Its February and it's not a surprise that suddenly everyone is preaching about love. Why love, or its expression should be bound by a month or even a date, is another issue altogether, we will leave that for some other time. Today lets talk about unconditional love.
Often Facebook posts, quotes, shares and stories revolve around this idea of unconditional love. Which is further propagated by a millennia of literature propounding stereotypes of the said kind. Open any chic-flick, or anything in the romance genre and there you have them all over. In contemporary conversations and literature alike, the youth of today is often derided for having ephemeral emotions. We are supposedly , "the hook up - break up generation" . Can we pause and ponder over the constant bombarding of this statement?
On one hand we talk of empowerment, of leaving stereotypes behind, and on the other hand here we are trying to make a generation conform to conventional ideas of love, its expression or its longevity. Can we at least acknowledge the possibility that a rise in divorce rates or the frequency of hook ups and break ups is not merely due to the fact that love itself is not valued, but that the idea, that love, necessarily means sacrifice at the extent of your identity and individuality, is being opposed and challenged. Shouldn't we be glad that we are progressing to a society where people in relationships do not feel the need to live a sham for the sake of their acquaintances. Isn't it time we shifted focus from judging people's characters based on the number of relationships they have? Can we fail an exam multiple times? Can we make wrong choices in choosing our jobs? Can we make wrong choices in choosing the products we use? If any of these questions answers yes, how on earth does one expect every other individual to get their "life partner" right , in the very first attempt? Does it necessarily have anything to do with lack of will or lack of efforts? Not always.
Lets delve further into this idea of unconditional love? For starters, does it even exist? It's a Utopian concept; the idea that one must let go of ones' self identity and merge into somebody else; that one loves without expecting anything return and must love equally, eternally. But don't lovers expect love in return? Or you live with someone who doesn't love you? Even the dog, who is supposedly the icon of unconditional love, doesn't love you unconditionally. There's always an expectation of minimal love in return, in absence of which, he experiences a poor quality of life. So it is with people.
We expect love, and we expect love in a language that we understand. There's nothing wrong with this expectation. And if two people feel that they are not able to establish this language of communication between themselves, or even if one among them feels an absence of this communication, then its nobody's business to question their separation.
When, one wishes to quit, is a personal decision. Expecting everyone to be built with the same endurance is like expecting every string to have the same tensile strength. Each string breaks at a different weight and so do relationships. Everyone has a different endurance, and there is no "minimum endurance level" that we are built with.
Romantic love is a beautiful experience, but to transform it into a necessary requirement for living a quality life is wrong and unfair. We wont really change much in the way we are gender-imbalanced as a society unless we move " personal relationships" and "family" away from the public discourse. If you are someone, out to celebrate "the season of love", please go forth. Love may be sacred for you, but it's not blasphemy if someone else doesn't feel the same way.
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