A brief reflection on Love

We accept the love we think we deserve.

Stephen Chbosky

Love is always one-sided. There can never exist two people being equally in love with each other. One of them will invariably give more than they receive. There is always a deficit in this transaction of love for each other, which makes Love, in a way, unreciprocated.

This is true for all forms of Love. A lover to their lover, a mother to her son, a father to his daughter, a sister to her brother, a friend to their friend and so on. Some relationships are more skewed than the others. The love we show for our parents, for example, can never match theirs for us.

So, due to its inherently unbalanced nature, Love, like a universal law, always hurts. Because love is not an entirely selfless act. We love with the hope that we will be loved equally in return. When we give and find that the return falls short of the expenditure, it makes us feel cheated. What do we do then? We give more the next time, thinking that this time the person would notice, realize their mistake and rectify it, but they never do, and so goes on the vicious cycle.

Love is then meant to hurt. And people still fall for it, enjoy it. Are we all then masochists by nature? The truth is that there is no escape from it. We don't choose love, Love chooses us all. It is one of those curses, and also blessings, for being humane. Love is abrupt, unpredictable but inevitable. Neither there is a preventive nor any cure for it. Once it invades us, we must accept it, live with it and face the consequences. Pain and pleasure, it is said, are two sides of the same coin, and nothing better reflects that notion than Love.

Love makes us, Love breaks us and Love takes us through a journey we can never be prepared for.

Shakuntala, pretending to remove a thorn from her foot, while actually looking for her lover Dushyanta, by Raja Ravi Varma (1870). Source: Wikimedia