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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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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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