Prisoner Of Love

“I Love you”, one of the simplest forms of expression of love but when you mean it, it speaks volumes. Love is one such emotion which is as unique as every individual personality is. When you fall in love with someone everything about that person becomes special but can falling in love make you stay in love too? Falling in love is one of the few falls which we enjoy just like some find it fascinating to do bungee jumping or sky diving. The difference in those falls and falling in love is they are activities which has a completion time, but love is an emotion which starts its journey as you fall. Then why or how is it the most beautiful and fulfilling emotion anyone can have? How can love free you after a fall and not make you its prisoner since you can’t escape it once you are caught?

We always believe the way of life should make us move forward. After every step we take, the next one should lead us to a better place. We are taught to get up and move ahead if we ever fall. But have you ever heard someone saying get up from love? No, we like to be in love. Once we fall in love we always want to stay in love. Love has a definition which is special to every individual and every relationship. So falling in love, be it with anyone, your newborn, parent, partner or friends, always makes the space between the two more comfortable and pleasant. Then how do we change this equation to suffocation and burden as we continue to stay in love?

A mother is known to have unconditional love towards her children. When the child is hurt, the first cry is always to his mother. It is a lovely phase of the relationship. Mother always want to believe that she knows what’s best for her child and to an extent she does know but over a period of time, life starts to change and slowly when the kid reaches adolescence, he starts a journey where he is struggling to find his own identity. At this time if mother tells: “I know what is best for you”, there is nothing within the child which will make him believe what she is saying because he himself is unaware of what he wants. Here is the time when we start caging love and slowly the love of our life becomes a prisoner of love.

There is a phrase: “love is in the air”, then why do we forget to allow the person we love to breathe? We humans are always focusing on what we want and once we have it, we lose focus on that. This is where we start taking relationships for granted. Two people in love want to get married and once married their focus is lost and now, they too are lost in that new relationship because they don’t know, what next? When we are parenting our kids, we are sometimes rude, angry, unreasonable and the justification for that behavior is: “we love you and we don’t want you to be hurt or do the wrong thing, we are trying to protect you”. This explanation is so well communicated that when an adult sugarcoats their violent behavior with love, our mind tends to believe it. In our adult life, we hear this from many in our life: “I am scolding you because I love you” and we accept this be it in marriage or any other relationship. This belief that someone is hurting me because they love me is the first step in accepting and making us stay in an abusive relationship. Here love is the prisoner who is guarded by that fear who is confused to understand the feeling of being in love.

Most of our emotions can be shared and felt with the similar intensity. For example, we can feel happy, sad, angry, disappointed, frustrated etc., and share this with others and feel that they understand us completely. But some emotions like love are personal and no one can feel it like the way you do. Sometimes I tell my husband, I don’t know why I love you. If someone else would have done something like what you did I would hate that person and smiliar feelings are shared with my daughter too. That is the beauty of love. We don’t know why we love a person. So don’t try to make the person whom you think, you want, this will destroy the individual and their personality.

Change is beautiful when it comes from within and not under compulsion. Sculptures are made with constant effort from outside, gold ornaments look beautiful because of the design carved on them and flowers look beautiful when they bloom. But stone and gold don’t lose their natural properties from within. They are beautiful from outside because we made them look like that and we only see the outside beauty while the inbuilt qualities are the prisoner within them. When flower blooms it changes from within and if we try to forcefully open the petals, it loses its originality and can never become what it is meant to be. Similarly, humans when hit from outside might turn to become the way we want to see them while their inner self remains prisoner to the outer world. Love should change the person from within to become a better version and not just beautify the life which becomes a visual treat for the society creating a vacuum for the individual and his relationships.

We share happiness and it spreads. We share sorrow and it relieves our pain, But love, cant be shared. Love is an unique emotion which no two individuals feel the same and it can never be shared. We often forget this reality and tend to cage the person we love inroder to protect our relationship. An individual has an individuality as long as he is a free man. When you imprison the person, you cage the love and leave the person free. You can either have love or the person but can never find both in one.

            Allow love to cherish your relationships.
            Allow change to nourish your relationships.

When love becomes a prison, lover always finds a way to escape. Cage your fear because love will always be in the air and once you fall in love learn to stay in love and not get up and get going. Love teaches you to live life and feel life the way you want. Beauty of life can be beautified from the love which is within you and not what comes from outside.