Relationships

"Hatred is love without facts. Can our minds be changed if we knew a few facts about the things we hate?"

I want to write about relationships today. How much value does a human being place on this thing called relationship! All of us want to be a part of one thing or the other. The sense of belongingness to a certain group, community and owning something or somebody... these I think are the reasons that we seek relationships.

Strangely for some of us relationship does not necessarily be with human beings... we also tend to make relationships with inanimate things. And we strive very hard to hold onto something and get the feeling of belongingness.

This stage of our life (for people of my age), usually is characterised by the establishment of family-especially the spouse. And not all of us have had good love relationships. It has always been a period of stress, sadness, pain and gloom.

While human beings are empowered to achieve things which never existed, love has been something that is still a mystery! Man finds it too difficult to understand it, possess it, and enjoy it. No matter what, a slip in love life makes a man feel deprived, powerless, incomplete, unhappy and lifeless! While lag in other relationships are made up for through perks, wealth, power or other things, love relationship leaves behind a deep scar which is irreversible, irrevocable, and irreplaceable. While these are the best part of love, they are also the sad part of it. Those who are able to conquer their love feel elated and the others are left with the scar as an accident.

While this has been something I get so upset about-the love failures-I attempt to understand what this love is all about. In a sense this can be extended to the concept of relationships as well. I see that every single thing that you and I do is for utmost selfishness – just and just for my (your) sake. It is just because I want to be happy, I want to be secure, I want to have support, I want to live, I want to be comforted, that I get into love and hence relationships. May be that is the reason ‘I’ get smashed when the person I love dump me! My hope, my dream, my sense of security, my wishes, everything that I have bestowed upon that ONE person, is destroyed in no time just because the ONE did not reciprocate.

Also, how difficult it becomes for each of us to accept the other person unconditionally, just as they are. Though at one level we all seek to belong to someone, there is internal discord which is difficult to set right and does not give the sense of belongingness. Establishing relationship is a challenge but more than that maintaining a relationship becomes yet more difficult.

I have read somewhere about spirituality where the different human forms are perceived as different manifestations of a Single Soul. So there in reality lives just one Being. A naive illustration to explain the point: While ‘I’ represent the exercise of will to experience Love, ‘you’ might represent the exercise of will to attain Success. All ‘forms’, work towards the goal of the Single being. This seems to be a comfortable Philosophy to follow for me: maintaining relationships become much easier when I see you as the manifestation of a different me!

It also gives me the ability to empathise with you. See it from your point of view. Stand in your shoes. Now I am holding onto Spirituality to support me!

Relationships: they define them all! What more to say?!