Valentine’s day is here and love is in the air. Stores try to flog off the remaining heart-shaped cards and children peddle wilted roses and heart balloons at signals, hoping to make some money. I’ve been thinking about the nature of love and how it’s changed for me.
I can still remember the exact sensations I experienced when I first fell in love with my boyfriend (now husband of 13 years). The giddy excitement, the feverish longing to be together, the drama of those initial fights, the pining for each other when we weren’t together. It seems almost old-fashioned when I look around me at kids today. This is a practical generation, most of whom look at love with a lot less ishq and mush than I certainly did. And yet, the drama is still there.
On the afternoon of 14th February, as I drive home from a wonderful lunch with my husband (and 10 of his cousins and their kids, all of whom I love dearly), I can see couples in various stages of togetherness – embracing at the back of taxi cabs or on the shorefront, bashfully giving each other roses, and a few even in the midst of intense arguments.
For a bit, I feel a bit nostalgic – and I have to admit, sad. ‘I will never fall in love again’ I think, looking at a couple kissing intensely, ‘And I will never feel that rush of excitement that only new love can bring’. After a while, as we drive on, all this makes me see red (literally!) as I realise how exhausting new love can be. Yes, there is the giddiness, the new-found passion, the intensity. But there is also the uncertainty, the not knowing the other person as well so not knowing boundaries and expectations, the questions about the future – does this relationship have the potential to be a long-term one?
We arrive home and settle into our Sunday afternoon routine: the kids pull out homework, the dog runs around in circles, ecstatic to see us after a couple of hours absence and my husband settles down with the papers. Suddenly, I remember a line I had read in a book long ago that has stayed with me: love is something we arrive at. As I survey my family, kids working at fractions and squabbling over the eraser, dog noisily gnawing at his Valentine’s day gift – a new bone, and amidst the circus of my daily life, my oasis of calm, my 13-year-old husband, glasses perched comically at the end of his nose, reading the Sunday papers. He looks up at me, and smiles. Smiling back, the last line in the brilliant Stephen Hawking biopic ‘The Theory of Everything’, comes to me: “Look what we made”.
This is love.
Image Source: www.footage.framepool.com
Mansi Zaveri
Janani S Koushik
Neha Savla
