Can you fall in love with someone you have never met? If you are an atheist, the answer is simple. However, my brain is conditioned to believe in God whom I have never seen; I have been “taught” to love Him. Hence, by default I love the idea of abstract.
So what are the conditions of love these days?
You meet a guy, maybe online or in person. Set a date. Crack couple of jokes, maybe pretend to laugh at his few ridiculous puns. The chemistry is great, hell with Economy and the physiology because mujhe Pyaar chahiye Pyaar, Allah miya!
You text each other till late hours; some Good morning messages at 3 am and never having to say good night. You tag each other in funny memes and shit gets crazy. You want to know everything about each other, you stalk their ex, their friends.
Wow Joe Goldberg would’ve been proud! The obsession of new maal starts to take over your life. You want to know why they broke up. You study them thoroughly, analyse their every move because love is a test you don’t want to fail. The chemistry which was great till now is slowly growing into similar pattern, you are unsure because, Kaisey mujhe tum milgayi kismet pe ayi na yakein.
It turns out, people bore you. So the talking phase is over. You divulge deeper, the intimacy cannot begin because you both have commitment issues, geography issues and some history that keep repeating itself and you end up ghosting each other. Then the red flag emerge and becomes a shroud over your dead relationship. It turns out behen, you two never dated each other. So then, somehow Mark Zuckerberg knows the condition of your heart and the algorithm of your social media feeds are filled with heart breaking quotes, like Bitch, single life is best, this man is shit, that man is even bigger shit. You start writing love poems with sad lines and discover that there is a whole new galaxy of sad lines and poets.
How did we end up being like this? The land of Kama sutra, this land of Heer Ranjha, Laila Majnu, this land of Krishna and his Gopiyas when did it become so parched? Even the gods in our country come in pairs. Where did we go wrong? Why such trust issues? Why everybody’s walking with a mask and a knife? Why is there a hook up culture so prevalent that love is just a four letter word only fit for fictional books?
I had this conversation before where Love and Logic were separated in two different groups. There is no practicality in love, because it is dynamic and the most ridiculous thing on this planet. It makes you weak, it makes you happy, you make a fool out of yourself, you daydream, you become a better version of yourself, you become kind and again a selfish giant. You start hoping and it makes you believe in things.
It drains you. Love is the most beautiful yet horrible thing that can ever happen to a person and yet people fall in love again and again.
Perhaps, I was born in a wrong generation. I want love like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. They started with letters, an offline thing here, no photos. She was a sickly recluse, under the care of her overprotective father, almost six years his senior. He was a young poet smitten by a woman whom he had never seen but have managed to fall deeply in love with the words.
They eloped, she was disinherited. The love story is better than Romeo & Juliet. (No I am not going to insult Twilight. I got your back Stephanie)
The Lake House (2006) is my all time favourite movie, because # 1 Keanu Reeves is there. #2 Yes, Keanu Reeves is there with Sandra Bullock. I love this kind of love story where soul connects. It’s a remake of the South Korean film Il Mare (2000).
The story revolves around an architect Alex Wyler, living in 2004 and a doctor Kate Forster living in 2006. The two meet via letters left in a mailbox which serves like a portal, at the lake house they have both lived in at separate points in time; they carry on correspondence over two years, remaining separated by their original difference of two years.
How do you love someone you have never met? Love as an idea is an ideal, pure in its form. It cannot be marred by your carnal desires. Maybe we love this very idea of love more than the humans. One can say I can live without attachments; then it is some unnecessary pain one is creating by separating oneself from his/her desires. Sure it hurts so much sometimes, yet we relapse. Modern day romance is all about vanity, maybe not in looks but in feels too. Sometimes timing isn’t right, sometimes we are too accustomed with our space and our walls, and we become hostile to new beginnings, a pessimist approach to new love.
I wish life was simple and not as complicated as finding love in modern day has become. I am planning to ask my parents refund for the trauma they have caused by giving birth to me without my permission. My relative aunties are killing it by asking my asking my age and the topic somehow shifts to the right time to conceive a baby. Babies are parasites; I am already in a symbiotic relationship with my parents. My facebook is a successful matrimony cum Baby shower forum of jolly meme sharing buddies I have never seen or met.
So the question remains unsettled, beneath the humour buried but never dead. Is this how we love in modern society? We erase each other in poetry. They say you can never unlove someone, you don’t replace, you just love someone more than the last. So the sting that was left pains less, because you carry a bigger wound now. And thus it continues, until one day you see your body is filled with scars and there is no place for a jab, no place for new wound. Though the scars have healed, your skin is thicker now and numb against the pain.
We are breeding skeptic humans who rather fall in love with a robot than another of its own kind. This is not an age to fall for love, yes I am waiting for second coming of Jesus and the Apocalypse. Thank you very much.
Sanskari 