“Pyaar dosti hai”
my therapist said to me today, following which I laughed for 5 expensive minutes straight. I hate wasting therapy time in non-insightful non-eureka moments, but this deserved it. What a simplistic way to define something so complex and heavy!

I have always struggled with the idea of romantic love. I recently made a peace calendar for my parents where they mark the days they go without fighting with a heart; I call it the love calendar to humor them. Someone who has to make peace calendars almost never comes out of life with a rosy idea of love. To add to it are my abandonment issue, my rotten self-esteem, and my insecurity about happiness.

I am trying to untangle this mess, with its bad personal experiences, no guidance, next to no role models to look up to, and I don’t know which end to start untangling the strands from. I am not sure what romantic love is, but I am sure of the things it is not. It isn’t all giving like our Bollywood one, or blind like the Netflix one. It isn’t ‘aag ka dariya’ like I hear mumma tell R. It definitely isn’t like my parents’. I know it isn’t like building a man from lego blocks, let’s put addiction to fiction here, and then let’s put 6 pieces of empathy, 2 of emotional quotient, and let’s see if we can find a block of ‘experienced childhood trauma but went to therapy and is doing well now?

So I am stuck with the inverse of components, non-components, non-rules, and non-guidelines if you may, to build a good partner out of/for Prachi.
When I brought this up in therapy, he told me that most people come to this stage fully laden with traumas, biases, and unhealthy attachment patterns. He promised to decode mine, but till then let’s try to work with this he said: love is like friendship. When you find yourself feeling scared, ask yourself what would you do had this person been your friend? I can work with this, for a while, till I know myself better, till I figure out what this love is.
And when I do, we will go on a date to the classics section of a bookstore.

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