Understanding Love

“In his heart, Frodo begins to understand…the quest will claim his life. You know this. It is a risk we all took...”

Understanding can hit you like a ton of bricks sometimes. Smacking you right between the eyes. And you wake up from your coma and you realise the world is different. It is not what you thought it was. Your thoughts was just a moment in a dream.

My obsession with Love has finally come to an end. Because I finally understand it.

It started with my reconnection to Mr. Smooth. I still had a cyber crush on him and I still knew it would never work, and then against my better judgment, I contacted him again. You know how they say, curiosity killed the cat? Well, curiosity killed the crush in this case. The minute I met him, I watched as my cyber crush, burst into a thousand little pieces, and then I watched as it caught on fire burning to a crisp and then the ashes scatter in the wind.

When I met Mr. Smooth, the complicated, multifaceted nature of the human being, (that I so understood and preached) was now in full colour for me to look at and interact with. At that moment I knew in my heart that I did not like him. It was not one specific thing but I just didn’t feel it. Even after all the things I knew about him, and all the good conversation we had online, the real world was different. From what I could tell, he liked me. But in my opinion, he liked me for all the wrong reasons. Then his constant “your beautiful”, “Angel” “sweetie” talk seriously annoyed me. It annoyed me, because I didn’t like him like that.

*Confession* I did the cardinal sin of being single. I thought about the stories I heard from people about how they met their spouses (it pains me to type this) but I wondered…what if this was it? What if this was my last chance to get married…what if he was a really good guy and would look after me and be the prince that I needed…what if…what if. I continued to talk to him, but made no effort to give him back what he was giving.

In the meantime…I met The Boy, who was much younger than me and one of my students *guilty look*. I felt myself drawn him. The Boy was from a very different world than I was. I don’t know what happened but I just felt different around him. I don’t know if it was just a physical attraction because he smelled so good. But people around me pointed out that I glowed like a fire fly recently and I wondered…was I in love? Or was I running away from Mr. Smooth and therefore fixating on a person who is so completely different from me that it would never, ever work? I was caught between two very different worlds and my fear questioned whether any of it was real. Slowly I let Mr. Smooth know that all his efforts of trying to win me over were done in vain. And I let my heart believe for just a second…what I felt for The Boy was real. The second passed and reality set in.

(I wrote a whole paragraph on all the things he did, said and the looks he gave me that made me think he liked me, then deleted it. Thanks to the whole Fred and Martha thing. Because this is not about me making excuses for liking him. This is about what liking The Boy and not liking Mr. Smooth made me realise)

I kept on asking people, how they knew if they were in love. I got all sorts of answers, the worst one was "You'll know it when you feel it". But then I wondered, how do you know that its love and not obsession or lust? Then someone told me "It’s real, when the other person feels it too" And it clicked. Yes, I agree, its real when the other person reciprocates. But I also know that people are much more complicated than that. There is no way of knowing that how you define being in love and how your partner defines being in love - is the same thing. So technically you will never know. But it is something that you believe.

What I realised is that Love has its uses. The feeling of Love makes us see and do things that we would not normally do. The Boy was so different from me that he made me look at the world differently which was part of the reason why I was attracted to him. I don't think I would have seen his perspective on things, had I not liked him. And this is the reason that Love has its uses. It’s to push us in ways and directions that I our imaginations would never dream. If you had to tell me last year this time that I would even look at The Boy, the way I did this year, I would tell you, your effen crazy. This I see as "destiny". A point that you have to be at, at a specific time, in order to learn the lesson. I also realised that now, I don't have such a aversion to guys who are younger than me.

People are looking for Love. The type of love that will make you fight for it, the type of love that will make you forget things like gham, and the fairness of one’s skin. But sometimes Love is the 'divine providence'. People who have a list of criteria that they want their perfect partner to be, sometimes meet the people from their list and then find stupid things wrong with them. Here love would be able to help them get over their issues. But that feeling, or inclination to say 'yes, okay, I want to spend the rest of my life with you' is just not there. That inclination can be seen as love, others call it destiny. I call it 'Divine providence'. Even if you meet the perfect person on paper, as Mr. Smooth was, or the perfect person in character like The Boy was, the point of connection will only happen if Allah (SWT) wills it to.

I never use to believe in this whole fantasized idea of love. And until it’s reciprocated, I still won’t believe, but I understand the use of Love and that I think that is my divine providence.