Latent Space

Most of my life I have been warned against not giving away too much of myself into a relationship. Those who know me well enough know that I love without any inhibition.
For me love knows no reservations, no reticence, and no self hugging consciousness.

I have been told that the hurt that remains after a failed relationship is not easy to live with. It keeps wriggling into every corner of your being and you just can’t throw it out. I have been cautiously led into the belief that things which I embrace so heedlessly might come back to haunt me later in my life.

I never believed any of this. People have called me naïve for doing so. For being the obstinate person that I usually am. They have smirked and walked away. Telling themselves that someday I’ll learn my lesson.

Yet I held on to the belief that love remains indifferent to circumstantial alterations or situational outcomes. If at all it gets stronger in the face of adversity. I know it is too idealistic a view but then that’s what I believe and live by.

But this was not always the case. I remember my days when I used to get mighty affected by what people had to say or think. I fell easy prey to their insecurity and their jealousy.

Yesterday talking to P, I realized how enormously different things are now. He was disturbed over something his friend had said about how each one of us should be prepared to accept failing in a relationship. And he got thinking as to what if indeed he failed. I helped him see reason then. And made him realize how it didn’t apply in our case but later on this got me thinking.

The enormous amount of negativity that people carry around these days is indeed catching. And more so with respect to love. And worse still is the way in which they pass on their own fears, their own bottled up insecurity, their inability to love to those who are truly happy in life. And when a person close to you comes up with something like this you are bound to be affected. You do stop to think for a moment that what if he indeed is right.

But yesterday as I was making P see reason I realized that all this fails to affect me now. After being misled so many times by people close to me I have eventually realized that what ultimately matters is you and the person you share the bond with. As long as you both are comfortable under the skin of your relationship, nothing else matters. Neither the fear of losing nor the fear of giving away too much of your own individual self. For the universe that was once yours - today is yours and his.