Love After The Reveal

Hello readers! So for those of you who know me personally, know that I’m also a part time counsellor to friends and family alike. I enjoy and savour in unwitting others, how much ever wired I am. And nothing truly brings me more joy than seeing people happy and joyed after the unwiring. More than that, every unwiring I do, also detangles something in my own self.

Today’s epistle is about one such counselling session I was having with a young girl a couple of days ago. And I swear, talking to her was like really trying to teach swimming to a person so that you can save them from drowning, but in all honesty, it looked like she had already drowned. And so many such girls I meet through my sessions, who have already drowned, not for their inability to swim, but somebody pushed them below the water level and kept them there till they could die.

How would you feel if you have acne and you are sold a product that is promised to relieve it for you, but instead exaggerates it? Violated, betrayed, lied to, devastated, plus concerned with anxiety on using any other product that now promises to remove acne. Every time you use a face cream from now on, you’d be more skeptical, protective and would like to test it on a smaller patch instead. Would you then ever meet a person who asks you to test a face cream as boldly as you did the first time or would advice you to forgive the face cream and continue using it, inspite of it aggravating your acne? Or rather forgive it because the seller lied to you and he might have been mistaken? I don’t think so.

But with people, we often expect them to forgive the hurt very soon. And something I never do when I counsel young girls. Don’t forgive, don’t pretend to be ok, don’t ever give the same cream another chance. And with this one particular girl I was counselling, she was sold a cream with all the promises that one could ever give of a glowing skin. But it caused the most amount of skin damage once used, completely opposite to what it promised to be. And I have seen most girls undergo the same ordeal. Love someone, be promised something and be delivered something absolutely different. It’s like ordering a phone on Amazon and being delivered a brick for it. And there is no honest recovery from the same, rather than either crying at your fate or fighting with the call centre to refund you your money. Atleast with money, it’s possible. Sadly, with emotions, it isn’t.

But I often ponder on what to do with the love after the reveal. What to do with the calm that was once offered and the tornado that was actually delivered? What to do with the pattern that was created but can’t be followed? What to do with a trust once broken and can’t be rebuild? What to do with yourself when you’ve reached the middle of a race that you were running, only to realise that you are running solitary in a desert? So many people I have seen struggling with this question, girls and boys alike. And it breaks my heart to think that we Atleast live in a world that theoretically offers the 18th century Old Age romanticism but sadly delivers Artificial Intelligence.

When anybody asks me the solution for it, I would call it ‘authenticity’, which is so difficult in this world of social media and external validation. How what my life looks like to other people is more important than what it actually looks like. And that’s the crux of the issue. Men having wives for the sake of an achievement of some sorts but going to bed thinking that it’s the worst situation they can ever be in, and vice versa, is all around us. I enter into a club and almost spot a guy with a girl and either of them is married and now it’s the most consistent conclusions that I have.

Love after the reveal is tough, almost impossible and equally saddening. Someone told me that if you date or marry out of logic, it’d change every 5-10 years and then you’d be left with multiple partners. Rightly so for some people as what gives us joy is priority but for old souls it’s important to get back to being authentic and be selfless, no matter how dangerous they sound in the 21st century. It might sound disadvantageous to be that, to be at loss and it feel like you are losing the race, but you aren’t. Trust me. You are just comparing yourself with the wrong world. See right, and it’ll all fall into place! Let’s start respecting the dignity of every life around us and ensure that even if hurt happens, it’d never be out of malice or intentional hurt!

Cheers 🥂