Love: The Loftier the View, the Shallower the Base

It is outright stupidity to claim to understand love, because love it is not meant to be understood. This is the problem with young people today. They claim to have an insight into everything around them but what they miss out is the futility of the entire exercise of comprehending love, in the first place.

I have many friends who also have many friends. They, in turn, have many boyfriends and girlfriends. Since these young people are in relationships, they believe they’ve figured out the secrets of the world in an instant. Any relationship that lasts for more than a year becomes the hallmark or the archetype of a perfect relationship and of undying love.

I am not saying that that could not be the case. For the sake of my friends, I hope it almost always is. But to deny or refuse what is staring you in the face is an act of absurdity and stupidity that I would rather not indulge in. This is because I have had my fair share and more of love problems. I do not profess to be a love guru, not by miles. But I do profess to have studied, analyzed and observed some of the basic underlying issues from which dissent arises.

Allow me to share the most obvious ones with you.

However, the same is not the case with love. On several occasions, my friends have come up to me to ask, “How do I love him (or her)?” Or, “why do I hate him (or her) and at the same time love him (or her)?”Don’t understand love experience it. I know that at best, it sounds mushy, cheesy and clichéd, but that is actually how love is. Let me give you a very twisted logic. Have you ever had problems with feeling sad? You couldn’t probably understand why you are upset but there is no ambiguity as far as the emotion and its consequences are concerned.

That’s just the problem. Love has been romanticized, valorised and glorified to such an extent that we have thought so much more about it but have forgotten how to experience it. The problem lies in our thinking about it a bit too much. This problem gets much worse when people like me, who have studied, analyzed and observed relationships, formulate certain principles they wish to live by. If I were in love someday, I would…Period. Problem!!!

What we end up doing is to create ideals and notions much higher than our inbuilt tolerance scale. Neither would I ever be jealous nor would I fight unnecessarily. Instead, I would this…I would that. If it were as easy as that, the whole world would be in love of the undying kind.

Love is always evolving, which means it’s neither static nor fixed. It is an entity that you construct

as you experience it. The problem arises when you create lofty ideals about the person you love and end up with an ideal that you cannot live up to. This brings on a whole lot of disappointment when the ideal manifests itself in the relationship. In hindsight, you find that achieving love itself was impossible because you lose out on the good things of what a relationship does to you and can offer you.

A relationship is not about being perfect together but about being different and yet being together. When you work around those differences, with them and within them, you achieve the hallmark of love.

By this, by no means do you lower your standards but become realistic and avoid getting into an abusive relationship, be ill-treated or any such thing because undoubtedly, you know where to draw the line.

The loftier the view means the shallower the base. Whenever we have had instances of people having strong rigid views about anything at all, the consequences have been dramatic and destructive. Why would the life of an individual be any different?