The Life Partner?

Going by the number of blog posts I have been reading since the last few weeks, this seems to be a topic on the minds of a lot of us out there.

The Life Partner. The one with whom I will spend the rest of my life? Just the very thought is scary. What if I get it wrong? What if I end up marrying the wrong person? A lifetime of grief and frustration?

And how do I find the right person? Where do I even search? And how will I know when I do find her? So many questions!!

Arranged Marriage? Love Marriage? Arranged cum Love Marriage? What the heck!

I want to think, why take the trouble at all? Why marry at all?
Why can't I just be on my own all my life?

These were the questions that I often used to ask myself. And I think I am gradually finding the answers. And I find myself slowly gaining a kind of peace as I understand these answers.

You see, one of the biggest of my concerns was always making a mistake and choosing the wrong person. I mean, the world tells us that there is someone made for us waiting for us somewhere. But what if that someone, if she did exist, was somewhere out there, say in the jungles of Africa? :-)

Or in Alaska? Or in New York? Paris? I mean how you can ever be sure that someone is the one made for you till you have met every other girl out there in the world! How can you ever be sure that there is no one else out there who's not a better match for you than the one you are with now?

So if this doesn't make sense, what we are really coming down to is someone within our circle with whom we have a logical chance of having a relationship. But which then means it’s a choice. It's a choice whom we decide to love. Whom we decide to marry.

I am not saying we can choose or decide to fall in love with someone. But we can and do always choose to continue to love or not.
There is always an element of choice.

Next for me is the aversion to arranged marriage that I had for a long time. How can you marry someone whom you hardly know?

But fact is, I have seen them succeed. I see my friends happily entering into arranged marriages. And I now realize, there's a basic reason that they do succeed.

You see, first of all, it's an exercise of choice by both the parties.

To understand the second, let's take the example of a couple who fall in love. It may take no time to fall in love, but it usually takes time to be really in love with someone. And it happens only after a considerable period of togetherness, when two people grow with each other and learn more about each other.

Of course two people would want to spend considerable time only if they like each other in the first place. But then the truth about liking somebody is, we are generally inclined towards liking people.

I mean if two people, with good hearts and clean intentions, and a basic level of compatibility, meet, they are more than likely to end up liking each other unless there's a turn off from either side. I mean, why would I not like someone who I know is a nice person?

And if two people who like each other spend time with each other, more often than not, they are going to end up falling in love. It's almost an inevitable law of nature!

Well, maybe not always. But what I am driving at is, this is exactly the same situation a couple who has had an arranged marriage is in. They know they like each other. There is a bit of chemistry and they seem to be compatible with each other. And they have chosen to love each other. And even if they do not feel love when they are married, with time, they inevitably will end up in love. It's as simple as that.

So ultimately, what I realize is, love is not always the instinctual love at first sight or the passionate romance. Often it's simply a decision to love. A decision to face life's battles together. And share the joys and sorrows together.

And when both the partners are committed to that decision, the marriage has every chance of success. That's all you need really.

So all you people out there don't sweat. The love in the movies and novels also does exist. But so is the kind of love that grows on you. The kind where you don’t even realize when it has happened to you.

But ultimately, it all starts from a simple decision.

And I tell myself all this and write down all this and then one question comes straight to me. What about the passion? How in the world can you manufacture passion where there is none? Can you arrange passion? But I do not know the answer to that question yet.
That's the unexplained magic I guess.

I can only hope, that whoever it is, would feel as much passion for me as I for her. Yes, at the end of the day, fact is, love is best experienced, not defined.

And I have now realized that my attempts to understand and explain this wonderful phenomenon is futile.

And so I give up. And hope. For the magic to happen someday.

And I want to end this post with these quotes from the movie, The Village.

"It is amazing what two people love chooses to unite. It follows no rules."