The elusive essence of true love

If you are accustomed to abuse and toxicities, you will never let true love in. Representation pic/Shadab Khan

I've never been a fan of Valentine's Day. As a teenager (especially as a teenager, perhaps) even the lead-up to it felt like too much pressure if you weren't a conventionally attractive person. You were forced to watch as the other prettier girls around you were wooed with gifts that seem tacky in retrospect but at the time felt thoughtful. They held currency. I was one of the ‘unfortunate' ones who only received an anonymous card from some anonymous stalker. It was creepy. I did find it charming, though, that my parents made an effort to give each other gifts, but apart from that, the whole event felt sickening and gendered. As I grew older and witnessed the Indian right-wing resistance to the day as something outside of Indian culture, one felt pressured again to regard the celebrations as something subversive in the face of censorship. I realised, early on, that what is, in fact, deeply rooted in Indian culture is the whole business of policing who gets to love whom. True ‘love' seems to be an elusive concept within our culture, especially when you think about how Indian society understands (or rather, sidesteps) the notion of consent.

As a culture, we have conflated love with duty and obligation, which is linked to the need to people-please and maintain the status quo. We celebrate our addiction to duty for its role in nurturing a presumably non-individualistic culture. No matter how liberal seeming your familial environment may be, it's rare for any of us to speak of contexts in which we were encouraged or enabled to empower ourselves by honing our sense of personal agency. For most of us, it has been very normal to pursue our parents' dreams at the cost of our own, to live the kind of heteronormative lives that are in line with societal expectations, often at the expense of our sexual identities, because it is easier to live a double life than to come clean to our ‘loved ones' and give them access to who we really are. Those of us who find the courage to deviate from societal norms are usually confronted with the ‘what will others think' spiel. The morass runs so deep that instead of championing love, we valorise its opposite, abuse. Our societies are filled not only with perpetrators who disrespect both children and women by violating their bodies, but also with family members who go to great lengths to actively protect the abusers - usually known to the family - by brushing their brutalities under the carpet and continuing to allow them access to their victims. The fact that we legally have no protection against marital rape says so much about where our priorities lie. Marital rape isn't even legally acknowledged as a crime. How insane is that? In some parts of the country, laws are being enforced that will compel unmarried couples to register not only their current relationships but also their past. Intersecting with all of this is our troubled (troubled is an understatement) relationship with caste, our inability to truly confront not only its horrors but our complicity in its continued perpetuation.

The thing about true ‘love' is that, if you are accustomed to abuse and toxicities, you will never let it in, because it is unknown to you, and unknown variables are frightening. When it stares you in the face, you feel programmed to perceive it with suspicion. I certainly felt that way when I met my partner. It was strange, because we met each other at an art event and ended up talking for a long time, and I was simply moved by his attentiveness that seemed not to be motivated by any agenda. Some days later, we went out for dinner and had the most wonderful time just talking and getting to know each other. It was and wasn't a date. Two days later I left Italy, but we remained in conversation over email and WhatsApp. We were sure we would most likely never see each other again, so we decided to adopt a policy of total transparency. No secrecy, no beating around the bush, just complete honesty and trust. And that, I realised would be the foundation for any form of love.

Five weeks shy of delivery, I've been thinking about what it means to bring another child into this post-apocalyptic world. It is a privilege, in many ways, to be able to accept the call to nurture another person to love and care for the world and its many fragilities. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do this with someone whose love for me I never need to question. Because love, in its purest forms, manifests not in big gestures and gifts but in the everyday domestic. How we manage our household resembles a beautiful dance, our bodies keep time, speaking to each other wordlessly. We respond intuitively to each other's needs and talk to each other with kindness and empathy. This is the legacy of love I know I want to pass down to our children not selflessness or subservience, but love as a series of gestures made from a space of self-care and self-respect.

Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.