Love

Don’t you want somebody to grow old with? 

You mean you don’t want to leave your legacy behind? 

Do you want your rotting corpse to be found by neighbors?

This earth was made to share your life with one another, you should find someone quick!

These are some of the responses I get when I tell someone I’ve decided not to (or can’t) marry . Yes, rather unpleasant to hear for someone who chooses to live life a little differently. I’m sure you’ve heard some of these before. But there’s a reason for these responses. They want you to experience that all glorious feeling of Love. I instantly want to go full Black Mamba (kill bill reference) in my mind when I hear these narrow minded ideologies thrown at me.  They have somehow come to the conclusion that worst possible thing on this planet is to die alone. Theses are people who feel they know better and have this compulsive need to shove their ideas down your throat. But I wanted to try and understand them.

Firstly let's explore where you got this idea of dying alone. We begin in pop culture. I’m sure you have witnessed scenes in the crime shows where someone walks past a house and they smell something really bad. They call the other neighbors, they call the firefighters or police and they end up finding the body of some old lady or man in their apartment, dead. It does stem from reality, I’m not disagreeing with you. We immediately feel sorry for the person who died. It was just the saddest thing, that they didn’t have anyone in their lives in those final moments to say goodbye. This fucking final goodbye. We have seen it over and over from soap dramas to movies. There is always that allocated 3 to 8 minutes of screen time for someone beloved to exit the plot. And in Indian cinema it’s extremely over exaggerated. 

Let me just walk through another scene with you. In this famous 90s Tamil movie that takes place in the village, there’s a scene where a sister comes in the line of fire to protect her brother. She gets impaled and she’s bleeding out. Bucket loads of crimson red thick blood all over her and her brother. In the real world, she’d prolly pass out from that amount of bleeding. But in this scene, she’s on her final breath on her brother’s lap, saying her goodbyes and giving her final monologue about how she had the best brother in the world and being his sister was the one true purpose in her life. If there is a next life, she would want to be his sister once more. Que the violin and 24 piece orchestra and you get yourself a tear jerker.

The main gist here is that you shouldn’t die alone, because you won’t get to say your goodbyes, you won’t get those cherry blossom-esque final moments. It's a fate far worse than being hit by a bus.  The point I’m driving at is that you were never instinctively thinking like this. You are programmed to! I don’t use the word brainwash because you need an existing ideology first. This experience is drawn from early childhood to adolescence and it impacts us for the rest of our lives. These experiences turn into concepts and ideologies and are slowly fed to us by media, family, friends, religious institutions and communities. Now that we have covered death, let’s look at love. I know, weird tangent.

The program called Love. If you think this sounds familiar, it is from the Waichovsky Brothers movie The Matrix. They define what Love is in a coded way. The fact that it can mean different things and be installed into you. So, like The Matrix, we’ve been programmed to fall in love from a very young age. Cinderella meets Charming, Snow White and some dude with True Love’s Kiss, Aladdin, that carpet, Jasmine and the whole new world etc. Love against all odds is a major theme that runs through the core of our childhood stories. It is about how love is earned through adversity and fights. It is about how love transcends any social background. It is about how love conquers all. Shakespere’s love is about enjoying love and tragedy together. #bittersweet. That paved the way to your modern day Rom-Coms. Boy meets girl, they hate each other, they fall into extenuating circumstances that bring them closer and by the end they can’t live without each other. AKA You complete me. (Urggg, I really disapprove of that notion.) There are even more examples in music. Every genre of music from every decade has a Love song; a break up song, a why I left him song, a I can’t live without you song. In-between the shows and the music you have commercials. The de beers company and their diamond advertising campaign showcasing the value of an engagement between man and woman and a tiny little rock. There’s just so much content to explore and weed out about where you got your impetus of falling in Love and finding Happily Ever After. Which becomes one of the major pressurizing goals in your life. To find a mate and profess your never ending love to them. For some, it is once and for others it is numerous times. And for some, it never happens. 

