Love is arguably the most complex emotion in a person’s life.
We spend so much time and energy thinking about it that we confuse our heads off to simply get a hint at it.
Most of the confusion surrounding this word emanates from the fact that love is ‘ever-changing’. It evolves constantly. It is in this evolution – this slow and steady transition – that we also grow as a person and in perspectives. Or maybe vice versa. Because people change with time, their perception of love changes.
We often talk about love in terms like true love, platonic love, infatuation, attraction, admiration. lust, friendship or care. In this web of terminology, we fail to develop our own definition of love.
Interestingly, the subject of love has been of immense curiosity to many scientists and psychologists. Many scholars have tried their best to define ‘love’.
Abraham Maslow placed the need of love just below the need of self-esteem. Robert Sternberg gave three components of love – intimacy, passion and commitment. Lee defined love in terms of colors. He proposed three styles of loving in his book ‘Colors of Love’ viz., Eros (intense, passionate love), Ludus (game-playing love) and Storge (stable love).
We have many such scientific explanations of the term ‘love’ yet it seems elusive.
No definition fits in our definition of love.
Why is love such a personal feeling? Why do we feel others can understand us but they can never understand our concept of love?
I think it is because love is indeed personal. It is the innermost part of our emotional being.
Love is the core part of a human being. It is as unique as a human being himself.
With love being such an integral part of a person’s inner self, it is natural to have one’s own, peculiar and extremely personal sense of love.
Chuck all personality types and the compatibility scores. Cut the crap out of sun signs and their assumptions of right love partners.
No science, no fiction and no x-ray machine can get past our heart to dig our perception of love.
It is something that only the neurons in our own brain can decipher.
Only our eyes can spot it – even in a crowd, at a distance and without even directly looking at it.
The way I define or I practice love can never be exactly like somebody else’s way.
My love does not have a set standard. It is flexible like a fluid that takes the shape of the container. Depending on the person, my love takes a shape and adheres to that.
I can never love two people the exact same way because no two people can ever be the same. There has to be something unique in my love for each of them except one thing:
I completely lose myself when I am in love.
When in love, I am more like water. Taking the odor, color and shape of the object of my affection. Slowly, from this bowl of water, I begin to flow like a river – following my lover. I had flowed like river, overcoming rocks of hurdles, carrying along whatever my lovers had to give to me, blindly following the paths they had carved for me until I met the sea.
With marriage, my love has culminated into a life long commitment of reverence. The river in me has found her destination – the ocean – in my husband.
Coming to where I began, my thoughts of love have changed over the last seven years. Or maybe, I have changed which is why my notion of love has changed!
Right now my love is stable.
It has acquired a shape, color and odor of its own. I am like a fish, who has found her abode in the vast sea. I do not care if my husband is a fellow fish like me or not. I am happy that he is the source of my living. I will die if I am taken out of this ocean, more so, because a younger, five-year old girl fish dwells upon me.
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