Love Is Not Like What You Think...

Today is Valentine’s Day. Happy Valentine’s Day everyone :) I want to write something about this thing called LOVE. Trust me it won’t be Just another article about Love, ok? 

Remember my Indian guyfriend who occasionally had long chats with me? He’s been married for more than 13 years so I couldn’t belittle his views on love and marriage. He’s been there already. This guy brought this idea to me. Not sure if any of you would be as surprised as I were that time. 


He popped out this. “This kind of love that you women are waiting for, DOESN’T EXIST.” My friends, read that. Let’s do some thinking session. When we speak of love and marriage, are you sure we are not seeking for “PERFECTION”? We want a partner who is good in as many aspects as possible. For the few weaknesses that we discover in them later on, make them disqualified to be the person we want to marry. Maybe we don’t realize this but we’ve been doing it all the time. We break up because of the smallest issue in our partner that we couldn’t tolerate. It’s not even about infidelity, my friends. Sometimes the two of you are still very in love, but still you guys break up. Reason? “I can’t tolerate his smoking habit”. Small things like that!!! 

He continued, “The love that you women want, is a love that happens only in Fairytale.” And then the continued, “You don’t marry the person because the person is good in everything, has no flaws and weaknesses.” Oh man, is that true? Is it something that we do unconsciously? His sentences felt like a few slaps around my face bah. The part when he mentioned “fairytale” – it really hit home. He could be right. Or was he right? 

“You marry a person who you think you can build family with. The one that you can raise the kids together. There’s no such thing as fairytale LOVE before the marriage. MARRIAGE IS NOT EVEN ABOUT LOVE. It’s about how you manage to cope, tolerate, accept, adapt and deal with each other to make sure you guys have a peaceful life together. The person you marry could be Anybody who is there for you. Cos it’s going to be the same thing, no matter who the person is. It’s about coping with each other, accepting each other’s weaknesses and most importantly, it’s about the kids that you guys going to have, and provide them with the good lives. At the end of the day, it’s NOT about the two of you anymore. It’s NOT even about LOVE. It’s more about responsibility.” 

“LOVE IS TOTALLY OVERRATED by you people.” He added. 

I was thinking very deeply as he was talking. Judging from the way he spoke, this guy knew what he was talking about. Maybe we are talking TOO MUCH of love, right? Yes, maybe love is totally overrated. Maybe “a good feeling” is all we need but we are all seeking for “the perfect” kind of love. My gosh. Does it mean that we are looking everywhere for something that does not exist? Or is it his view as an individual? Or is his concept right all along?

He even told me this. “Men have animal desires. Me, as a man, I sure want to have another affair/relationship with another woman. Yes, I Want. But that’s me AS A MAN, with the nature that a man is born with. But as who I am now, with all the responsibility that I have, I don’t want to do that because “I don’t want my kids to hate me.” Guys, I was expecting that he said something like, “But I love my wife and I don’t want to hurt her.” He didn’t even mention anything like that. “If you ask me if I ever laid my eyes on other women, YES. I had those feelings before. You meet a girl who is attractive, who makes you feel good and have a good laugh with. I found myself thinking about that “another woman” too. But I never really bother to put a name to it. I don’t really care what it’s called. Maybe some of you call it Love. 

The word LOVE is totally gone from this man’s vocabulary. 

But from talking to him, my perceptions on things have broadened. It’s looking AT IT from a different view. He doesn’t put too much weight on LOVE, but still he has a good marriage, and good family life, wife and kids that he enjoys to be around with. Maybe because he doesn’t put the burden on LOVE, then LOVE has very little burden on him. 

Look at most of us. Maybe we got too burdened by LOVE. We are looking for Love, Love and Love and nothing else. “Do you love me?” “How much do you love me?” “Are you sure what you feel for me is Love?” “But I don’t love you that much.” “Are you sure we are going to be in love forever?” And the list of “love remarks” goes on…

Maybe YES, we don’t notice it all along that we are taking it too hard on the subject of LOVE. This discussion will not have a conclusion because I only want you share with you guys, Who Knows you will get some different and interesting ideas about it and then apply it to your lives. 

Wait…one more. A lot of us wonder why in the era of match-making marriages that happened in the older generation, the marriages last longer. Whereby in this era of Love marriages, the divorce rate is shooting up. Why? That’s a question we have to ask ourselves. 

Maybe the older generation knows better what “living together” is all about. Maybe they know it better that fairytale Love does not exist in the reality of marriage. 

Maybe there’s no one that can tell us what to believe, what to think and what to do. But we sure can learn something from them and who knows, we might come up a better understanding. So, I’d say, why not. Let’s understand Love Better. What do you say? :)