But we can just start at the beginning. You. You are a product of love. I’m talking about your parents. The relationship that they had, would have subconsciously imprinted on you at a very young age. You want something like what they have. They may have even encouraged you to follow a life path similar to their own. If you have never explored the idea of being alone and only have known how to be with someone as the norm, then the concept of being alone is alien to you, naturally. It’s somewhat similar to your eating habits. As Asians we love rice. We have been conditioned to want rice with most of our meals. Rice is just a staple part of our dietary requirement. Yet in some countries, people don’t even know how to cook rice. Because rice is just not part of their food culture. When we are used to having something constant and vital in our lives, we are naturally drawn to wanting it. So let's replace Rice with Love. You’ve always had it in your life in some shape or form. I had it too. My parents had a working relationship. Selflessness was at the core of their relationship (I never figured out if they knew it or not). Not only was it to each other but to the three children they had and their other immediate family. There was no time for “being in love.” There was no such thing as date night for them. They just did their duties as mom and dad rather than husband and wife, mostly. You can see their affection for each other when they get into petty fights and jab at each other about the other’s family. There was no outright I love yous and professions of adoration. No grand gestures like in the movies. So how did my parents express their love? If either one of them were out late at night, there would be a phone call. The phone call only had two things involved in the conversation, “where are you?” and “what time are you coming back?”. It wasn’t interrogative at all. It was more of a ‘Hey, I’m thinking about you and hoping that you’ll be back soon.’ which is really very sweet. Another example was this matter of making drinks. There is a malt drink in Singapore called Milo. There’s just something about the way my mother makes it or some form of placebo effect it has that no one else could make that same cup of Milo taste that good. I’d like to think the secret ingredient is love, but it's probably just portions I guess. Without fail, my father would ask for it before he goes to sleep and they’ll be both in bed already. She would groan that she was about to fall asleep and not want to do it. But after some pestering and sweet talking she’d get up from bed, and make it for him. 

This taught me a few things. Showing your love comes in many forms. It doesn’t have to be going out to dinner at a fancy restaurant or movie date night or jewellery or roses. You show and give love without expecting anything in return. That cup of milo meant she had to get out of bed, boil water, make a cup and bring it over to him. She gets nothing out of doing this, she doesn’t even make a cup for herself. She does it because she cares for him that much and that feeling fuels her to love unconditionally. Again, no I love yous, no roses. Just a cup of milo. Now that is just selfless. These were two people, my parents, who didn’t indulge in anything for themselves from a very young age. They always spared a thought for the siblings they grew up with or the kids they raised. I might have a small fraction of their selfless attitude. But generally, I have a lot of “me” time. Me time is very important. My space is important to me. And I think I’m this way because I value what love is. Or the concept of it. Using my parents as an example, I fully understand what it's like to share a life with someone other than yourself. The compromises you make. That selflessness you have to be willing to evoke on a daily basis and it can’t be done out of obligation but out of pure concern. A friend of mine mentioned when two people are married, they wake up every morning and make the choice to love the person next to them. You choose to love someone and you can easily choose not to as well. 

People who are alone, know this choice very well. It’s not that they don’t have love in their lives. Ever heard of Self Love? If your self love is well developed you can get by without needing someone else, in essence you know how to care for yourself. You know what's best for you. You know how you are at every emotional level. You don’t need a yin or a yang. You have found balance. This balance means being self sufficient. You don’t require an external influence to dictate any part of your life. All your decisions are internalized and suit you at most moments. I’m not saying conventional couples don’t have this. They do, but they do it with a partner. In order to feel 100 percent, they need their support system which happens to be a loved one (not necessarily a spouse, it can come in any form, a pet, a friend, a parent, a guardian, a mentor.). However it is not autonomous. 

