One needs to be in love to know what love is

What is love is a question we have all loved answering, especially during our school/college days. Justification to be with someone, listening to ghazals, writing poetry, calling up the best friend in the middle of the night and chuckling on how beautiful this feeling is! We have all lived this melodrama once in our life.

Now, years after being married, being a parent, living a life of “wise & experienced” people, I look back at this question with more depth- What is love all about? How it feels to be in love? What’s it like to be in love?

The ones who are lucky to find one by the time they reach their marriageable age, get to legally live being loved for the rest of their life. But there are others, who either wait all their life to find true love or get married to a stranger in the hope that this is the love they all had been dreaming of. And then there are some who find love after they have been married to someone else.

Honour killings, divorces, late marriages, extra marital affairs, gay marriages- all these are not just increasing numbers but societies’ way of telling us that this feeling called love is much more lethal than we ever imagined it to be.

The worrying thing with love is that you really can’t understand or appreciate this feeling unless you have truly been in love. And sadly, not all of us have actually been in love and hence we keep questioning- is love a myth or reality? And if it is a reality then are we right in ignoring it? The passion, the desires, the ever wanting need to be with someone is not only for reels but is deeply spread in our real lives. Some of us choose to live with it and some just shelve it under the carpet.

One needs to be in love to know what love is. Till then, no matter how much you try you can never ever experience the waves & tides of loving & being loved.

This dubious treatment of this feeling which has confused not only our childhood but also the ones before and after us is worrisome. On one side, we encourage children to show love- love your parents, siblings, and friends. It is one of the values taught in the moral science classes of primary school and then when the expression of love starts becoming difficult to manage, we scold them for having these feelings!

In the absence of a rule book that defines our reactions when we are in love or when we see someone in love, we tend to do things that our defined as the “right” thing to do by our society. But most of the times, this “right” thing is only killing this pure expression of a natural feeling. Are we largely becoming a set of people, who are okay to just read about love and not willing enough to actually experience it?

All the love quotes that you would have ever read, the love songs you would have loved singing and the romantic movie characters you have adored- they are all real and needs to be treated as real. It is a tough ask and looks unattainable right now, but something gives me the hope that there shall come a day, where people would have a change of heart and to every Simran that would fall in love, everyone around her would say-“ Ja Simran Ja, Ja jee le apni zindagi”