Love And Marriage - My Two Cents

This is a follow up to Love And Marriage.

I think Plato's teacher was quite right to a large extent. We expect love to be perfect. We all like to believe that there is one perfect person just for us somewhere. We think that that one person will be just the way we always imagined them to be - one who fulfills all our needs and all our fantasies. One who understands and takes care of all our needs.

But well, guess what? I don't think perfection exists anywhere in this Universe. Those of us who have found the happiness that they were always looking for are the ones who have become mature enough to accept the fact that their partners are not perfect, will never be perfect, and they just need to concentrate on the good points and accept and deal with the imperfections. Twice in my life I came really close to getting married. Today it is crystal clear to me that I was compromising on a lot of stuff on both occasions. If I'd been a little more patient, a little more compromising, a little more willing to adapt, things might have worked out with one of those two guys. But there are some things I cannot compromise on, because they are part of who I am and I have too much self respect to let go of those things.

When you first see that most magnificent stalk of wheat, you might miss the little worms eating away parts of it. Only later do you realize that the stalk is hideously defaced in places. Only after the initial phase of looking at it with rose-tinted glasses do you begin to see everything you've compromised on.

Perhaps we all expect too much. Perhaps we don't even know exactly what we want. Sometimes we do, but we don't realize that what we've always been looking for has always been right by our side the whole time. Just like Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na. Or My Best Friend's Wedding. Or sometimes we don't even see that there is a lot of fundamentally significant stuff missing from the relationship we're in, and complacently agree to be happy with whatever we have.

We are all basically unclear on what we want, what we need. From time to time, there are people in our lives whom we think we like. And soon enough we realize the significance of the word think in the preceding sentence. We realize that this person is nothing like what we need our life partner to be. And then there are those who've always been around, who've always been part of our psyche, but we failed to acknowledge them.

Like Julia Roberts says in My Best Friend's Wedding, "Sometimes people think they know how they feel about each other. But they don't. Until, they do." I love that scene. It's when she goes to tell Dermot Mulroney's character Michael that she loves him, but returns without doing what she intended to do.

The next couple of lines Julia Roberts says in that scene sum up my current state of mind... "I have a point. Am I getting to it?"

I'll leave it a little open ended here for you to see if you can figure out what my point is...


PS: Does anybody know why I can never talk about relationships and love without mentioning My Best Friend's Wedding?