Love Actually

So even the most crowded place in the world cannot make you feel as if you’ve got company if you feel lonely at heart. I got up this morning did my usual chores and left for work. The metro was over crowded as always and specially form the station where I change trains, Morichita, it gets worse.

Anyway this post is not about life in Tokyo, may be sometime later. It’s about “love”, I’ve been thinking about it lately and I’ve been wondering if this thing called love is just another feeling that fades with time or is it more? I remember sometime back saying this to a friend:

“zindagi kisi ke liye nahi rukti, bas jeene ki vajah badalti rehti hai.”

But I wonder in the truth of the statement in respect to love, if love is one of those feelings that fade with time then I don’t think love should be given the attention it gets. Everyone of my age has been in love at least once, however brief it might’ve been and then most of us fall out of it. I wonder if it was love in the first place at all or does love too has an expiry date. I guess most relationships that expire is not because love has ceased to exist it because love was not there in the first place at all, may be it was a mere impulse, but then does it mean that we close our doors thinking that its an impulse or do we take the plunge and to find out how deep those feelings are.

Anyone who has been in relationship will confirm that the first few weeks are the most memorable ones, when you can’t stop talking to one another, when you can’t stop thinking about each other. There is so much to know, there is so much to tell. But then here is the question; can you in these first few weeks tell whether this is meant to be or no? I’d say yes, at a certain level everybody knows right in those first few weeks that a relationship is meant to be or not. However most of us just ignore that feeling and move on to the next level and eventually hit a point where you don’t know what next. Because the next level is all about expectations, it’s about commitment, where you become answerable to someone, where you have to share your space.

However, I believe that being in love is about companionship, when someone just walks into your life, breaks all barriers, emotional and physical and fills the voids and not occupies your space.

Being in relationship is an experience in itself and being in love with a person is not a feeling, we often make that mistake. There are reasons to have feelings. Like pain is a feeling. I get hurt I feel pain. And that’s exactly what we do when we are in love. We look for reasons to fall in love with a certain person not realizing that that person is that reason itself. We feel that being in love is a means to achieve a certain end and not an end in itself.

And then things fall apart because we were looking for reasons to fall in love and what we eventually bang into are reasons why we shouldn’t love that person. Things that never mattered in the first place at all. We start loosing our patience, we start getting angry, we start keeping records. And eventually love fails. The truth is there is no perfect match; I’ve heard people say this a million times, but I’ve hardly seen anyone actually believing in it. That includes me. So the consequences are as expected a break-up or in a more somber way “Lets Just be Friends”.

However, having said all that I still believe that being in a relationship is an experience in itself. Having someone in your life changes a lot. You’ll do things that otherwise you wouldn’t even consider doing. And if we are lucky enough to grow old with the person we love, I mean a lifetime of experiences of high’s and lows, I’d say it was a life well lived. Because in the end it is what you have experienced that matters not what you have achieved.