Whats Love Got to Do with It?

One often reads stories in the newspaper of young women, who seem to have it all, ending their lives in a heartbeat. The reasons range from bad grades, unwanted pregnancies to the more troubling-heartbreak. Public opinion calls such women weak, unable to cope bravely with their problems, selfishly abandoning family and friends who love them.

Till recently I too felt contemptuous of women who ruined their lives (by suicide or never-ending sacrifice) for men who didn't share the same belief in love and relationships or, worse still abused them, both mentally and physically. I have always believed that nothing or no one is worth losing your peace of mind or life over. This was until a woman I greatly respected fell in love.

The man she loved is a decent man who I know loves her still in his own incomprehensible way. However after years of being together and unfortunate circumstances, she realized too late that his brand of love was not the same as hers. It was too late, because she had already given her heart to him and with her heart went common sense and resolve. While she may have said and done mean things to him when he treated her unfairly, hitting him where she knew it hurt with intentionally cruel barbs, she never loved him less or walked out on the relationship. Because her brand of love says, that nothing is worth losing a loved one over. When she fell in love with him, her pride never stood in the way of being with him, though she had to change some of her needs since he admitted he couldn't satisfy them. However, when they finally broke up, his explanation was that she had hurt his pride with her careless words and he could not look at himself in the mirror if he spent time with her. My explanation was, he had never understood her. And he obviously did not place the same faith in her; she had placed in him and true love when he had hurt her pride on all those previous occasions she had chosen to forgive him.

Different people, different views of the same messy situation. Who is right? Is his wounded pride at fault or her wounded heart? While I may have veered off the track a bit, the point I am trying to make is, it is very important to be with a partner who shares the same beliefs, places faith in the same things you do and has the same priority list. Every other difference is minor and can be resolved or adjusted to. But faith and belief cannot be changed and neither can principles, and if you don't agree on these, life will be very complicated.

Women are so often so in love with the idea of being in love, they forget to remove their rose colored glasses and view the relationship without its whitewashed veneer. We are sentimental creatures, emotional, intuitive and are programmed at birth to revolve our lives around the men we are closest to-brothers, boyfriends and husbands. The girl I spoke of could be any woman anywhere in the world. It could be me, my best friend, my cousin or a celebrity. She could be white, brown, black or any colour of the rainbow.

Men fail to understand that a woman's heart is more fragile, her love more selfless and her sacrifice more meaningful. Even feminists will have to agree with me. This is why at any given time on television; shows of successful women in their quest for the ONE exceed shows of men in similar situations. Ally Mc Beal, the Sex and the City gang, Susan Mayers, Rory Gilmore blah blah..

Does the ONE even exist, who knows? But women believe in this all their lives and even when they have been jilted the consolation is, "Oh well, maybe he wasn't the one." Or "You have to go through a lot of frogs to find a prince."

Because to a woman, love is something to be cherished and nurtured till you die, not tossed aside like a disposable razor when it gets a little rusty.

I absolutely agree with the viewpoint that numerous men go through the same situations and many women could be termed Evil B***** Monsters from Hell. But I'm a woman, there are more stories of grief ridden suicide driven women and acid throwing destructive jilted men in the papers for me to conclude, by and large men are extremely clueless when it comes to love and its tangles. A man's solution to things not going his way is a break up, speedy and painless, like ripping off a Band Aid. Women, on the other hand, believe every problem has a solution that will most probably end up being them Changing themselves.

Love is usually the one thing in life that comes to a human being free of any price and possibly the lowest peg on the priority totem pole. We don't fully understand the value of love in our lives until we have lost it. A lifetime is spent in pursuit of fame, careers, popularity, but it isn't until we are old and alone that we finally realize what it means to wake up every morning to a face that fulfills your every need-material and psychological. The contentment that comes, knowing there is someone out there who loves you, believes in you and understands the unsaid is like Nirvana-we know of its power but we rarely ever strive to attain it.

Many of us at some point in our quest for the corner office will swallow our pride and take the abuse of a boss who treats us like an amoeba. We will listen to the taunts of parents and teachers quietly and later on in life thank them for caring enough to scold and admonish us. We will silently stew when a colleague passes off our work as their own but not say a word, in order to preserve the harmony of the work place. We will subject ourselves to the indignity of being treated like criminals at airport security checks. Our pride will be wounded, but we persevere because we know that more good will come out of ignoring our ego, than fighting to defend it. However, if a loved one demeans us in any way, in a fit of rage or otherwise, our hackles rise, our bodies stiffen and we cut them out of our lives as completely and neatly as a surgeon in the operating room. Because we are intolerant of our loved ones, we put them up on pedestals and except them to behave like the angels we wish we ourselves were. But in all this, we lose sight of the bigger picture. We are losing the only people in our lives who give a damn about who we are and what we become. Pride is elastic and will bounce back to its upright form, but the lovers we refuse to forgive, the love we walk out on, it never comes back. It wanes and then disappears as mysteriously as it arrived. And finally we are left with nothing but memories tainted by hurt and anger, but the anger itself doesn't exist anymore. The heart is ready to love but the arms have no one to hold. And one day, you wake up and feel the cruel coldness and solitude that comes with being all alone.

And yet at the first sign of anger or frustration, love is the easiest thing to fight and destroy. Plenty of songs, movies and books have romanticized the tales of men and women who so righteously and bravely, give up love to seek out their dreams. We feel justified in expecting Princes and Angels to be our partners and in this search for a mythological figure of perfection, we forget that love is a human trait. It is what distinguishes men from beasts-The ability to love unconditionally. Passion, Hatred and Lust are all animalistic tendencies. Tenderness and Care, these are human. Heathcliff, the savage villain of Emily Bronte's classic, Wuthering Heights, was cold, barbaric and almost inhuman. However, his one humane trait was not his passionate, undying love for Catherine but the fondness, affection and respect he held for the son of his enemy, the young boy he had disinherited and ruined out of hate for his father, but loved as a son. Love, not passionate infatuation, that is the most human and the oldest emotion of them all.

To love is an honour, only a privileged few get to enjoy in their lifetime. For the rest, it shuts its doors on the constant abuse meted out to its fragile existence. To, all those women who killed themselves for love, this is my tribute to the power and influence of that funny little thing called love. To all the men, who watched them destroy themselves, here's a line from a Celine Dion classic 'Treat her like a Lady.'

"Treat her like a lady, you make a good girl crazy if you don't treat her like a lady.

What goes around, comes around."

Because at the end of the day-""Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it...It really is worth fighting for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more." - Erica Jong