A Lot About Love.

 

“Love is active penetration of the other person, in which my desire to know is stilled by union. In the act of fusion I know you, I know myself, I know everybody - and I "know" nothing.”

-Erich Fromm (1900 - 1980)

Yes, I have felt emotionally stormy. Not once, not twice but a countless number of times. Quite often, I am so overwhelmed that I can feel the sentiments conquering my lung capacity, I can’t breathe. So as I am typing this, I feel emotionally frenzied and chaotic, like it has converted into a whirlwind and going through me.

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem, which he has to solve. I think, to love and be loved is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.  So accept it or not, everyone who exists is biologically programmed to fall in love sometime or the other. To love is an art-an art in which everyone alive is adept to. When in love you don’t go by the book like in science, rather you follow your guts! Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. It is an act of faith and whoever is of little faith is also of a little love.

But just like a bowl of jelly beans, romantic love is strange and awfully mysterious. No one has been able to unravel as to why just one person alone in all the world mean so much so as to cause the heart to miss a beat just by a glance, a word or a touch? Why just one, and not another has the power to make us dream and cast a magic spell on us of supreme delight? Why!  

But still, all of us fall in love so conveniently. There is no looking, no contemplating, no questioning, no probing and no check listing before falling in love. Like a human papilloma virus, it finds its way inside us and before it starts showing external symptoms, it settles without warning like a benign epithelial tumor. Perhaps, its perplexity can well be compared to our dreams. We all dream but we don’t always understand our dreams. Yet, we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleeping minds- strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake. It is exactly the same with love I think. Love gives you a third eye to see beyond reason. It gives you the courage to let go off uncertainties. 

But sometimes..

Love is a real virus, not benign but malignant in nature. You feel it like an abnormal growth inside you, as a pernicious form of cancer. That’s when you know that you’ve to get rid of it; that you’ve to fall out of love. That’s when love makes you blind. Rather than making you seeing beyond reason, it makes you unreasonable!

But starting again by falling out of love isn’t any easier. This is what everyone wants, right? A new beginning. A clean slate. A world of possibility. Like that’s going to be effortless and totally painless. Ask the guy pushing a boulder up the hill. Nothing is really easy about starting again! Nothing at all..and starting again by erasing love not returned? It’s really difficult! 

 So the conquest of falling out of love seems so much more phenomenal and miraculous a feat than falling in it because the latter happens so seamlessly and without notice. In this act of doing so, it feels like we are transcending love itself and it only gets tougher with time. As we ascend the ladder of falling out of love, viciousness seems to wear a thicker mask.

This is precisely why I thought I wanted to be alone and never fall in love. It wasn’t because I thought I would be happy alone. It was because I thought if I loved someone and then it fell apart, I might not make it. It's easier to be alone because what if you learn that you need love? And then you don't have it. What if you like it? And lean on it? What if you shape your life around it? And then it falls apart? Can you even survive that kind of pain? Losing love is like organ damage. It's like dying. The only difference is- death ends. But this? It could go on forever . . .

In a case like such, ‘love’ seems like a four letter syllable for, “Here is my heart and soul. Please grind them into hamburger, and enjoy." It's desired and feared- difficult to live with and impossible to live without. So out of the things in life which you simply can’t escape, intimacy is certainly one of them. For the other things? You just don’t want to know. 

Talking about falling in love, I realize that there are no defenses to protect yourself from it. I wish there was something like immunity from falling in love. Diseases.Toxins. Infections. Germs. Our bodies encounter dangers all the time, just beneath the hidden surface. Whether we realize it or not, our body is constantly protecting itself. Every time we blink our eye, we wash away thousands of unwanted microbes. Breathe in too much unwanted pollen, and we sneeze. The body detects the invader. It releases its white blood cells, and it attacks. But what happens when we fall in love with a wrong person? Where is the sneezing? Where is the defense? It’s only when it spreads like malignant tumor that we realize; something needs to be worked up on! It’s when we lean on it so much that our life starts revolving around it. Its then! I wish there was a rulebook about falling in love with a wrong person- some kind of a guide to tell you, when you’ve crossed the line. 

In my 8^th grade, we had to read Romeo and Juliet for English. Needless to say, I slightly had a different take about Juliet. I thought she was a complete idiot! For starters she falls for the one guy she knows she can’t have and then blames fate for her own bad decision. My teacher explained to me that when fate comes into play choice sometimes goes out the window, and that I would be lucky if I ever experienced that type of true love. At the ripe old age of 13, I was very clear that love, like life, is about making choices and fate has nothing to do with it. Everyone thinks it’s so romantic, Romeo and Juliet, true love, how sad! But I think if Juliet was stupid enough to fall for the enemy, drink the bottle of poison, and go to sleep in a mausoleum, she deserved whatever she got. If Romeo and Juliet could have known all this coming beforehand, maybe it all would have been okay. The dagger and the poison could’ve been both put down, making it into a happy ending!

