The thing people call "Love"

“Love is a leader. In order to be love’s follower, you have to be chosen by love,” says Khalil Gibran.
On glancing around me, I see a lot of people who claim to be in love and the emotion has become so overrated that anything and everything between two people is named love these days. If the so called thing that happens between two people is love, then why is it that relationships don’t last or that marriages which claim to be built upon foundations of love fall down miserably?
Even though there may be exceptions, according to my observations and acumen so far, an average(most commonly seen kind of) romantic relationship in today’s scene can be described as follows:
• When two people meet (even though the scene in the contemporary world includes homosexuals, here my reference is only to the heterosexual pairs) and they think they are curious about each other, then there is a misbelief that it is love.
• The next thing is that they get into a romantic relationship and then of course there is the usual night talks on the phone, the 24 hours non-stop text messages, make out sessions which are much looked forward to and then the final culmination- sex.
• After the sex, things change in most relationships, the pair starts to feel bored, the talks get monotonous, and as days go by there is nothing much that excites the both of them in each other.
• When the relation reaches this stage of depression, either of them decides to dump the other or they decide to part gracefully.
• If not that, they have a huge fight and they break up. Later on, the guy goes around describing the girl and her assets or the girl goes around lecturing about why guys should not be trusted.
Now, if we analyse this hypothesis, we see that all that the both of them needed was sex. If that was the case, why didn’t they just sleep together in the first stage itself and part?
When it comes to love, our society seems to be a complicated and disoriented lot. The underlying fact is that every individual wants to be on his own and wishes to think for himself. When a relationship happens, people do not look beyond the possibilities of the physicality between the two of them. Any individual cannot survive with someone to whom he cannot connect on the intellectual level. Be it a mediocre person or a snob or an intellectual one- every individual wants to talk out his mind to his partner and be able to coincide on some level with each other’s line of thoughts. Human beings are not sex machines who can be content with sessions of love making alone. Its only when work, brain activity, love and sex come together that a person feels revitalised. Sex alone will not sustain any individual or relationship.
Love becomes an experience only when you get to discover the person each day and when you can be happy about his existence itself. Getting to know a new facet of someone each day and celebrating the existence of such a person will never bore anyone I guess. But to create that kind of a lasting bond, both the man and the woman need to be wise, well-read and of distinct individualities. Sadly tough, in our social scene, people think that knowledge and love are in no way connected.
The commitment phobia that the Indian men have is another thing that adds fuel to the breakage of relationships. Men in general seem scared of commitment and marriages. They can be in a live- in relationship with a woman for more than 10 years but cant marry her. If the relation can go on for a long time, why hesitate to give it a name? It could be that the stigma that lingers over divorce and marriages in the Indian minds is one reason why people do not wish to get into nuptial knots.
Sex is a physical need, but it has got nothing to do with love. If sex is needed, we should learn to get it and move on without creating dramatic instances by calling it love. Every individual is in search of love. But the irony is that everyone seems to be in love as well. Love is something that will never be found in its entirety (at least thats what I believe!). Love keeps hopes alive and hopes keep the world moving. But again, in most man woman relationships, there definitely is no love. So we should invent some new word that can be used to replace “love” in such cases. “Lust” could be a substitute but again people don’t like it when their true intentions are spilled out. We always want to glorify our motives and use strong words like “love” and “commitment” so that we look, sound and seem civilised(even though civilization has not even looked our way)!