There are days in my life when I see two people sharing a meal together at a café and I find myself wondering if they’re in love. On most days I dismiss the thought because I like to be a cynic when it comes to matters of the heart, but lately, life has placed me at such strange crossroads that I’m compelled to think, what I actually think of romantic love.
It pains my heart to see people of my generation become impatient about falling and being in love, as though ticking off an activity on their to do list. We envy couples, question our self worth based on whether or not we’ll be able to impress whoever we like and mistake being desired for being deeply known. And that makes me wonder if we really want to be in love or we just like the idea of being in love.
For all the suspension of disbelief films gave me growing up, it taught me one thing: love, whatever else it may be, has never been impatient. It was never associated with urgency.
Growing up, no points for guessing , romantic love for me was anything and everything that was shown in the movies. Big gestures,dance and music, eloping,intimacy, falling in love, falling out of love, realising there is no life without the other person and eventually falling in love again, and while this forms the premise of almost all the Bollywood movies I watched growing up, love actually goes way beyond that(surprise). I would still prefer falling in love with a suited-up nerd who listens to you are my soniya but let me finish what I have started.
On a bus ride back to my college , my friend and I (shout out to Jigisha), discussed our ideal love tropes. While I would refrain from writing the details of our 7:30 am conversation, the one single word that we came down to was - organic. Not manufactured, not curated, unhurried. The kind that allows people to slowly become familiar with one another.
The kind that happens because both of you just decided to give each other a chance, long strings of conversations, remembering coffee orders, sending lame selfies, sharing the nothingness of your days, discussing movie endings in great detail, just the kind of love that makes the ordinary seem not boring but easy, not exciting, simply lighter.
But these opinions take time to form, as a teenager the appeal for the bad boy is very real. The one who’d be starkly opposite from who you are and yet would sweep you off your feet. There would be jitters, and some heart skipping a beat kind of a thing and ultimately falling deeply, truly, madly in love. But with the passage of time, the appeal eventually fades, the butterflies stop feeling like enough.
And that makes me think, what lasts when the sparks are over?
Maybe friendship? That Rahul, Anjali and Miss Briganza made us all believe in, in Kuch Kuch Hota hai? (Pyaar Dosti Hai).
Maybe knowing their quirks or knowing the fact that they spend their 21st birthday crying.
Maybe remembering which band made them fall in love with music and playing that one song after a difficult day.
Is it the inherent romanticism of being thought of?
Or maybe simply knowing that they’ve only been pretending to like chocolate pastry while all along they only liked blueberry orange?
What lasts when the sparks are over is conversation.
So my idea of falling in love is simply this: falling in love with talking to someone. (not Siri, I love the movie Her but yes-). Perhaps falling in love is really just falling in love with conversation.
Yes tell me about the history of liquid soap and which one you used growing up.
Tell me about the craziest fan theories you formed after watching a film when you were 5. Tell me about the fallout you had with your childhood best friend of 8 years. Tell me why you prefer polo T-shirts to round necks.
And let me tell you about the one crush I had in 11th grade at a debate competition when I looked like a loser nerd or why I wear mismatched socks or why I love the yellow diary or why I feel dil chahta hai is the greatest film of all time.
Or after a long day, simply tell me that you don’t wanna talk and that is okay too, because that’s when I know, that my love is safe. The kind of love that feels less like fireworks and more like exhaling.
And that is another word I associate with love- safe. Not because love protects you from pain, but because it becomes an emotional refuge for when the rest of the world feels heavy.
Where I know I won’t be judged for being myself, or for breaking apart.
Where I know that I’ll be held, I’ll be understood and I’ll be allowed to just be.
The kind of love that makes it easier for me to breathe, to go back to and to hold on to.
I understand that it takes years for love to feel safe, to develop emotional bandwidths for not just yourself but for another person too, but I feel, kisi cheez ko poori shiddat se chaho, toh poori qaynat usse tumse milane mein lag jaati hai. Loving someone is a series of deliberate choices every day. (simply meaning - if you possess an unwavering desire for that love to last, it will last) and you will make it last, no matter what, no matter where.
And that’s another feeling I associate with love- effort.
Simply trying to understand the love language of the other person and making it work. Paying attention, noticing, learning the other person’s emotional geography and maybe unlearning it too. Or simply a cheesecake on a bleak day.
Another gray exists between safety and efforts- yearning (yes, Imtiaz Ali)
I have always wondered if yearning is proof of love or merely proof of hope. Maybe it is neither. Maybe yearning is simply faith in someone you haven’t met yet. Or maybe it’s trying to find parts of someone else in your life long after they are gone.
There are some things about love that I’m yet to agree or disagree on- is love supposed to be painful? is love equivalent to sacrifice? is long distance really worth it? is it true that you fall in love only once? is love successful only when it ends in marriage? is the idea of being with one person as difficult as my generation makes it look and sound? is forever really a thing?
And I shall find answers to these questions, someday, when I’m older and wiser and hopefully a little more in love than I am today and have finally figured if I like love aaj kal or not.
I don’t know what you’ll make of me after reading all of this. Maybe you’ll think I’m too hopeful for someone who claims to be cynical, or too sentimental for someone who’s spent this entire essay questioning love or just someone who lives inside these cheesy Bollywood movies. I’d like to think I’m neither. I’m just twenty, trying to understand something people spend lifetimes writing about. I’m figuring it out too.
I don't know if love is abstract, or profound, or art . I just know that if it’s meant for you it will cross oceans, distances, and doubts to reach you.
Maybe it’s just the little girl in me who grew up believing that if Rhea and Karan (from Hum Tum) could keep finding each other despite terrible timing, across cities, then perhaps love has a strange way of returning to the people it’s meant for.
It’s about meeting the same person over and over again, until life finally makes you ready for each other. (Saif Ali Khan saying - hum bohot jaldi milenge rhea, kyu ki yeh zindagi bohot lambi hai, aur hum par waqt bohot kam hai, gives me goosebumps till today).
I hope the right kind of love finds all of us and until then, we have friendships, and movies and coffee and songs and Bollywood and versions of ourselves that are still learning to love. And that’s not too bad of a deal right :)
Maybe one day, years from now, I’ll sit across from someone over coffee and tell them I once wrote an essay trying to figure love out. I hope they smile, disagree with half of it, and tell me what they think instead.
The girls are talking. Get in the conversation.