Sometimes I think, being a toddler again would’ve been great when the biggest worry in life was nothing beyond, if you'd get a Barbie for your birthday or if you'd get to eat cookies for breakfast. You believed in fairy tales so much! That fantasy of what your life would be- the white dress, prince charming who would carry you away to a castle on a hill and all of that! You’d lie in your bed at night and close your eyes and you had complete and utter faith. Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, prince charming –they were so close you could taste them. But being an adult? Totally overrated! I mean seriously, don't be fooled by all the hot shoes and the great sex and the no parents anywhere telling you what to do. The moment you open your eyes to adulthood, the fairy tale disappears. The castle, well, it may not be a castle; the ugly frog may be just it and no handsome prince and that it is not so important to be happy ever after, it is only important to be happy right now. Adulthood makes you fall in love and more often than not, with the wrong person! And know the scariest part? When you quite screw it up and let it slip right through your fingers.

Let’s face it that the organ which is instrumental in making us fall in love (and fall out of it too) is itself the human body's most mysterious organ: the heart! It learns. It changes. It adapts. It tells us what we see, what we hear. It lets us feel love. I think it holds our soul. And no matter how much research we do, no one can really say exactly, how all the arteries and veins inside our heart works. And, when it's hurt, it’s broken, it falls apart, when the human heart is traumatized, well, that's when it gets even more mysterious!

I guess, we blow our minds out at our respective workplaces and in our own lives, we can’t think through. We don’t really make a sound choice at all. When it comes to ourselves, we’ve got nothing left! And is it worth it? Being responsible? Because if you take your vitamins at the right time, pay your taxes, follow the laws, reach your work desk on time and never cut the line, the universe still gives you people to love and let them slip out of your fingers like water or sand and then what have you got? Vitamins, laws? And certainly nothing more!

Falling out of love is like recovering from trauma. After a trauma, your body is at its most vulnerable. Response time is critical. So you're suddenly surrounded by people: doctors, nurses, specialists, technician, may be performing a surgery on you, if need be. Surgery isn’t a one man’s game but a team sport. Everyone is pushing for the finish line and putting you back together again. Emotions are tucked away neatly and you are shifted to a clean, sterile room where the procedure is simple and not more than 3 steps- cut, suture and stitch. The first 24 hours are critical- every breath you take, every fluid you make is meticulously reported and analyzed, celebrated or mourned. Likewise, in the initial stages of falling out of love how much of your eyes meet the one you do, how much you smile at him (or smirk), how much you talk (or groan) is measured. 

But once the surgery is over, the real healing begins. It is when the first day after surgery turns to two and weeks turn to months.  It's called recovery. The imminent danger of falling in love again has somewhat passed, the machines are disconnected and the doctors and nurses are gone. However, recovery, even while falling out of love is not a team sport. It's a solitary distance run. It's long. It's exhausting. And it's lonely as hell.

But sometimes, there is nothing like falling out of love just as there is nothing like a cent percent healing. The length of your recovery is determined by the extent of your injuries and it's not always successful. Sometimes you are faced with a cut that just won’t heal- a cut that rips its stitches wide open. No matter how hard we work at it, some of these wounds might never fully heal. Yes, the pain gets you when you least expect it, hit you way below the belt and doesn’t let you up. But you just have to ride it out and hope that it goes away on its own. All you can do is fight your way through it because the truth is that you can’t outrun it!

That is what irreparable heartbreaks do too! You might have to adjust to a whole new way of living. Things may have changed too radically to ever go back to what they were. You might not even recognize yourself. It's like you haven't recovered anything at all. You're a whole new person with a whole new life. Finding a way back to where you were before you fell in love can be difficult. There is no compass, no map. This is what happens when you are in love, never meant to fall out of it! Perhaps, it’s no trap for you. It’s how your life is meant to be. You can just close your eyes and pray to God that everything will work out fine.

YES! I feel emotionally stormy because I once fell in love and I’m falling out of it now. Alas! My heart once haemorrhaged. I’m only praying that my wounds dress completely.

Don’t ask me why I need to fall out of love because I’m clueless myself. For obvious reasons, I don’t find this world a great place to live in. If you can think of a reason; any reason at all why the universe is so screwed up and random and mean; now would be an amazingly good time to tell me because I really need some answers.

I do!