Random thoughts on love

For a few minutes today I saw the modern version of “Great Expectations” in the form of a movie that they were showing on TV.  They had probably changed the names of the characters because Miss Havisham had some other name in the movie. but the names of Estella and Pip hadn’t been changed.  When the character of Miss Havisham  sees that Pip is attracted towards Estella she remarks something like, “You already love her and she will cause you great pain.”

That set me thinking, is love all about pain?  There was a time when I used to think like that.  I thought there was no true love without excruciating pain, without anguish, and without longing. Maybe these notions of love were a result of all the literature I was reading at that time.  Whether it was Dostoyevsky, or Thomas Hardy, or Garcia, or Salman Rushdie;  they all seemed to be obsessed with characters that burnt in the inferno of love; the more vehemently the fires burnt, the greater heights their loves attained. It almost sounded like the glory of martyrdom when you die for your country with a smile on your lips.

Some people believe that love should be about eternal happiness and joy: “you are at the top of the world when you are in love”, This may be true in the rarest of the rare cases, but I think that kind of love, the love that brings you eternal joy is of the spiritual kind — without physical attraction and the cutting desire to be close to the loved one.

Sure, the cosmic joy manifests during the budding times of love.  You feel like dying of happiness when the sparkles of reciprocation spread all over the firmament of your love.  But after the initial thrust things slow down and the law of diminishing returns gets operational and eventually every kind of great love boils down to juggling with the quotidian matters of life like earning money, cooking food, taking care of the children and paying the bills.  After all Romeo and Juliet couldn’t have spent their lives rebelling against their feuding families and making love.  If they hadn’t died and if they had gotten married they would have had children and all the associated problems with them; other problems take precedence over love and romance as you settle down and start a family.  But I think am talking about the bookish love.

A few months ago Alka and I saw a documentary on the National Geographic Channel in which they showed a couple who has spent more than 35 years studying elephant behavior in various African geographical locations.  They have grown old now but they are always working alone in the limitless world of humanlessness. Had there not been prodigal love between them they wouldn’t have managed so many years with each other without meeting other human beings.  Of course their common passion must have acted as a binding force but still you need something more than passion to stay together for such a long time and accomplish so much, together. How many moments of love and hardship they must have shared together.  Now here we can say that it is a love of eternal joy and happiness (at least it looked like that ). One of my cousins told me last year that she was thinking of getting a job because both she and her husband were getting fed up of seeing each other in the same room; they needed to get away from each other for at least some time (they both work from home I think).  Theirs was a love marriage.  Has the love withered, or the great love was never there and it was just an illusion or some sociological compulsion to love somebody?

The love-related pain is of two kinds: of separation and of treachery. For a few months I have been trying to read “The Count of Monte Cristo”; it is a very thick book but still, had I been able to extract enough time out of my daily routine I would have been able to finish the book, but anyway that is another subject.  The protagonist of the book is framed falsely by the people who are jealous of him both for his financial success and his success in obtaining the love of his life.  He is imprisoned, and no doubt he is very sad when he is taken away from his lover.  But his agony breaks all bounds of reasoning when he learns that in his absence his lover doesn’t wait for him and marries the person who had falsely framed him for treason (she doesn’t know that her present husband was responsible for the sad turn of events, but it hardly matters). So she also gets included in the list of people he wants to take revenge from. The treachery of love incites both hatred and pride.  Pride, for being the one who loved till his or her last breath.  Hatred, for being left for another. To understand this feeling, you have to go through it.  Treachery of love turns some into exceptional poets and some into psychopathic murderers.

In today’s world separation due to societal pressures, at least in educated classes, is not a great factor.  Here I would quickly refer to the case of the Muslim boy who recently died in Kolkata because he was in love with a rich girl whose parents were opposed to the alliance: the boy was allegedly murdered by the city police.  So such things still happen in the society but for the argument let us assume that they are not a norm and they don’t happen in the civilized world.  Ranjha (the hero of a Punjabi folklore love epic written by the great Sufi poet Bulle Shah) turned into an ascetic when due to societal differences he couldn’t spend his life with Heer and eventually they both died of separation.  This is where things get mixed up a bit; what causes greater agony in love?  The separation due to third-party intervention or the separation due to treachery of a partner?  For instance Heer and Ranjha could have spent their lives peacefully thinking that even though they were not physically close to each other they still loved each other. A great amount of strength can be derived from the fact that a person in a faraway place loves you from the bottom of his or her heart. So did Heer and Ranjha died because they couldn’t live with each other, that they couldn’t mate? Obviously they would have had sex had they gotten married  because after all theirs was not  a motherly, or a fatherly,  or a sisterly, or a brotherly, or a friendly love and neither was it the kind of love we have for Almighty. Many people take a leaf out of these legendary love stories and take drastic steps when they fail in love. But a love that prompts you to kill yourself is not actually love; it is a craving, an obsession that drives you out of your mind and you end up killing yourself.  This is a mental illness and not a romantic emotion.

So what would be true love?  I think true love wouldn’t depend on getting to live with the person you love.  True love is just there, irrespective of the kind of reciprocation it generates.  True love lets you live a productive life even if you “fail” in love.  The best example is the parental love.  Okay here I am not going on a tangent; I am using the example of parental love just to drive in a point.  Parental love is a love that does not depend on a return. Your parents love you just because they are your parents; they keep loving you even if you have abandoned them to the extent of calling someone else your mother or father (of course there are exceptions). As long as you are healthy and prosperous they will be satisfied (assuming the other problems don’t bother them like money or health). This you cannot say about a lover. A separation or a shift in loyalty is bound to cause lots of pain and anger.  The happiness becomes a joint affair when you are in love.  Your lover loses the right to be happy with another person; he or she should only be happy with you.  This feeling lasts as long as you don’t get another partner who is even better than the previous one.  Do you call it love?  Rather it is a circumstantial feeling; it changes with the change of circumstances.  True love, in its real essence, doesn’t get affected with the change of circumstances.  It doesn’t matter to the true love whether the other person lives with you or with someone else, or is happy with you or with someone else. A love that doesn’t depend on togetherness can be the cause of eternal joy I think.