Love - Kabhie Khatta Kabhie Meetha

Love is the essence of life. Love in any form is pure, and makes life worth living. In fact, a deeper realization reveals that love is ultimate. The day, we will be able to master the art of loving everything and everybody around us, we will attain Nirvana! Love is selfless but in today’s world, we have a very narrow minded outlook of love. We hardly come across a perfect couple now a days... What goes wrong over the years? Why love at times hurts us? Why we repent having loved a person once? Why we decide to move on? Why...why...why... These questions always haunt me.

Love makes life live. Love is the ultimate quest. It is love that we all look for and it is love that teaches us all the good things in life. Love is the greatest virtue of human beings. Love is the ultimate lesson for us to learn. And as we live our lives, we are trying to master the art of love. There are various kinds of love: romantic love, the love of a child for a parent and vice versa, and love of nature, of music, of poetry, and of all things on this Earth and in the heavens. Love also implies relationships. And each type of relationship that we live, love is manifested in some form or the other. We experience love from the very first day we are born. Even when we are in our mother’s womb, we experience her love and care. Something that we are born and brought up with, something that is so much of a vital part of our lives, we should have actually been comfortable with this aspect of our life, if not anything else! But yet! We stumble the most, when it comes to love. We face a lot of problems in matters of love and relationships, and they affect us hugely.

Why does love hurt us? I think the main reason lies in our own expectations. Most of the times, we give the responsibility of making ourselves happy to the ones we love. And most of the times, they don’t live up to our expectations, not because they don’t love us, but simply because they don’t know what will make us happy. Similarly, we tend to set out to do things our way to make our loved ones happy, and in the process, we also don’t live up to their expectations. And the end result? Both the parties in consideration are left unsatisfied. If this goes on for a considerable period, the blame game starts in a relationship. We start blaming each other for our unhappy state of mind. And in the process, we just drift apart. Ask anybody around you, you will see them complaining about relationships – My boss is so impossible to work with, my husband gets on to my nerves because he is too interfering, my children are so lazy, and so on. We complain, because we look at things from our point of view. We think that our children don’t love us, because they are lazy, and we hate laziness. We think that our husband don’t love us because he is too interfering, and we don’t like this interference. But probably what we fail to realize is that his interference is because he cares for me! Probably that’s his way of expressing his love. My children may be lazy, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t love me. It’s only their nature, which can be tackled differently. If only, we can think from each other’s perspective rather than only considering what we like and don’t, in a relationship, am sure we would be much better off.

I think the root of a healthy relationship is mutual trust and respect. It's when:
you have fun together
you both feel like you can be yourself
you can have different opinions and interests
you listen to each other
you trust each other
you can both compromise, say sorry, and talk arguments out
you don't have to spend all of you spare time together - you can spend time on your own, or with your own friends and family.

So the responsibility is on us - Love is indeed the greatest gift one can have - its us who have to ensure that we never "over do" it. I believe that if we have found one person on this earth who loves us, its a real treasure - and we should never let him/her go. Love indeed makes life live.