On Love and Relationships

Of late, I have had a lot of time to think about how relationships occur. As someone who had been in serious relationships throughout college, I was relatively new to the dating game. The use of “was” was intentional in the previous sentence because I have had some colorful experiences over the past few months and can no longer claim to be relatively new.

What I did not expect was how hard it is to actually like someone and begin a relationship. In college, I met my second serious girlfriend shortly after breaking up with my girlfriend of over two and a half years, both of whom I loved dearly. This gave me the impression that falling in Love was a simple and inevitable matter that required you to spend some time with a certain person. I can’t say if I have changed with age or I am just realising this, but having a spark or connect with a certain someone is very, very hard to come by. I dated all these beautiful women without any expectations, just letting things take their course. All of them had this girlfriend potential and checked all the right boxes, and naturally I assumed I would just begin a serious relationship, every time. Unfortunately, they were also under the same impression. By the third week, I’d have usually lost all interest and broken the news to them.

I have had time to introspect about why I made those decisions, about why I think the way that I do. First of all, I always compare how I felt at that same point of time while I was dating in college. Around the two or three week mark, I was very excited to be talking to them and all I could think about was how to spend more time with them. That kind of spark has not happened after that, in almost two years. It really makes you appreciate the value of that magical spark. Then, I think it’s mostly the concept of how much I feel like opening myself up to this new person, because by telling them my deepest and more personal thoughts, I am in essence letting them into my world. I simply did not feel like talking about myself, or any of the things that make me who I am. With them not having even scratched the surface of who I was in a few weeks, I realise I don’t have anything to lose by ending our time together. It isn’t their fault though, and now that I think about it, it’s actually mine. I am just artful in the skill of deflecting conversations away from me. It impresses me to no end when a woman can see past that and ask questions that matter, to try and truly understand me. Finally, the narcissist in me thinks that I deserve the above mentioned spark and understanding, and so three weeks is the threshold before I end things, which the ladies hardly expect because things were great just a week earlier.

So, moving on from why I find a relationship hard to initiate at this point in time, I am shifting the question to “why”. Why relationships? Whats so great about them that being single does not offer? Humans are designed to co-habit and it is the most natural thing to do. However, marriage is far from the mind of a man in his mid 20s. While I appreciate companionship, I am not quite at the point where I have to enjoy the companionship of one woman for the remainder of my life, gross. So, you take marriage out of the equation, and look at companionship, because that is what dating is. There might have been a point where I would have appreciated it, but after having been single for so long, I am kind of used to this and am quite enjoying myself. Companionship brings a host of pros and cons, the usual stuff you can find on a simple google search. Its the inherent idea that companionship brings happiness. Ofcourse, making a relationship work involves a lot of elements, and love is not even the most important of them. But for me, Love is everything in a relationship. I cannot fathom being in a loveless relationship. It’s in looking for that spark that I am going at a pace I’ve never gone through before. Once I realise that I am not going to fall in love with the girl, I quickly lose interest. This is not the case for everyone, but it most definitely is my case.

When you fall in Love, nothing else matters. Practicality and rational thought take a back seat. I would go to the ends of this world for a loved one, but unfortunately, love does not strike nearly as often as I thought it would. Now that I have finally understood that Love does not happen often, I have come to the conclusion that neither do relationships. There has hardly been a case when the end of love did not end in heartbreak. Having had my heart broken twice, I have also realised that I am a lot more fragile than i would like to admit. I also fall in Love a lot easier than I would like to admit. Put all these things together, and me having another failed relationship is setting myself up for disaster. I figured its better to enter into a relationship only when I can see it working out, everything else is just a waste of time.

Now that relationships, atleast what they mean to me, are out of the way, I have to elaborate on what Love means to me. Way back in High School, someone I don’t even remember asked me what Love meant to me. I said, “To rely on someone as much as we do on the Air we breathe, to be suffocated by their absence, that’s Love for me”. Over the years, my understanding of Love has changed, but my defintion of it has not. I refuse to settle for anything less than this. I don’t know if I would ever experience such a powerful feeling again, but this is what I need out of a relationship, the kind of unrequited love that knows no bounds in its passion. Emotions are a tricky thing, especially where relationships are involved. The conventional thinking is that you fall in love with the person you are in a relationship with, but since it has failed miserably for me in the past, I don’t think I’ll go with that logic. Rather, I’d get into a relationship with that one girl that I would be in Love with, not the other way around. Falling in Love ought to feel like a huge weight has been taken off of my shoulders and the burden of life is going to be a shared weight, making the whole less burdensome. Love ought to feel like one of the purposes of Life has been achieved.

I have not felt Love in a very long time, but that’s okay, I don’t need to. I am content the way I am, and I am pursuing other interests in Life. I am not waiting in Life for Love, I’d just appreciate it if it happened along the way as I pursue other goals. I now know that it is very hard to come by, and the next time it happens, I shall make sure I do not lose it. However, I can’t explain this in detail to every girl I date. I do tell them the gist of it, but they end up falling for me anyway. I do feel a little bad about ending things with these gorgeous and wonderful women, but I tell myself that its better I end things sooner rather than later. To sum up everything that I have said, the occurence of Love is so rare and so unique, that it must be chersished with all of one’s heart and never given up on, ever. The entire world can burn, but not Love.