Tuesday, November 4, 2008

defining love....


Dude what is love???

I asked this question to one of my room mate who for the past 5 years has been dating* a girl - who of course is his girlfriend….

*dating = can’t find a suitable word for someone being in love & yet to get married in our Indian context

thereafter I have asked this question then to most other people also… be it my other room mates …CA articles working on the same project as I am…my project manager, PwC colleagues etc etc… just to find an answer to this question I have been dwelling upon for some time now…what love really means & how is that it should be defined?

For the past 1 year I have been watching some of my friends and others who have got engaged…how life changes for them and how they affect others lives… all but a strange experience…. life seems to be unidirectional for them…

Relax… no complaints for all of U who are in love… love matters…no one better than me to understand that …though m writing the blog…

But then I started thinking on this ‘love’ word and tried to get answers to it… I got some interesting responses which I thought should be put down to get a non dictionary meaning of love…

Rummie 1 (who is in love) defines- ‘love is a situation wherein u don’t get seduced by the hottest chick that may be around you & you still continue to think of your beloved’

Ok. I agree with this definition. But this guy was just surfing Bharat Matrimony site alongwith my other rummie & trying to find who is the hottest on bloc ... though I don’t mean he is not in love … (our other aspects of locating the hottest one are purposefully kept under secret)

Rummie 2 (desperately trying to find a match for himself on Bharat Matrimony… that too at 12 am and avoiding my question feeling m not feeling sleepy & that is why such questions) says…‘love cant be defined … it is very unstructured & you never know how n when it happens’ …. (nice way to get away !!!)

on some serious stuff…
I queried our articles as I knew I would be getting some good response (U can query articles only… CA Institute gets pride when u post queries and not those simple questions to its students)

Article 1 (female… u know the rule -ladies first) defines—
· when in love one feels secured/ one is sure of himself or herself
· we accept a person first for what he is and then we have the freedom to say for what we feel he or she should change to better himself
· when in love, you want to be with that person for all the time
· love is trust

Article 2 (male) thoughtfully defines—
· love is the willingness to compromise one’s self
· love is all about compatibility & trust

truly… CA articles always add more value to our thought process…

Colleague 1(who is getting married soon -he is a telugu & his fiancee is a guju) says- ‘there is nothing called as true love…marriages to some extent are a compromise… I may go around watching other girls but then my fiancĂ©e knows that at the end of the day I shall come back to her…’

hard one to digest but a I feel it to be a realistic view…

Colleague 2 (he messaged me his response) – defines love as a situation wherein U love someone more than yourself…

Further as I ponder on this ‘love definition’ my senior added some more twist to the definition & I faced one more thought provoking question… are love marriages better than arranged marriage?

Actually I had pondered on this question sometime back and asked one of my Bengali female friend on this question. She got married a few months back and her marriage was an arranged one --

as I was sipping my coffee and chatting with her on the messenger …I asked her—
what is that she is feeling after getting married to someone who was a stranger to her sometime back and that now after getting him known after being with him for a while? Does she really feel to be in love and does the guy whom she thought was to be like is like as per her thoughts and would her love last the same way over life as it does now??

She had a simple response… yes definitely I am in love… more that what I thought to be and found my spouse to be more interesting than what I had thought of… may be the romance would end but not the love !!!!

Good one…but she believes that she married him only because the guy belonged to her caste and then had no answer to my next question- what if her spouse was not a Bengali and then he would have been the same person??
In short Love also sees what caste n religion u belong to… n I tend to agree to this point…


So what is love is after all???

time for me to try n define the same …

I believe love to be a feeling of belongingness… the thought that someone cares for U…that someone understands U … has all the faith in u… it is all the fight that u may have but then it is also the sacrifice U can make to see the other happy… it makes u feel happy but then can cause lot of pain as well…

I guess I have added nothing different from all the views I could get …but then I feel none of the definitions to be the complete…love, a small word with a huge meaning!!


PS: I know some of my friends will have this definite question of why is that I thought to blog on this topic…where is that I got the idea??
Well then my answer would be… I really don’t know…probably working throughout makes U miss most of the people u have cared about…