LoVe AcTuAlly - 2

It’s weird to see how people define love, as I am myself in a complete dilemma about this acronym called LOVE!! I happened to read a blog the other day which mentioned a boy doing certain things for a girl and the author asking whether this is true love?? The blog goes something like this:

“I have seen people around me who are in love. I just wanted to share small incidences which I had seen in these days. A boy and a girl fall in love with each other. One wonderful evening a girl praised a moon. And she said to boy I want this moon. A boy did not say anything just kept quiet. Next day he gave her surprised by putting Radium Stickers on the roof of the room which reflects light. She could find her smiling moon on her room’s roof. Isn’t it love? A girl was working late night since morning she did not eat anything. A boy came to know and 5 am in the winter morning he was in front of her office to take her home back. On the way he gave her some food keeping in mind that she did not eat properly. Isn’t it love? A boy was not serious about his studies but a girl saw a Physics book in his hand. Isn’t it love? One day she was hungry. In spite of his tiredness a boy went his home and cooked food for her. He is around her just to see her happiness. Isn’t it love?” – (excerpts from ‘Love is a wonderful feeling… Isn’t it?’ By Savita Munde)

In all it sounds like a very realistic phenomenon and I am sure the author has either gone through this herself or has seen one of her best friends or roommates or siblings going through this. It sounds like a genuinely true love story where two committed souls who are deeply in love with each other are doing things to express their so called LOVE to each other. With my own experience of this immortal and heavenly phenomenon, I somehow have a different angle towards this declaration pronounced as LOVE. Though I would agree all this would come under the super subset of love, I still think they are individual pretexts of a LOVE relationship in its initial stages of the PLC J

I have seen guys go beyond their usual routines to show there care, impress their better halves by things they never even thought they would do; but the only problem I have noticing this so called love occurrence is that it surprisingly follows a PLC (product life cycle).

When the LOVE is in the Introduction stage, both do a lot for each other; especially the guy who goes out of the way to do things to astound upon his dame with his feelings towards her. This is the phase where the guy actually does all the above mentioned things like going that extra mile for your girl and doing all the possible things in the world for her, getting her the most expensive gifts possible and so on and so forth.

Then the love goes on to the Growth stage where friends and parents are brought in loop and the golden couple gets married to live happily ever after. The probability of getting flower’s when they meet, the gulping down of anger when either of them is late, the likelihood of receiving surprise gifts, the possibility of a wide smile on either of their faces everytime they face each other, the odds of getting treated like a prince or princess – all seem to come down in terms of YoY growth rate J

Post marriage comes the Maturity stage where the couple is endowed with a greater responsibility of running a family; managing their house, upbringing of their children, managing the family expenses, etcetera etcetera. The probability of fights and arguments drastically goes up in this stage of the PLC. If the couple is in a joint family with the bride being a housewife, the sandwich situation of the bride between the mum-in-law and her husband immensely increases the odds of post marital distress. (Dear readers, show me one situation at this stage where the 35 yr old man will put radium stickers on the roof of his dames room, or picking her up in the wee hours of the morning – out of love and not out of routine, or cooking for her) Not that I am trying to suppress anybody’s notion towards love, I am merely putting forth my observations (prove me wrong with strong numbers, not with exceptional cases of 1 in a 100).

Now comes the worst part - the DECLINE stage. Here both the members of the ‘once so golden couple’ are now at the apex of their individual career lives. There is no time for each other than the usual greetings at breakfast and dinner – discussions about their child’s studies and career, discussions about pending EMIs and loans and investments, discussing about buying a new house, bla bla bla .. The only occasional tint of romance is when the children surprise their parents with a surprise celebration on their wedding anniversary.

So much said and done, there is a surprising stage at the end of the PLC. Once the parents are retired and sent in some distant flat or old age home by their children, the love seems to come back. This is the product Revival stage. Once the couple is post their 60’s and have past through all their material desires and when such desires seem unimportant in life, the love resurfaces. Both of them have enough time for each other, sitting hand in hand in the same garden where they once used to sit as a young couple. Remembering those times when the boy put radium stickers on her ceiling when she asked for the moon and the times when he occasionally tired his hand at cooking to impress her (but failed miserably). Cribbing about their children who don’t care about them anymore and are busy in their own material lives, walking down the memory lane of their age old love, confessing about times when they had a crush on their respective colleagues/secretaries/boss during the course of their career, and on and on.

However surprising it may sound, we all know this is the bitter fact of life. I may not be a self proclaimed love guru of sorts, but of all the stints that I have been through I have surely realized one thing, CHANGE is the only constant variable when it comes to the Equation of LOVE.

I would like to end my bhashan with a small tagline I read the other day on somebody’s Gtalk – TRUELOVE has 8 letters, so does BULLSHIT !!