‘God determines who walks into your life. It is up to YOU to decide who you let walk away, who you let stay and who you refuse to let GO!!!’
I read these lines somewhere. On the face of it, it’s just another ‘quote’ or a ‘forward’, the likes of which flood the internet. But try to contemplate it. Isn’t very word of it oh- so- true? It is so easy to “fall in love”, as if you just stood there, doing nothing and a wave of water sweeps you off your feet. It just ‘happens’!! But sustaining a relationship is where the catch is. The inception or the honey moon period of a relationship is certainly very rosy. The experience makes us feel completely alive…every sense is heightened, every emotion is magnified, our everyday reality is shattered and we are flying into the heavens.
People take risks, are willing to walk an extra mile to do stuff for the other person, put their rationality aside, lock their brains up and let the heart lead the way. Smile is given a permanent residency and elation carves the path.
But I guess, like everything else in the world, a relationship too follows a life cycle. After sometime, this euphoria starts diminishing, the excitement starts fading away. The other person becomes predictable and starts being taken for granted. The focus starts shifting to the negatives, which had always existed, but were over looked till now. Things like calling every hour, questions like, “Have you had food”, which were considered cute and lovable till now, starts becoming a nuisance. Conversations start becoming sparse. After years of togetherness, I still see people questioning themselves ‘Am I with the right partner?’
At this stage people tend to look behind, reminiscing their initial moments and with the desire to experience it again, they look at moving out. This may be with the intention of experiencing it all over again with probably a new partner. This is where the relationship starts breaking. But what they fail to realize is that every relationship would face this stage where people feel that they've reached a saturation point.
Come to think of it, how can you reach a saturation point in a relationship? Man is such a complicated being, how can to get to know everything about a person in just a few months or even years? For me, I think a complete life time is inadequate. It’s probably that after a certain time, you just stop looking for anything new in your partner. May be you just WANT to believe and take pride in the fact that you know your partner inside out, and thus just refuse to look beyond. Doing that is good until this starts acting detrimental in your relationship.
I remember having a friend in college, who had been dating this girl for 4 years already. One of us once asked him, "Dude, you are with your girl for so many years now. Look about, you study in Delhi University and the campus has so many hot chics around. Don't you ever feel that you've had enough and you need to date other females too?"
His answer to this is something that I can never forget in my life. He says, "I never feel the need to do that. Because every single day I discover something new in Sonal and I fall in love with her all over again."
It's been 3 more years to this conversation, and they are still going strong {touch wood}. Still, every time I when look at their pictures and posts on Facebook, I feel a desperate urge to fall in love and experience what Nitin and Sonal are experiencing.
Thus, I feel, making a relationship work, or putting an end to it lies completely in our hands. It’s for us to keep the spark alive and maintain the magical formula. Please notice the use of words like ‘our’ and ‘us’ in my sentences, which means both the people in the relationship should be actively involved in making things work.
You’ve got to understand that no one on this Earth is perfect. Every one has flaws. The idea is to look beyond these imperfections. If you keep expecting your love to change a person, there is quite a high possibility that all you get at the end is disappointment. You should try and see if you can live with those short comings or no.
Somebody once told me, ’The key to succeeding in a relationship is not finding the right person; it's learning to love the person you found.’ Well… Probably!!
Love may start with being a ‘feeling’, but at the end of the day, it’s certainly a ‘decision’… a conscious decision!! :)
