In a relaxed Sunday Afternoon, sitting on a bench across the open area of a famous shopping mall in Calcutta and looking at people passing by, P suddenly remarked

“You know, everybody in this world has a soulmate. And I am looking forward to finding her soon!”

Me: “You can’t be serious! Are you telling me that you believe the soulmate theory?”

P: “What is so wrong? I think there is a special someone for everybody.”

Me: “You have finally gone nuts, then. So, how do you plan to find this soulmate of yours? Will there be thunder? Lightning? Spotlight when she enters?”

P: ” Yeah. I was also hoping for some music and song and dance routine, you know. So that I would instantly know, its her.”

This conversation happened years ago. May be such a long time ago, that it wouldn’t seem to be strange at that age to discuss it. But quite frankly, as we grew up, or rather as I grew up, it is quite startling to find that not much has changed in this notion of soulmate which can be just laughed away or considered to be just a stupid, childish thought.

For a long time now, I have been seeing many of friends falling in and out of love. It is a strange feeling to watch and listen to their stories. Their everyday experiences, their happiness in the good times and their agony of the bad times. But most of the time, it is the latter which truly distresses me. Every one of these stories, mind you, start out to be the perfect romance of the century, promising to tear down all the boundaries and to be a worthy historical account  of greatest tales of love in the modern world of tall buildings inhabited by money mongers. But quite sadly, they almost always, end in a catastrophe.

The stories are all quite similar and familiar. As I said earlier, it starts being perfect, then people realize that the courtship period is over so that they can be themselves, and then they realize they don’t like each other so they have to treat the relationship as a burden which needs to be carried on. Finally, the volcanic eruption happens through the cracks, the molten lava comes out quickly and well, that’s the end of it all.

During the periods of unlimited bliss though, the lines are wonderful. “Oh, she has been a huge emotional support for me” or “I love him more than myself” and the like. And I sit and smile, and I wonder, why do people need an external emotional support when they have themselves? Or, can a man or a woman possibly love someone more than himself or herself? Is that really possible? I dare not read these questions aloud, because I already have a very bad reputation of being cynical person always crying doom when things are going hunky-dory. I know that. But emotional dependency on people is something so difficult for me to relate to, that it makes me say aloud, “You know, you shouldn’t be so emotionally involved”.

“Oh! I love him and very serious about this relationship. And besides what do you know? We are even thinking about opening joint bank accounts”

Yeah, that’s a pretty serious thing. It scares the living daylights out of me, you know. The idea of opening joint bank accounts with my boyfriend would pretty much rob me off my peaceful life.

But anyway, most people really don’t agree with me when I say this, that the moment you become emotional with something or someone, the end result would only be a very big disaster. It is because, that treating people with emotions makes us irrational. It pretty much makes us stupid. And stupid people don’t make good decisions or they don’t handle situations like smart people, who think logically. So the whole volcano and the molten lava story gets inserted here.

Emotions is not the correct E. The correct E is Empathy. One needs to understand that people are living beings and they have their own life where they need to play a lot of roles. Roles need to be prioritized, and since human beings are essentially narcissistic , we like to spend more time on those things which makes us happy and which are a lot of fun. Now if a relationship has been squeezed out of the fun factor, (and I don’t mean fun as a euphemism only), it is obvious that a role in that relationship would not be prioritized compared to watching football with the friends on a weekend. And for a relationship to be fun, it needs to less of the emotional baggage of the have-tos and the expectations of the should-haves. It is but only natural, that taking things slowly and enjoying the ride is the best way to go rather than conducting the merry go round all by yourself.

“Oh that’s a very crude way of putting things!” I hear you say, but unfortunately it is for the  better.