My Valentine

I have been trying to have relationships for many years now. I mean romantic relationships, each of which I have entered always with the great conviction that it will last for the rest of my life.

After many trials and errors, I have come to a point in my current relationship (which, I hope with the same, persistent naivete, will last for the rest of my life),  where I am getting present to this conflict between my need and demand to be loved in a certain way and the way in which my partner loves me. There are some distinctions that my mind cannot hold when it is consumed by emotions and when it is busy projecting its past on to the new situation, the new partner. For instance, there is a subtle distance between feeling unloved and feeling loved in a way different from the one I want. All of that is too theoretical for me when I am caught up in my shadows. In those moments (honestly, they are days and weeks, not moments!), I cannot even read my partner’s love for me as love, because I lack the patience and clarity to read as love anything that is different from my notion of love. When I get present to this, I shudder at how unaccommodating and closed I can be. I am shocked by the violence I do to my lover’s love by not even according it the status of love.

How then can I truly understand the limiting nature of my idea of what love is? How do I live the next many days and weeks in a way that helps me recognize my limiting conception of love, bracket it aside, and receive what my partner is offering me? The primary act of love I can do now is to acknowledge his love for me as love. Since it is important to remember that love is also a verb, a set of acts, a mode of being in the world, and not just a cozy state of being where things happen to us, how do I be loving in a way that seeks to undo my hitherto violent rejection of love that has been coming to me from my partner?

I think it is very sad that we are never really taught these things. I understand that life is to be experienced, to be learned as we go on, but I do wish someone taught us, even as they were busy making us learn how to balance equations and to remember dates of wars and conquests,  to love ourselves, to examine our fears, apprehensions and projections. Oh I have nothing against balancing equations and knowing dates of wars, for I do find this world fascinating and want to learn as much as I can about it. I only wish our inner worlds weren’t neglected this much and left for us to figure them out on our own.

As we get close to yet another St. Valentine’s Day, I cannot help but muse on the theme of love. The language of love continues to be occupied by a consciousness that is all about young, heterosexual coupledom. Sadly, this currently available language falls woefully short of addressing even that one form of love. The glorious light this language of love casts on mushiness, the good feelings one is conditioned to feel and want, the unqualified longing for love one is supposed to feel, casts the darkest shadow on all that needs to be worked through for love, in love and through love: our fears of abandonment, our unexamined investment in patriarchy and other ways of wielding power, our readiness to sabotage something beautiful before it threatens to destroy us, our adamant refusal to believe that something good can ever happen to us, or, even if it did, that it should last, and many more things.

If I were to embark on a personal reclamation of St. Valentine’s day, I would, at least this year, make it my project to turn the light on my shadows where all the real business is, where all the things are that most urgently need the light of my love as well as my partner’s. You can ask me why bother about St Valentine’s Day at all, or some might even ask why bother about romantic love at all, that smug and narcissistic form of love that often relegates other relationships to a side, at least until the heart invested in it is hurt and comes rushing back to other relationships for comfort and healing. At one level, I will tell you that love seems to be badly needed in the world, that the recent discussions around sexual violence, the resurgence of violence on inter-caste unions, etc. point to our failure in thinking critically and usefully about love.

At another, more honest and personal, level I will tell you that as long as I seem to be bothered about love and romance, I think it would be a good idea to look for more healing, less turbulent and less toxic ways to love.

So, this year, for the first time, I have a proper Valentine. Myself. Love.

This essay is part of the Orinam V-Day 2013 series called The Original L Word