Do you think that everyone is destined to find the love of their lives?
For the longest time in this universe, I have been this hopelessly romantic and optimistic in love person. The one that believed that if someone loves you, they’d move mountains for you. That the person you’re in love with will follow you to the ends of world, will see your best, worst and everything in between. And that… they’ll never ever turn their back on you. But then you see, the problem with this notion was that I never realized, that if this were indeed true, and if this is what love meant, then I’d have to move mountains and follow my love to the end of world too. And here lies the conundrum of unconditional love: if I make a step following my love to the other end of where I want to go, and they make a step following my heart to where I want to be, do we not end up mindlessly going back and forth and eventually, our love makes a standstill?
We all learn about love from movies and books and endless real-life stories of people who tell you what love is and how it should be. You’re a kid and you see your mom and dad sticking with each other and standing up for each other despite the numerous fights they have in their daily lives, and you tell yourself that love is about not letting them go even when you hate them the most. Then you watch The Notebook as a teenager and tell yourself that love will find its way to you even when you let it go. Romantic comedies become your obsession as you convince yourself that you’re the lead part in your favorite movie and some Ryan Gosling or Ryan Reynolds will sweep you off your feet and will carry you around…forever. Then it does not matter if you watch people around you ending up in divorces or staying miserable in their marriages, because you know it in your heart that you will find your true love, because that’s what you have constructed in your head, that your one true love exists somewhere in this world and destiny will eventually take you to them, and you’ll love them forever and all will be happy.
Unsurprisingly, you’ll find someone too. Someone who gives you the butterflies, someone who takes you on a date or two and you cannot stop laughing and giggling around them. Every time your heart flutters, an imaginary brick of your fairy tale castle is laid. The imaginary stories begin and you can already fantasize yourself in a beautifully embellished wedding lehenga while all the guests around you cannot stop gushing about how cute you two look as a couple. If that’s not enough you already predict your imaginary kids’ DNAs and decide on their names. You set yourself up for the long haul. You decide you’ll give in to this feeling, and dedicate your everything for this someone. Because some hormones said so. Because everything you saw or read as a kid made you believe so. For a while, your real story does match to the expectations of your fantasies. Everything is perfect. Someday in the future, however, dents begin to appear and you start doubting your story. Is this the person you’re meant to be with? Their habits annoy you, their efforts do not satisfy you, and sometimes you appear to be far more distant than the day you first met. But no, you fight for it anyway- you’ve spent far too long believing that this is who you’re meant to be with, so you keep going, because this is the love you have felt and this is the love you believe is real. How long do you go on? One day you get exhausted, you snap, and tell yourself this is it. This is not love, this is not who you’re meant to be with, this is not your story.
And suddenly, it’s over. Just like that.
The castle you built for yourself, destroyed.
The wedding lehenga, stained.
And the kids, dead.
The truth is that your love ends because you believe in this very ideology that you’ll save each other and make compromises and sacrifices and all those words that seem very beautiful, but are in fact, extremely exhausting. The fact of the matter is that love is far from idealistic, and far too different from how they make it out to be.
Love isn’t optimistic at all. I’m not here to tell you what love is. In fact, if I do, run the other way. Because I do not think I have it figured out at all. But nor has anybody else. All I know is that love isn’t optimistic, and it’s not ideal. One day you think you have found it, and the other day, the world around you is destroyed. And you do not know what to believe anymore. Does true love exist at all? If it does, why do some people remain single until they die? If you’re destined to find the one, how long do you have to wait until you truly know you have found it?
Love’s mayhem. Love’s maybe even imaginary. After all, just a bunch of hormones, right?
But despite of all of this, the only thing that will help you wake tomorrow is the hope that you’ll walk on the streets and go to your favorite café to find your Ryan Gosling waiting for you. Without that hope, you’ll succumb to the fear of being alone. And why, what’s to fear about being alone, you ask! But then, the answer to that lies in the very moment you opened your eyes and saw your parents, together. Not alone, but together. And you were screwed from the very beginning, because that’s what you thought you’d be too. Together. And not alone.