love

The Multiple Facets Of Being A Lover

Photography by Sebastian Bieniek

There shouldn’t be a thing such as “I can’t be with a ‘someone’” for whatever reason. There shouldn’t be a thing such as “I love her/him so much but I can’t tell them that”. How cruel is that! Suppressing your feelings just so someone is safe from the tsunami of your love! What’s even crueler is depriving them of the chance to experience a love so deep, so unfathomable, so impossibly gentle and passionate! And they don’t know it because you don’t have the strength to face the fact that your feelings will not be reciprocated.

Listen, the whole point of love is it to be selfless. You don’t love somebody because you WANT to be loved by them. You just love them because you can’t stop loving them no matter what they do. When you’re in love, you just want to give it all out! It’s like you just want to drown, shower, shout and scream your love around and over them. Loving someone is being selfless. You just have to want it enough to tell someone who has touched your soul that they have done that.

When you decide to tell someone that you are in love with them, it shouldn’t be because you want to conquer their heart and soul like some property, you tell them just for the reason to let them know that THEY are so capable and worthy of being loved. They are so loveable that you yourself fear that it could destroy you. Well, who wouldn’t want something like that? To be desired to be loved by someone so much?

Sebastian Bieniek

The Fear of Rejection

Ah, this. It is a recurring fear that bleeds into other parts of our lives as well. We’re all scared of being embarrassed in front of family, friends, STRANGERS. But when it comes to expressing our love, you can just throw this shit out the window into the abyss. How can you do that? Well, the thing is, just because someone doesn’t “want” your love or has thrown it away, doesn’t mean you cannot love other people. It doesn’t mean that you lack something. Everybody wants some or the other kind of love. Some want passionate love, some want attentive love, some want the quiet kind etc etc. Just because you met someone who didn’t want the kind of love you can offer, and you parted ways because of that, doesn’t mean you won’t ever love somebody ever again. It isn’t because you’re ‘incapable’ of loving—you just have to wait until you find a person who is missing a part of their soul that can be filled with the love only YOU can give and they’ll have the pieces that your soul was looking for. Trust me. And these people are WORTH the wait. Don’t rush into anything because you can’t stand being alone with yourself.

SOUL-MATES’ THEORY IS SHIT?

After a long-list of ex-lovers or if you haven’t found someone yet, you start to think that maybe you’re just not cut out for this “love crap”. You feel like you just aren’t meant to find this soul-mate everyone seems to have, apparently.

Here’s a piece of reminder: DON’T give up on love. Like at all. Nope.

It is REALLY easy to hate things or to be by yourself, instead of going out and offering yourself all the opportunities that you should be looking out for, you decide to stay in and revel in all your failures and disappointments and convincing yourself that happy endings aren’t for you. Good god, no! Love is the ONLY thing keeping us going; ALL of us. The only redeemable thing about us as humans: our ability to love even in the shittiest of circumstances. If people gave up on finding love, this world would be the most bleak and meaningless place.

Love is our only constant. It is the only thread that pierces through thousands of years, when we changed, but it’s the only thing that remains constant and unyielding. Through the wars, the technology advancements, the social media dawn. It transcends EVERYTHING. Love isn’t a one-dimensional thing like being intimate with someone. It exists in so many planes and spheres and everybody gets a piece of it. It exists in friendships and family and pets and celebrity crushes and music and art and books and poetry and photography and adventurous sports and coffee shops and desserts and home-comings.

Look for love in people, places, pictures, movies, lines painted on a wall in a street alley, on the chalk boards outside shops. It is EVERYWHERE. We are gorged with love as much we are gorged with hate. Which side we let take over us defines our lives.

Sebastian Bieniek 4

Meaning of Being a Lover

Even if you confess your ‘eternal’ love for someone and they accept it, the hardest part of loving someone is knowing HOW to do that, in a way that you love them just right and don’t leave yourself behind in the process. Who is a good lover?

I think a lot about the wedding vows that are mostly common in all the traditions of marriages across the globe. The thing is, JUST because you haven’t made “official” vows, you still have to carry out these vows when you’re a lover. You have to be there in sickness/health, in the good/bad times or in richness/poverty or whatever. People have this twisted concept that just because you’re not bound to your lover BY THE LAW, you can just do whatever the hell you want. As a lover, you are responsible TO and FOR each other. It shouldn’t be a duty but a privilege.

If you cannot give yourself wholly to a person who is ready to do that, don’t drag them along. Don’t have them in your life just to fill it with some kind of meaning. They are not there to give your life meaning, they’re just there to help you find some meaning BY yourself while loving you all the same. The tough times in life aren’t always palpable and can be avoided or overcome by oneself, sometimes you feel not being worthy of being loved or anything, your lover will love you anyway. Love is waiting for the storm to pass together. Not waiting for them under a shade holding the umbrella but sitting in the rain with them and getting sick.

Be the lover you want to have. You’ll be alright.

Oshin Ahlawat is a young poet and writer based in New Delhi, India. “I believe people who write are like tornados and cyclones. We wreck a lot of lives; for better or worse. It all depends on the people who read our work. They decide where the damage is going to be; the heart or the mind and whether it’s going to be for the good or for worse. I wish to give them the choice to decide that. I’m just going to focus on doing what I want”, she says. 

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