Romance as portrayed by popular culture can be the biggest barrier to a long-lasting relationship i.e to love itself. Here's how.
Aren't most of us stuck in this idea of love and longing for "the one" to make us whole?
We have been brought up in this popular rom-com culture where Dilwale comes to "save" his Dulhaniya, poets feel "incomplete" without their beloved and love is not love if it doesn't make you whole, at least, that's what they said. Prince charming on a white horse, saving the day?
And there would have been nothing problematic with any of the above scenarios if they wouldn't have been tagged as the "definition" of love.
Hear me out.
"Do you fall in love when you are feeling vulnerable or not so good about yourself?"
Have you ever been in an all-consuming love where the adrenaline rush is extreme but so are the fights and when it ends, you feel hollow, as if you have no idea of who you are now without the relationship to define you? They completed you, the urge to impress them made you change and remold yourself, and now, you are like a deer in the headlights with no destination in mind. Romance does that to you.
In romance, someone else comes to save you. In love, you wake up every day to save yourself, to be a better person, and support the other to the best of your ability.
Love is getting a partner where you deepen the joys and cushion the blows of your very individual lives. Love without the traditional idea of romance is sharing responsibilities and an equal partnership.
Margaret Anderson says
"In real love, you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person."
Romance in its traditional sense is steeped in the idea of patriarchy where men and women can't share their equal partnerships.
Love in its constant exploration offers you a window of acceptance.
In Romance, you get a complete makeover just to woo the other one. In love, you carry a large bucket of ice cream in your sweats to the couch to watch a movie and deck up together to go out later.
Gloria Steinem in her essay "Romance versus Love" argues that if your sense of well-being is determined more by the state of your love life than by your own life, you are still somehow playing a role of refuge in a classic romantic movie harboring the thought of someone else saving you.
But romance can be pictured differently. When we are not waiting for the other one to make us whole and blooming in self-esteem, romance can mean curiosity. Steinem says,
“If we weren’t so needy, full of illusions about a magic rescue, so hooked on trying to own someone - in other words, if the conscious goal of romance were stretching our understanding of ourselves and others, romance could be a deep, intimate, sensual, empathetic way of learning."
Romance isn't the problem. The idea of romance is. Once we take it as a cue to spark the urge to know and truly understand love and loved ones, it can transform into a passage towards the long-lasting journey of togetherness.
