“To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.”
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
Lately, while chatting casually (nevertheless meaningful) about life, love with some of my students (between the age group 22-25), the Gen Z generation as they call it now, I got apprised with some words that till now I had never encountered, at least not amongst the people of my age credentials. Words or if I may put correctly the “relationship status” with which they describe their romantic connections. One of the girl students explained a term “situationship” to me which apparently means a “casual scene” between the partners with no intention of ever falling in love with each other. But then another girl student was quick to respond, “but a person reaches the “delulu” world if they fall in love with the other person.”
Well, me being a 37-year-old person and relatively a little oblivion to such terms had to stop them and ask as to what “delulu” means and it turned out that it means living in a delusional world. It took me 10 seconds to grasp in the newly found information with quite a lot of contemplation. While I was just trying to encompass my thoughts with two new learned Gen Z words, another male student steps in and teaches me about “breadcrumbing” and “ghosting.” I breathed a sigh of relief and to be honest felt a little elated that at least I knew what ghosting meant, but for breadcrumbing I still had my ears and mind glued towards my student. Without much ado he tells me that it’s a manipulative trick wherein one person keeps throwing baits at the other who is actually in love with the former. Neither the former gets into any form of commitment, nor they let the other go. So basically, the one in love is invested in a certain “relationship” without the other one being in that relationship.
All this latest information was going to take some time for me to process but it really got me thinking how the “old school love” and “modern love” have been bifurcated by the younger generation. The humans are so scared to fall in love that they have decided to take recourse to some casual terms and connections to hide their real emotions. How insensitive is all this? Was all I replied to my students with a little disappointment written all over my face.
In that moment all I wondered was how lowly an emotion like love has been reduced to. Walking away from a person who might be toxic or inconsiderate is correct to be termed as “self preservation.” But, intentionally pulling yourself away from a love or relationship that not even for a moment feels forced or simulated is definitely not entitled to be labelled as “self-preservation.” Young people and even many in their 30’s today want to protect their hearts from being hurt but seldom do they realise that maybe the heart doesn’t need that shielding. The heart is quick to find its way and maybe that’s why they say, “When you love someone you have no control. It makes you powerless.”
And I am not planning to give any references of Heer Ranjha or Romeo Juliet to prove my inclination towards the beauty of old school love, rather I want to cite the reference of love between friends. This very evening one of my closest friends asked me if I wanted to talk about something that was bothering me, and I told her that I was not looking for any such conservation and wished to just stay silent. I did not lie to her because I did not feel the need to do so. It just felt right at every level considering we have let our hearts collide and do not feel the need to brag about self preservation. I love her dearly and she just let me hurt in that moment and neither did I feel the need to talk to her and protect my heart. Same is the case with our parents, don’t we love them so much that we hide our pain, struggles and daily stumbles from them. We give them the “preservation” and let us hurt ourselves in that moment. Then why the need to protect yourself when it comes to “love” from a person in a romantic relationship. Why the need to “situationship”, “breadcrumbing”, “benching” [being in two relationships at a time with one as a backup] or “ghosting.”
Why not let love enter your life when it is finding its way?
Humans rarely realise what effect their actions can have on other humans. Human hearts are fragile no matter how strong we might portray ourselves to be, all hearts tear and bleed the same way. I have no reservations in saying that people in love always hurt each other sometimes intentionally and many times non-intentionally. But this practice of labelling the relationships as trivial as these terms or treating someone in love with you as trash or some kind of scumbag is the most barbarous thing. It makes me wonder what happened to the core of humans, did they really lose it in their journey to just protect themselves from a plausible hurt or is it just how vicious the human beings have always been.
Do humans take a moment… pause… and look at themselves in the mirror and question themselves how they could do something like this to another living person who also apparently has a heart which is clearly not well versed with the rules of “self preservation”?
None of my arguments would have convinced my students that at the end of the day we all are beings of “surety” [as one of my close friends says]. We need a “relation—ship” which gives us stability, surety and if not any of these at least “consideration” and respect. We are not meant for “situation—ships” because people themselves have to decide whether they wish to see the world in front of them and appease them or they long to see their entire universe in just one person whom they can reverentially call their own. Having always believed in the sanctity of pious love I refrain myself from attracting social change, status quo and only believe in my “happily ever after” even if it does not adhere to societal expectations. Calculating every move might help us sustain life but the world needs to stop and consider the fact that this entire universe is also the result of an event which hardly finds a certain answer and that is all that exists of love and relationships as well. We need to live in “love” to experience it and not doubt it.
As William Shakespeare wrote, “Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move, Doubt truth to be a liar, but never Doubt that I Love.”
