Love's Labor

One of my favourite books “Road less traveled” talks about relationships and love and one of the key take away is that love should not mean that you become one with your beloved. Instead it means that both of you will remain independent entities with independent thoughts. You need not lose your independent identities for making your relationship successful- instead it should be about growing together in your own space and capacities and helping each other in that growth process.

I was and still am captivated by this thought but do not see many manifestations of this. Why? Because baby it means putting in lot of efforts.

We see couples breaking up or at least the distances coming up. Not all break ups are dramatic- it’s a gradual process and creeps on you stealthily. And frankly nobody is to blame.

Research says that the thrill of early romance tapers of within 2 years. After that one has to start working to keep the relationship alive. In the normal course of time you have different anchors coming up to bond you together. Some anchors are the natural outcomes of the social and environmental fabric that we exist in for example in a conventional marriage you have kids, you make a home...etc. Other times couples have to work at finding new things constantly to keep the bonding alive such as taking up a hobby class together, traveling and so on. What will work for each of us cannot be predicted or prescribed. We have to discover this together with our partners. But that’s easier said than done. As they say it is easy to fall in love but hard work to remain in love!

Normally what happens is that we tend to keep on musing about how it was in the past in the initial years of relationship- that we run the risk of losing focus from the person who is the object of our affection in the now and here. I will call this one’s obsession with love’s lost glory which prevents us in accepting that living life together and carrying on the daily chores is also a form of love.

All of us cannot be a Romeo & Juliet- in any case all the famous couples are failures in a way- I guess the real couples are the ones who build a life together and survive through the challenges life has to offer- biggest of all being the challenge of mundane ness of normal life and lack of romantic adventure.

So coming back to the moot point of working for love, I sometimes feel that most of us approach this as we approach the issue of becoming fit or losing weight. For some weird reason we can find thousands of excuses for not being able to maintain an exercise regime or a healthy diet plan even though it involves something which is so intimate and important to us- our health and well being. Usual excuses being time, tiredness, does not fit my work schedule blah blah! Same with our relationships- we keep on cribbing about things not being okay but also have the excuses to cover up the laziness or inertia for not doing anything about it. I can almost copy paste the excuses from above!

At the expense of sounding like an agony aunt- my 2 pence suggestion is stop cribbing and get up and work out! That will be truly labor of love or love’s labor (whatever)……