LOVE

The last post was more than a year ago. It is amazing how time flies these days. I have allowed much time to pass before getting back to my blog again. But thoughts continue to come and go and this time, I will stop giving excuses and will not say that I did not have the time to pen them down. Instead, I will admit that my laziness overpowered my excitement in writing.

Love.

In recent months, a range of conceptions have crossed my mind on its definition. This whole post is written on the basis of thoughts that enter when reason somehow does not qualify an answer. I write this despite knowing that literally everyone who reads it will disagree vehemently. But my rationality in this is that I am neither here to argue nor defend myself. We are absolutely right in whichever way we want to look at it. If I had read a post like this, perhaps a year ago, I would be in the same band width as everyone else, opposing such a ridiculous idea. We often do not live in dimensions that are unseen and fathoming anything near them is unfeasible and implausible.

The Oxford English dictionary defines love as :

“An intense feeling of romantic attachment based on an attraction felt by one person for another; intense liking and concern for another person, typically combined with sexual passion.”

I do agree that there are many other definitions of love. But largely they run on the same lines.

Humans evolved.
Well, not with dracula characteristics or dinosaur strength, but with anatomical modernity.

We lived through wars, but fights did not seem the way to live in a society. So we espoused an effective way of living in peace with each other. As a result, we took on an emotional and dependent attachment to one another, which ensued in us being less selfish and more giving. We called it love and permitted it to overwhelm our lives. Perhaps it helped us survive, and eventually live.

Assuming Tabula Rasa is true, we are born with no prior content and ultimately we secure knowledge and understanding through perception and experience of self and others. Based on this, our whole lives could be a fabrication of what has been fed to us, unless it is proven without a doubt to our satisfaction, that our history books (also other ancient tomes including our religious scriptures) are based on facts.

Is love a feeling? Or has it been imposed on us masterfully? Think about it.

The love which is natural is affection, the kind that cares, not the kind that exists today in narcissism or irrational loyalty and insane madness for another person.

Again, it may be that I am juggling words to explain my thoughts on this. Let me try a different approach.

Just like all else, our parents teach us what they have been taught. We are disciplined neither to question, nor oppose those teachings. And if we have the courage to question, then perchance, we will be discouraged to get into an argument about it. Some of us become rebels because of this, most of us become like our parents. So we have a world of followers and a `fatwa’( for want of a better word), on the person who thinks differently, the rebel.

Before the 12th century, love meant loyalty among a group of people.

But after, romantic love was scripted in songs and auditioned in movies. It was when the invention of romantic love began in literature, it was then that passionate emotions were displayed, sold and adopted by all.

The bard, made popular his romantic tragedy and magnified celebration of obsessive love, in happiness and sorrow, life and death. In scepticism, I see love and tragedy as a contradiction. How is despair and anguish a celebration?

Love is a lasting preoccupation for us, more so in designing melancholy as an attachment in a meaningful pattern making it almost beautiful. Are we reduced to thinking that perhaps these feelings belong to us? Our assumptions are made normal in the beliefs of others, and as a result of ours too.

But I think it is an intriguing concept that it is actually an exhibit and a belief that is passed from generation to generation, and perhaps an affliction, we cannot cure ourselves from. And it is interesting to question why we would doubt what and how everyone feels if we feel the same way. But again, is it really a feeling or an emotion planted on us to display normalcy?

I, in oppose to normalcy, declare that passion, romance and sex are neither a part of love nor an extension of it. I look upon the connection in trepidation, not being able to justify the thoughts of the masses. We follow and we are followed, an ailment we continue to will to our children. If we look back at those passionate romances, they were the acts of inanity, still, how easily we excuse ourselves from them, saying we did them for love.

Not much later, the industrial revolution emerged, when structural changes from agriculture to industry influenced daily lives in every socio-economic strata. Men left for the cities in search of work and women were emancipated in their economic status giving them a kind of equality to the men. Duty to the job and responsibility to family were priorities. Romance and sexual gratification became business.

It was only in the 19th century with the age of romanticism, when all of a sudden, people’s feelings were of utmost importance. Love became a fairy tale of happy ever afters. Embodied in music, literature and arts, intense emotions became a source of aesthetic attachment. Romance became an easy sell and business men pounced on it for mega bucks. They sold excitement, passion and eternal love through advertisements and testimonies.

Being in a relationship of marriage and keeping it going is dreary and unappreciated. With romance, we are swept off our feet and claim devotion pour toujours for our partners. We cannot foresee that anything could possibly go wrong with such a passion. The drama of romance ignores all faults and failures of a relationship right in front of our eyes so we remain delusional and continue displaying the witless acts through it until we finally commit to one another and find out to our dismay, that the reality of it all is something else. Our understanding of love and its overestimated magical ability to solve any rift in the relationship will crumble in argument, disappointment and depression.

Romance in love is a fantasy that inspires us to make the wrong choices. We are overwhelmed with an emotion that takes control of us by blocking our rational thoughts. It isn’t an emotion we were born with, it is passed on to us as a concealed misfortune of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, that will eventually cause us pain one way or the other. We are deceived by people who did not know they too were tricked into believing something which was not there at all, and which was possibly never meant to be there. We imagined it, we created it, we hyped it up, we gave a name to it and we made it an invisible contagious disease passing it to our own children, and then we let it destroy us. How conveniently ignorant and mindless we have become.

Let us recognize real things, like respect and value. Being brave and humble, and being in a continuous and constant state of gratitude. Being reliable and progressing in our lives while guiding others with honesty and honour. Let us be kind and supportive when no one is watching and contribute in every way we possibly can to everyone around us every time we are able to.

What has all these got to do with love?