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Love is a requirement for me, a requirement that surpasses my need to have sex. Am I broken?
I wonder if my ideas of intimacy, love and relationships are flawed. I take a good look around the room – almost everyone in the room has had more flings than I had relationships. I am a unicorn, as a friend puts it.
I remember having a discussion on how sex and love are unrelated, with two different friends at two different times in my life. Being able to have sex without any emotional attachment is liberating, they say. Sex is a requirement, not to be confused with Love, they tell me. I don’t understand. I nod, though.
When I am alone, I can’t stop thinking. Love is a requirement for me, a requirement that surpasses my need to have sex. Am I broken?
While I was struggling to get out of a toxic relationship, questioning my ideas of what I believed to be the forever kind of love, the world around me was going through a revelation of its own – that love was not necessary for sex after all. When I finally emerged out of my stupor, and ended a relationship that had pretty much obliterated my sense of self, the world had moved on to a renaissance of sexual liberation, a world in which I could not fit in.
The rules to fit in were simple – throw the idea out the window that love was necessary to get intimate with someone. I could not do that. I could throw my prudence out the window, but Love, Love stayed with me, like a bunch of old letters, college notes and some flowers pressed between pages of a book, kept carefully inside a cardboard box that I carried from one apartment to another every time I shifted.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t judge people who have sex with someone without the promise of a relationship – they intrigue me. I feel, sometimes, I would be better off if I could pull this off – this whole hook-up thing. I can’t. I stop talking to a guy if I don’t feel an intellectual and emotional connection with him.
But don’t let me wander. Let’s come back to the present. I feel like a unicorn, surrounded by all these people who have slept with more people than I have had friends. I feel small. Why can’t I shrug off this skin which has clearly gotten old and is in need of being discarded? I don’t fit.
Someone calls my name. They pass me a drink. I smile and take it. Drowning my sorrows in alcohol – I can’t do even that. I process my grief, address my mistakes, never drown out my sorrow in alcohol.
I am looking for love in a world that has become sceptical of love, which sees love as a weakness. It is a world that moves fast, running away from a possibility of love, and a ‘forever’ kind of relationship.
No one wants ‘forever’ anymore. ‘Forever’ sends a chill down people’s spines. ‘Forever’ is a long time. It is full of the unknown and unknown is always scary. I have battled the scary and I know that sometimes what we know turns out to be scarier than what we don’t.
So while everyone around me runs away from ‘forever’. I stick around, although nervously, wondering if I am doing the right thing. I don’t have a choice, I guess. Even if I tried to abandon this quest for forever, I could not.
Deep down I wish for ‘forever’. I wish for love. I wish for cold winter mornings spent lying beside the one I love and who loves me back.
Image via Unsplash
I am a writer who loves to daydream about food and has her nose in books. I can give amazing relationship advice, bad at following one though. You may detect a hint of sarcasm in read more...
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Neena was the sole caregiver of Amma and though one would think that Amma was dependent on her, Neena felt otherwise.
Neena inhaled the aroma that emanated from the pan and took a deep breath. The aroma of cumin interspersed with butter transported her back to the modest kitchen in her native village. She could picture her father standing in the kitchen wearing his white crisp kurta as he made delectable concoctions for his only daughter.
Neena grew up in a home where both her parents worked together in tandem to keep the house up and running. She had a blissful childhood in her modest two-room house. The house was small but every nook and cranny gave her memories of a lifetime. Neena’s young heart imagined that her life would follow the same cheerful course. But how wrong she was!
When she was sixteen, the catastrophic clutches of destiny snatched away her parents. They passed away in a road accident and Neena was devastated. Relatives thronged her now gloomy house and soon it was decided that she should be married off.
Women today don’t want to be in a partnership that complicates their lives further. They need an equal partner with whom they can figure out life as a team, playing by each other’s strengths.
We all are familiar with that one annoying aunty who is more interested in our marital status than in the dessert counter at a wedding. But these aunties have somehow become obsolete now. Now they are replaced by men we have in our lives. Friends, family, and even work colleagues. It’s the men who are worried about why we are not saying yes to one among their clans. What is wrong with us? Aren’t we scared of dying alone? Like them?
A recent interaction with a guy friend of mine turned sour when he lectured me about how I would regret not getting married at the right time. He lectured that every event in our lives needs to be completed within a certain timeframe set by society else we are doomed. I wasn’t angry. I was just disappointed to realize that annoying aunties are rapidly doubling in our society. And they don’t just appear at weddings or family functions anymore. They are everywhere. They are the real pandemic.
Let’s examine this a little closer.
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