Love: Why be Unfair to it?

Love: The most beautiful of all emotions and perhaps the only emotion that is so badly treated! Osho, how I love his thought, said that we compartmentalize love and in doing so we ruin it. How very true!

Love is a limitless emotion. It cannot and should not be bound. It knows no territory, caste, socio-economic status, gender, age, handicap or anything else. It is unconditional and it is for all. The only emotion that actually has the power to tide over every problem and bring the world together, Love, has been so wrongly misused and we as a society need to change that.

Let’s get back to basics. A meets/knows B. A and B spend time together and talk about a lot many things; laugh together. A and B like each other. They spend more time together and understand each other a lot more. The more they interact, the more A and B want each other’s company. A and B love each other. It is possible that most of us saw A and B as a romantic alliance, while others saw it is as friendship and so on. Why? Basic tuning. We do not see love as love. We give it a relationship status to understand it.

It has to be compartmentalized in our heads for us to appreciate it. “Friendly affection”, “Brotherly/sisterly/motherly/fatherly kind of love”, “Boyfriend/girlfriend” love, Teachers’ love…it goes on and on. We don’t do that with any other emotion. “It was ‘friendly hate’/ ‘husband anger’ that made him do that” are never heard. No compartmentalization there! Then why do we have different rules for this precious and worthy emotion? And it is because we make this distinction that a sense of propriety comes into our love. If you are married, you should have brotherly/sisterly love for the rest of the world except your spouse, loving someone of another gender after marriage though he/she was your best friend before is inappropriate- blasphemy, in fact. Why do we do this? A lot many beautiful relationships are lost because of these binding rules for love.

First and foremost, love and lust are two different emotions and cannot, must not and should not be spoken in the same vein. We tend to mix the lust aspect in any male-female relationship especially (Applicable to homosexual relationships too albeit in a different manner). “Just Friends” always brings with it raised eyebrows.

Secondly, love is not about getting or possessing, it is about giving. For example, take a romantic relationship that does not last; the people involved drift apart for whatever reason and move on in their lives. They can still love each other. (I personally believe that you never fall out of love, if you do, it was never love) They can still wish well for one another and be friends.

Thirdly and most importantly, love is without expectations. If there is an expectation (and we all learn this rather late) which we, for a large part of our lives take as a given, it isn’t love- at least, it is not love for the person we claim to have love for, but ourselves. Loving someone is about you. What you feel when you shower love is what bliss is all about but if you wait for a return you kill it. I had read and perhaps shared on “Facebook” an article/video, I forget which, that says if you love fish and enjoy it for dinner, you don’t really love fish, but you love yourself and the taste of the fish had that satisfied your palate. If you genuinely loved the fish, you would take care of it and not eat it.

All the lovely tales of love, whichever form you see or read it in, is beautiful. Why? That is because the relationship does not matter, the feeling does. Let us break down the barriers around love and just love freely. Let us not be judgemental when two people share love. No one seems to question negativity! Why defame love? Love brings positivity and nothing less. If love brings any negative emotion, watch out friend… for it isn’t love! Love is all about acceptance of flaws as well as strengths, it is above everything…love is liberation, love is bliss, love is hope, love is what makes us smile and love has NO BOUNDARIES!

My Blog: www.musingswhileunlearning.com
