melancholy

Are “Dealbreakers” breaking us up?

Painting by Karel Balcar

The fact that we are constantly discussing deal-breakers in relationships is a testament to the fact that commitments have largely become transactions. Transactions that leave us losing out on love.

Relationships are simple, in all honesty. They don’t ask for too much. They just asks to be felt from the bottom of our heaviest fears and the top of our grandest desires. Just felt. Somewhere though, in the name of pleasing the people around us more that trying to seek satisfaction for ourselves, we have lost track of what a commitment should actually taste like.

The moment compatibility becomes a form to fill out in order to fall for someone, is when most love is lost.

Listen, it isn’t about looking for compatibility before commitment. Truth is, if you truly are able to find home for your emotions in the layers of another’s skin, if you are able to face your fears in that person’s shadow, then that is all the compatibility you can ever ask for, that is all that you will ever need.

But the modern society is fixated on the notion of compatibility. We try to gauge another person by their bank balance, their looks, the brand of clothing and so on – but apart from these things which are hard-wired in all humans, survival instincts as you may call them, we are also too concerned about what people around us think of our partners.

“The guy is too tall for me, that girl is too fat, that woman lives a quarter-mile too far from my place, I don’t like his dog and his mother, I think he shouldn’t keep his shirt untucked”- everyday expressions that suck the life out of whatever intimacy that might have been.

The world doesn’t realize that in a quest to find someone to tick all the boxes, we have forgotten to put Love and Care on our checklist.

I might be old fashioned, but I guess love isn’t something you can ever force people into or out of. It just drifts in seamlessly like the waters of spring flow again after an icy winter, gently lulling our demons to sleep.

It isn’t an action that you can take calculated steps into because howsoever man might’ve progressed, he still doesn’t have the required skills to give affection a shape other that the one his heart beats for.

And that’s the thing about all these abstract emotions that our life is entwined in, they don’t have a form. They are, just are. And the moment we talk about them as deals, as if we can sign on a piece of paper or use the barter system to buy and sell them, we are losing sight of what we are here for. Not to appease the people around us, just to feel alive, ourselves.

What we lack the most is simplicity. We need to rediscover what it feels to share a fast fading summer dusk with whom we feel the most comfortable with and watch the sun play hide and seek with the incandescent moon.

We need to hold the hands of our beloveds under the starry skies as the night chants our name. You can call these as clichés, but I can promise you, one day, somewhere, you will realize that true companionship doesn’t find its place in amongst the music that the world wants you to dance to. Instead it grows in the silence between two hearts whose beating is the only music they will ever need.

That is all love ever was.
Simple and profound.
And I swear, there is no substitute.

Sayan Sen is a 19-year-old from Kolkata, India, with a deep affection for puns and football. Currently pursuing Electrical Engineering, he loves poetry and loses his heart to all those who offer him food. He makes homes out of quotes and never says no to stargazing and 3 A.M heart-talks.

Read all from this author

Be the first to write a comment.

Your feedback