The Love Conundrum

Guest writer: Nihal Khan

Love is the vital core of the soul.
And of all you see, only Love is infinite.

Why do we think that all that ever has anything to do with love is what happens when a heart skips a beat, or when eyes meet and are forever entangled in the fabric of the heavens? Is it really that typical, that celluloid?

Does it even exist, true love and all its derivatives?

I know that it does, and it comes in many shapes and sizes, being a thing of a certain greatness that we’ll never truly understand. It exists everywhere, and it is ever so present. The great ubiquitous. Where thoughts and ideas are sprung, where breaths are taken and lost, and where friends and enemies are made; love exists. It is there and it sits by as a guiding hand for all that occurs in life. I know that love exists, and it’s not some sort of fabled abstraction that we search for all our lives. It is here and now, and it drives us in the same manner as hate and despair, greed and passion.

Maybe love is as typical as we think of it, but I differ in my view. For me, and possibly others, love isn’t like that. I think, for the majority of us humans, the idea of it is fairly flawed. We see it as something that happens, something that we wait for to unveil itself before our very own eyes. In the circus that is life, we silently sit ourselves down with others deprived just as us, and we keep our eyes open for it to make its grand appearance. But love has something else on its agenda. It never makes an appearance, because it never has to. It lives within us, grows within us.

Love does not happen before us, because while we wait for it to happen, it already has. We never really know when, but we always guess.

Love at first sight, who believes in that? Many of us love God and yet we’ve not even had a sight of him. How do you explain that, a love which defies the boundaries of visibility and a love stronger than all other kinds?

Well, it is in our eyes to deceive, to put things into our minds that are not supposed to be there. If love at first sight is something to believe in, it has to exist for all of us, indiscriminatingly. Now picture a blind man falling in love; can love at first sight apply for him? I’ll leave you to figure it out.

Now, I think you all might be having some sense of where I’m heading with this. To me, it is a ruse, some kind of examination that not many of us pass. To love you have to experience, and that experience may be a day or a month or even as short as the time it takes to have a revelation; but a sighting is only an illusion of experience.

What makes you think that woman in the red dress, in the distance by the tree, reading from what seems to be the cover of your favorite novel is the woman you love? You see her there and how lovely she is, and you think you have found her, and you believe the wait is over. But the wait is never over because there is no wait. You think you love that woman only because she looks and seems good to you, not for you. It’s a mere attraction, a basic appeal that is involved here.

There is no love there because all that is present is a primal sexual arousal, but the pretty face and lovely skin and glowing hair clouds the mind into falsified innocence, thinking it is something different. Something we label, ‘love at first sight’.

Of course, it you were to go there, meet that woman, and if chance would have it, get to know her; the story could change, and the context as well. Love enters the equation when you find out who and what she is—but then that is not the product of the first sighting but your experience of her. Now consider this: you meet her and get to know her, but you realize that you don’t like her. Here, love just escapes the whole equation. Perplexing, isn't it?

What I'm trying to say is that love does not happen but is always happening, growing. You cannot fall in love, but you can always be falling, never managing to make the fall complete. The woman in the dress, whom you've never met and somehow seemed to love because she looks beautiful; what is she in front of, say, your mother or sister? I know that there are many who might not love their mothers or sisters expressibly; but there is underlying affection in such relations that is beyond us. Now, that is the stuff of heavens; to love someone because of the idea behind that someone.

Let’s further the example of a mother. What’s the idea behind a mother?  A woman, beautiful but not attractive, being there in your life as an integral, irreplaceable part of all your experiences, tirelessly worrying for you and mending and moulding your very soul with every opportunity. Is it duty that makes her do that? If you think so, what do you wager she gets in return for it? Who does she answer to? Blank, completely blank.

You love your mother, because she’s there for you and cannot be dispensed. And it may not be your mother; it can be a father, a sister or a friend. It can be anything from an idea that pleases you to a place you were born and raised. Love is not strict; there are no rules for it. You don’t require two bodies for it or two souls of matching preferences, compatibility or anything as such. There can be love between a cat and dog, or to put it figuratively, between fire and water. But what the woman in the red dress and you have is far from it, because at that point there is nothing that you two have.

Now what about the loss of love? You might argue that you need to have something in order to lose it; if you cannot fall in love, how then do you fall out of it? The thing is, you can have love but that love is not found within strict confines; it is growing or it is being dominated, not escaping. You don’t fall in love, and likewise, you don’t fall out of it.

Picture love for an object or a subject as something that is perpetually flowing through a soul and it is either growing in that soul or it is diminishing, the two processes being continual. A concentration analogy applies, and where the two are at equilibrium comes envy. You never lose all love because it is outweighed by its opposite, or something in between. One can hate, one can despise something as passionately as he can, but there is always a vestige, a spark of admiration for it or a part of it in his soul that is silenced by all the hate. Isn’t it true that when someone we find detestable, someone we hate all our lives— we still remember the good about them when they pass away? That appreciation is a result of an unvoiced, overshadowed love; hate cannot see good in anything.

Of course, all of this is opinionated. You might disagree with me on some or all points, but that is how expression of opinion works. For me, however, the fact remains that love, the true sort, isn’t always and isn’t only something you see in movies and books. It isn’t confined to romance or intimacy; it’s everywhere around us and it’s truly beautiful.