I was exposed to Hinduism at quite a young age by my grandmother. She talked about oneness and going back to the godhead at an age where I was still learning how to talk. I didn’t understand the concepts she mentioned until I was 18 or 19 when I started reading the Upanishads. It was very eye opening, and confusing at the same time. Let me just do a quick summary. Upanishads is one of the 3 holy books revered in Hinduism. And Oneness is a core belief concept of Hinduism. Basically you are one with everything. You belong to everything and you will go back to it all at the end. I know I’m squeezing an entire philosophy in 4 sentences that doesn’t do much justice to the framework of Hinduism, but try and understand it if you can.

So the idea of sharing my life with someone wasn’t important to me. Because that wasn’t a program that was installed in my mind. I saw how my parents were working hard for their family. So the program that was dominant in my life was Hard work, Duty first, everything else was secondary. Despite all these functions running, I still fell in love. At 19, I quite furiously and foolishly loved someone that didn’t love me back. Ouch. Did this lead to heart break? Naturally. Did this leave a toxicity that radiated in the after years, absolutely. This was also the period in my life when I equated falling in love with happiness. When people around you start dating and falling in love and get married, they are projecting happiness. They are in this cloud 9 of ecstasy. When you’re not apart of this gang, you innately feel like something is missing. We can draw back on the “fitting in” portion from the previous post. As the years went by and with a little help from my friends and many rock bottom nights I was weaning away from this feeling of needing love in my life.

At the core of my being, I was beginning to understand that I was never miserable because I couldn’t find love or fall in love. I found that having “me” time was about looking inwards. Exploring my being. Exploring my purpose. Updating my own programs. So for me, Loving myself, understanding  the concept of “me”, taking full autonomy of my life was more important than loving someone else or creating a family or leaving a legacy etc. So throughout my adulthood, I was rather regularly single. Automatically, I didn’t put myself out there. I didn’t want to be wanted nor did I think I was deserving at times. Yes I’ll admit that I had a lot of self esteem issues stemmed from my heartbreak. Who doesn't? But apart from all this, I was still a very happy and content person. 

Let me remind you that some people don’t get out of this rut. Loving someone can take so much away from you. You essentially are losing bits and pieces of yourself when you’re deleting those memories with that loved one. For me, this need to spend the rest of my life with someone else, slowly began to fade away. These sentiments became stronger as it had to do a lot with finding purpose in life. I wasn’t chasing after a partner but a purpose instead. Oneness like how my grandmother loosely explained. To me it wasn’t about connecting to someone. It was about making meaningful connections and disconnecting with everything else. Personally and in 2021(yup that’s when I wrote this post), if you’d were to ask me what love is to me, love is just an emotion to me, like anger or fear or happiness. It’s great to have it, but you’ll be fine without it too. Thanks to my parents I also see love as a selfless act.

What most people need to understand is that just because someone chooses to be alone, doesn’t mean they don’t have love in their lives. They might have loved and lost and are grieving with the pain. They have love translated in other ways. For example, some have so much love to give to animals, care and nurture for them. They give the status of children to pets. Because this is how they see their love. Unconditional love isn’t only exclusively for humans. Others could have love in the work they do. They are so passionate about their craft they put everything into it; their joy, sorrow, energy. So they don’t have anything else to give to anyone else. Love is also a choice. Just as you get that choice, someone else does too. So choose wisely. Love is just one part of your existence. If you have it in any form, cherish it. It is known to do great wondrous things and propel you forward in your personal missions. Passion is born from love and there is no denying that. As with anything, don’t let love consume you.

P.S.

Balance. That’s what I realized from writing this post. I think I was subconsciously trying to find balance after my heartbreak. I never wanted to feel that ill ever again, so I avoided every romantic opportunity that came my way. This barrier of protection somehow applied to the rest of the aspects of my life. Whether it be workplace tolerance or what you have to put with at home. It was a matter of finding my balance and juggling everything around me. I started taking myself out of every situation and would ask myself, does this make me happy? does my contribution hold any weight? is the time spent, worthwhile? I’ve also come to an age where I’m finally realizing the power of choices and the limitations of my circle of control.

-T