Recently I was posed with a question by one of my close friends. Quite a trivial one, it was. “Hey, have you ever been in love?” “I don’t know”, I replied. That ended there for the moment. But it triggered a conversation inside my self, with the same theme. What is Love, really? May be, we all feel the same dilemma at every encounter of sympathy and affection. I am sure there will be quite a few takers of my views, too.
Love is, in my view, a pure phenomenon. Where one has no expectations from anybody or for that matter a particular person, there begins the love for a person or the world as a whole. That, I guess, is a divine experience altogether. This may sound quite a bit spiritual. One needs to be closer to the nature, to the self, and may be, closer more than anything else, to the creator. We have developed a tendency to believe that the romance depicted in the novels and movies is supposed to be love. Love may not end up forming a relationship, like, most of us believe, a marriage, or may be a physical intimacy. One needs to understand the thin and delicate differences between love, relationships, affection, and obsession. Relationships essentially give rise to expectations. There starts the termination of love and affection. If the expectations get fulfilled, the partners of the relationships love each other more, and if not, the relationship ends up in trouble.
And such a relationship, the exchange of the fulfillment of expectations, is nothing but a contract. A kind of mutual understanding that literally corrupts the purity of love and affection. Each one is bound by the chains of possession. When a person loves another, s/he is ‘nobody’ of the counterpart. ‘Nobody’, because such a relationship cannot be bound by names given by material world. The expectations are nullified. It does not necessitate formation of a relationship, or may not result in a physical intimacy. Then there comes a question: Should you really believe in a ‘Platonic’ love? I guess, yes. Love is not platonic, essentially. It is the expectations that force a relationship to be platonic. Because, relationships formed on the foundations of obsession, and sheer attraction cannot last longer, not at all beyond the moment the attraction dissolves in the waves of time. Then start the epidemics of conflicts of ideals, and the victories and defeats. Relationships are only win-win ones. Nobody loses. Relationships are meant to last long, and are supposed to be resting on strong faith. Only such a relationship can harmonize our worlds. Love is to set each other free and still remain attached to each other in a manner that even though there are physical distances among the bodies, the souls are just in the neighborhood. This is what gives the relationship, the shape of enduring divineness. Hope we all understand these differences among these subtle things, which we never even bother giving a thought, and try and make our lives better.
