LOVE isn’t a foreign concept to me, as many of my acquaintances assume. Love comes naturally to me, just not for humans usually. I fall in love with ideas and thoughts, certain gestures and perspectives. Humans, being as unstable as the internet connection at my home, is quite frankly a little hard to be loved. Love is in many ways a complex concept to digest, and I can’t for the love of God understand how exactly we teach our children what it means. I suppose, our brain is designed to come to terms with such weird words as love and luck. However, I had this conversation with a man, practically a stranger, recently- and I think that was the closest I’ve come to understand the meaning of love.
He is a man in his thirties, and he has been working in an accounting firm for the last 10 years. There is nothing much extraordinary in his life- by his own admission, other than the moments he shared with his wife. He lost his wife to a car accident 3 years ago, just after 8 months of marriage. The way his eyes changed colours when he speaks about her betrays his overflowing love for that woman.
The kind of love you have towards your offspring, who is essentially a miniature version of yourself- I can understand. The kind of love that tickles the brain of a young romantic- I understand. The kind of love you share with your friends, who connect you to this materialistic world- I understand. But, it is this all-in-one kind of love you have with a stranger that outweighs any other desire or need that I don’t understand. It had been 3 years, and the first personal thing he shares with a stranger is about his dead wife. And I could see that he still loved her as if he still spends time with her. The reason is that he actually still spend time with her- he gets in touch with her friends, still has her kitty, manages her social media pages, takes up a lot of her hobbies, visits all her favourite picnic spots, and so on. I know, it sounds a bit deranged- but as the conversation went on, I realized that it needn’t necessarily be. He does consult a psychologist, by the way- which is how I got to know him in the first place. And the psychologist, who is a friend, doesn’t think he has an issue either. They just spend time talking about her.
One would guess that it would be horrible to lead a life in the memory of a lost soul. But, he wasn’t a sad man- actually, he is happier than most people I know. He enjoys the memories of his lost love, and that doesn’t interfere with his responsibilities here in this mortal world. Like any other person who watches prime-time telly would, I asked, “Why don’t you consider re-marrying”. And with a chuckle down his throat, he replied, “I am still in love with ____. I can’t marry someone else and offer only a quarter of my heart”.
(Just clarifying that I don’t think people who remarry after the passing of their spouse didn’t love their partner enough. Actually, I promote it and would encourage anyone in a similar situation to do so. You deserve to be loved and to have someone in your life to share your best and worst moments- and your love for another person doesn’t usually have anything to do with it. But this is an anomaly- I don’t think a remarriage would make him happier; rather it would only make two people a little bit sadder.)
I always approach these complex phenomena in an objective manner, well, at least as objective as possible. Romantic love, from a scientific perspective, is a total mess of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and vasopressin. When you first learn about them, you feel like you have a good grasp of what the concept actually means, now that you are familiar with the anatomy and physiology of it all. But then you come across people like him, and you are convinced that your understanding of love is not really any better than that of a layman’s. But when you think a little deeper, you’ll see that you understand it better now that you’ve met someone like him, you just can’t put it into words.
We can only hope to love and be loved like this middle-aged accountant loves (not ‘loved’) his deceased consort. If not, we’d still have Netflix, I hope.
