Sunday, October 22, 2000		Article

LOVE is not love which alters when it alteration finds, used to be one of my favourite quotes in my fledgling, greenhorn days when we were full of the romance of love and believed that love is forever. But, as they say, you live and learn and boy, didn’t we do just that. Beliefs take a tumble and experience breeds new amendments.

I’m not sure bachelors are qualified to discourse on love and its infinite variations but don’t they say "it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."? Yet, that does not give one the right to pose as an expert on love. There are no experts on the subject. Period.

The longer one lives, the less one seems to comprehend of that magic word called "love," which incidentally also has four letters. Remember Maurice Chevalier sing, "What is that crazy thing called love?"

I’m not referring to calf-love or infatuation when one is in the process of discovering love itself. And still, isn’t first love the sweetest? Watch a couple holding hands and trudging a vast expanse of barren road under the scorching sun and you can be sure it is "young love, first love, we share with true devotion." Never mind, if decades later, one is able to laugh at the futility of it all because it was as transient as a passing shower. But then again, not all young love ends up as passing showers.

The most common love is the one that ends in marriage (did I say sex?). It is supposed to be the lived-happily-ever-after syndrome but quite often it is confused with pleasure and isn’t as romantic as in the novels or films because they (the novels, films and, some times, love too) end at the honeymoon. Life, however, is a wee bit different and years and years of togetherness can breed contempt.

Then, there is what is called the post-silver jubilee syndrome where the spouses are so sick of seeing each other, they virtually start barking at one another at the slightest provocation. A guy gave me this example of looking as a calendar picture (a woman’s face, obviously) and however pretty it may be, you get tired of it at the end of the month. And then, there are calendars which have only one picture for the whole year? How boring? But in the case of marriage it is seeing the same face for eternity: No, I’m not qualified to comment on marriage, but the guy surely had a point.

There are so many variations of love after marriage, one can virtually pen a thesis on it. There is what in the olden days used to be called the seven-year itch, meaning seven years after typing the nuptial knot the partners began to stray, looking for green pastures. But today, with the pace of life being what it is, the communications boom et al, that duration is likely to be reduced to seven months.

Then, there’s the best-friend phenomenon. Hovering about the place ostensibly to be near his school buddy (talk about male camaraderie?) but ending up by running away with the best friend’s wife. Oh yes, one can’t rule out the opposite combination, that is the husband running away with the wife’s best friend.

The complexities of love are inexplicable, they just happen. Unlike a gentle rain from the heavens. Logic is conspicuous by its absence. Even marriage counsellors find it hard to put their finger on the cause of the rupture. Snoring can be enough ground for divorce, but then these are often excuses when the mind is already made up to separate. It may not have been love because it has altered when it found alteration but all the same it means one more marriage down the drain.

And yet, there is a good deal of truth in the St Francis of Assisi prayer, "it is in giving that we receive." It is the same with love, it seems. Unless you give, you are unlikely to receive. I think everyone is allotted X amount of love and it is up to that person to give that love to another. But the one on whom the love is bestowed may not want it. He may or may not have enough of it, but he doesn’t want it from that particular person. So, that love goes waste, falls by the wayside, is unrequited. It is not surprising therefore that much love goes abegging, even as others yearn for it. Guess, that’s the mystery of love — those who want it don’t get it and those who get it have no use for it.

Paradoxical, isn’t it? Which of course leaves us exactly where we had begun. But, may be bachelors aren’t really qualified to speak about that crazy thing called love after all.