his Simran. Oliver Barrett and Jennifer Cavilleri found each other in the ‘Love Story’ and taught you that love means never having to say that you’re sorry. All of them contributed to the content of the mental ‘soulmate’ booklet that you consulted way too often.

Having spent your childhood soaked in romantic movies and novels, you were aware of your hopelessly romantic expectations out of love. You wanted to feel chills down your spine at each sight of him, have breathtakingly romantic dates along the beach by the moonlight and write poetry till the ink cannot bleed more love. Your first ‘love’ or whatever you call it when you’re fifteen did obscurely met some of these criteria – there was poetry, breathtaking romance, 12-hour-long phone calls, there was ‘I love you’ written boldly and deeply on bits of paper every time you felt a surge of passion, there were decisions about the future, names of the kids and there was madness. It was followed by jealousy, heartbreak, betrayal, and devastation. ‘How do you destroy 16-year-olds? What do they even understand about love?’, you may ask. I think you break down their beautiful idea of love, tell them that they were delusional, and love doesn’t exist in the form they imagined it.

You pick up the broken pieces of your heart and put them together. You tell yourself that you cannot let one heartbreak take away your entire belief out of love. You reassure yourself that your soulmate exists, and you will find him in time. You grow up and so does your understanding of love and attraction – you understand that sometimes the chills down the spine are overrated, that sometimes your guy wouldn’t know wordplay well enough to stitch together a beautiful poetry for you, but he can still love you the same. You start familiarizing yourself with apparently a more mature idea of love and manage to find someone who fits into this idea. ‘He is probably the one’, you tell yourself and the years that follow reassure you of the same. There is again the spiral of love, laughter, cute-fights, not-so-cute fights, decisions about the future, names of the kids, I-think-we-are-not-the-same-people-we-were-three-years-ago, I-think-we-want-different-things-out-of-life and I-don’t-think-we-can-work-out-anymore. Gradually, the differences take over the love and you don’t feel like soul mates anymore. You sigh and tell yourself that you’re still young and maybe the right person and has not walked in just yet.

You grow older and hit that age when it somehow seems alright for you to be unapologetically reckless and have more drinks than you can handle, go to more parties than your schedule allows and fall for more quintessential wrong guys than you need for your mandatory ‘wrong guy lessons’. For some strange reason, they felt like your soulmate, albeit for a very short time. You wipe off tears, bandage your bruised ego and tell your naïve self to become pragmatic and not mistake a life lesson for a soulmate ever again. You tell yourself that it’s alright to fall for the wrong guys sometimes because they make you strong and give you more content for the ‘Things I will teach my daughter’ booklet.

Enlightened and emancipated with the life lessons that the wrong guys brought along, you continue your pursuit of the ‘soulmate’. Your thoughts have been widened to understand that sometimes you need not attach tags to love. Your supposed wiser self now stumbled upon the more liberated souls, unconsciously looking for a piece of the jigsaw that was supposed to fit just right. There were some who seemed just right – the thick-rimmed spectacled guy who read Kafka and the singer who made you the central theme for all his lyrics thereon. They seemed right – maybe this is what a soulmate would feel like – great conversations about the complicated theories of love, life and beyond. You pretend to understand Rumi and maintain the intellectual snobbery of being better than ‘them’, the mere mortals who could not think beyond the norms. It seemed beautiful for most parts when you felt liberated and realized relationships make you a prisoner of love and love is too beautiful to be caged. Months passed, and you realized that maybe you also want to belong to that cage. Your free-thinking partners, however, continued with their absolute rejection of anything closely linked to commitment. You strike off some more points from the soulmate booklet and move on.

‘You’re adding to experiences. Nothing beautiful comes easy. At least now you know what you don’t want!’, you tell yourself. You pull out pages from your soulmate diary which spoke about madness, passion, Kafka, pseudo- intellectual-masturbation and liberated ideas of love. Then, you meet this guy, the all-famous best friend whom you get romantically involved with because apparently, best friends make for the best partners. You think you have finally found the one when you realize that you understand each other perfectly, do not go through the ‘couple’ drama, have no pretense and have the potential to maintain a real relationship. Only when you started getting comfortable with your regular fights and not-so-cute name calling and try to establish it as a critical component of any healthy relationship, he breaks it you, ‘I can’t handle these fights. They drain me of all emotional and mental strength. I think we are great friends, but we cannot work out as a couple.’

It hurts to know that something which you established as a healthy component of the relationship was a deal breaker for someone. Nevertheless, you go ahead with the quest of the soul mate because you were certain that when you find him, he would fit into the spaces of your life so beautifully that all the undulations would smoothen out.

Then, one fine day you come across that guy. He ticks off everything from your updated ‘soulmate’ booklet and also brings in more additions. The smart guy with witty jokes, the cute nerd, warm, affectionate, passionate, ambitious, sensitive and adorable. He texted just the right amount, made phone calls of the right length, wasn’t painfully jealous of any of your guy friends, understood your idiosyncrasies and need for space. He didn’t reek off toxic masculinity and understood that men do cry. He didn’t seem like someone out of a romance novel because he seemed real and his love, believable. He didn’t sweep you off your feet or inspired you to drown in poetry. You didn’t mind it because you thought that maybe the real deal gives you peace and not butterflies. He seemed like the one who would make all the wrong guys worth it. You believed that finally, you had it all figured out and realized that peace and not chaos is the answer to it all. You basked in the perfection of it all, until one day when he tells you, ‘We are too ordinary, dear. There is no magic. It is important for me to be insanely, passionately in love with you and I don’t feel that. You don’t inspire poetry or madness. Lukewarm is no good.’ You took a deep breath, smiled, told him that you understand and maybe you’re not the one for him.

As you tear off all the remaining pages of your soulmate booklet, a billion questions throw themselves at you. What all qualities do you look for in a soul mate? What do people without a soulmate do? Are they supposed to spend the entirety of their life waiting for someone to come and complete them? Also, does your soulmate need to necessarily be your romantic partner? Does it necessarily have to be one person? Does it have to be a person at all?

I thought about it all and wondered that maybe I have pieces of my soulmate lying across different people, places and things. Maybe one part lies in my best friend, another in my mother, another in the guy who made me believe that my darker upper lip is actually quite sexy, another in my best friend who can take a bullet for me or so she says, another in my childhood journal, another in my mentor and another in the cat whom I used to pet as a kid. Maybe all of these parts together are my soulmate. Maybe it’s unfair to expect one person to bear the gigantic expectations of my soulmate booklet.

Yes, it definitely makes so much more sense now!

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?”