I was called an ‘out and out romantic’ today, while chatting with someone on a dating app. The comment took me by surprise and I was ready to pull out the sword and fight him tooth and nail for ‘reducing’ me to a flimsy label. I was ready to defend myself by proving how serious a person I was; until I realized he was right. I am romantic. I am a romantic. I also realized that I was being defensive because in my socially conditioned mind, I myself had reduced it to a flimsy label. A word that connotes flowers, sweet nothings, waiting around for someone else to become your savior, the ill-famed damsel-in-distress, the one who needs love.
Somewhere along the line, the one who needs love has come to be equated with weakness. You are weak if you want to be loved, and love in return. You are weak if you let the world know that sadness lies at the core of you, that the happiness for you comes from thinking of the streets of Calcutta on winter evenings, and chai and sutta at the corner of Vijay Nagar in North Campus. You are ‘emotional’, you will never get anywhere, success will never find you, you are not pragmatic, you live in a dreamscape, you are escapist and get real, will you?
Looking for love takes courage and faith, and it takes a romantic to have both. And a romantic will not just look for love in one person, or ‘the one’. Love lives in all things, beautiful and ugly. Love is my dog’s pawing at my blanket to be let in because she feels cold. It is that one moment of clarity in a conversation with a stranger. It’s your favorite song or a sudden line that you hear, and sing over and again, in a new and strange song. It’s the sudden smell of an old lover’s breath that reaches you, in the middle of the most unexpected places.
Love needs vulnerability, and vulnerability needs strength and power. I am afraid to admit that I have the former, and I am even more afraid that I have the latter too because then I’ll also have to accept that I am probably on my own. Loneliness is an inevitable companion of the romantic. But then if the world could quiet down for a few seconds, turn a deaf ear to its cacophony, it would find that we are all together in this vast ocean of loneliness. It is this loneliness that makes us fall back on nostalgia- the world we live in is too cruel, too inhumane, it doesn’t and it won’t let us have peace in the times we live in. Nostalgia is the fire exit of the lonely human mind- you can still be with your friend from Dhanbad, you can still be the little girl whose sisters would steal her kaju aur kismis and make her cry.
I am tempted to ask if you don’t want to live the dream wherein you are no longer running. Where you are with the people you love, where you are in love. Monogamy or polyamory, whoever you are, you are accepted and loved. You aren’t fighting your demons and denying yourself your deepest desires. I am tempted to ask you if you really want the ‘real world’.
And if your answer is yes, if you tell me you want the real world, then that’s fine. I am just begging you to let me live in mine.
