In old times a romantic affair was thought of as a once in a lifetime phenomenon, jargon like ‘ Pyaar Sirf Ek Baar Hota hai ‘was enduringly accepted and most of the time practiced as well.

 The notion of love has undergone a transformation in contemporary times. The word ‘love’ has been overused in every context. ‘I love you ‘isn’t any more an expression limited to one’s lover but is extended even to people one has just met. Somewhere, in the attempt of expressing a sense of compassion, we have tangled the word and its usage to a point where the attached meaning has gotten loose. Resulting, in debilitating it’s potential.

The modern-day advancements have landed us the freedom to choose, from options more than ever, without any restrictions of community, race, culture, or even gender. The challenge is choosing the best amongst all. The one after which one can end their quest.

Moreover, situations like usage of   ‘I love you’ by children at the tender age of 7-9 year, having no idea of the concept and the associated intricacies and with no one to guide them, creates deeper complexities.

The traditional functioning of our societies prohibits discussing such subjects with the elders. Hence, nobody is at the helm of steering these young minds in the correct direction. This causes their understanding and decision making to be driven by the ideas projected by the movies , novels which can leave them vulnerable.

During adolescence when one undergoes the  hormonally induced transformations and feels the newly developed sensations and craving of companionship,romance, arousal, and sexual desires, they are left eith little option but to surrender to the needs and engage in multiple experimentations with relationships to satisfy their hormonal needs.. Having a relationship is also a way of maintaining one’s social image and save oneself from being ridiculed as being unworthy of being loved which leads to making unmindful decisions. 

In experimental realtionships Love is used as a GO signal to initiate a romantic relationship. While walking the path in the relationship one begins the quest of the meaningful expression of love which mostly ends up in a no show as the relationship was need-based and not meaning-based and so it ends in futility, leaving one with a misconstrued conception and suffering leaving one weakedned and sometimes desperate for companionship. When the later urge dominates, it leads to moment based decisions of entering relationships to compensate for the pain and suffering of the previous relationship, these are called ‘ rebound relationships’. Since they begin in the moment of weakness and without mindful thinking, they end up in tatters , cumulating the pain and suffering further. Some people enter a vicious cycle of moving from one rebound relationship to another due to their inability to bear the temporary hurt. This leads them to land into a highly messed up and vulnerable stage .

 Some relationships are taken up to satisfy the basic urges of having fun, being pampered,  and for emotional and sexual needs without any long term commitment. These are the so called ‘ casual relationships’ 

Yet another category of relationships is where friends satisfy each other’s sexual needs without associating emotional attachments to the process, these called  ‘ friends with benefit ‘.

Sometimes people have relationships outside the marriage , called adulterous or extra marital relationships, seeking to satisfy the desires, needs, and fantasies, unfulfilled within the marriage.  

In the midst of this plethora of options to choose from and a  variety in the kinds of relationship one wants to enter it has become increasingly challenging to realize the very meaning behind the word ‘LOVE’ and explore the dimensions ahead of it. Most of the people are left beffudled thinking why despite tring all the ways and means are they unable to come across its potential.

Those who have the understanding of Love know that it is not a mere word, and when experienced in its full potential, has the power of breaking one’s cognitive, social, cultural, and all the other kinds of distortions and arouse the unfound energies and strength from within people and has the tremendous ability to transform them and the world around them for better. 

To reach this level one first need to understand and identify the shortcomings in perceiving the concept of love created due to mistaken choices made and misleading experiments with no standard protocol or counseling available to guide one’s way through this tumultuous path, causing one to land up into the trap of momentary temptations which create a life long impact on their understanding and experience in life ahead.

People who switch partners one after the other,  create further intricacies and bewilderment in their mind which entangles the cognition and associated emotional responses eventually impacting their ability to judge and calibrate their responses to the encounters they have in life. They may develop a pattern of initial excitement, gradually lowering down, and necessitating a need for a new relationship to rekindle the initial response. This process may be repeated leaving them more unsatisfied and exhausted ultimately till a point where their pursuit of looking for love ends and they lose belief in the concept of love itself.

Marriages based on the superficial judgments of a person face a similar problem of the inability and unfulfillment of the desire of receiving and transmitting love to their partners. The ever-rising number of divorces which once was a western phenomenon shows a lack of maturity in relationships due to the abuse of emotions by frequent experimentation in the past.

Since the fundamentals of love and its comprehension have been shaken and misused enough to have caused foundational problems of making misjudgments and misinterpretations. It is monumentally important for us to revisit our respective understanding of love and its importance in, not only initiating but maintaining a relationship in the long run. It is of great importance for the elders to have an open, peer like friendly conversations with them on these aspects of their lives so as to guide them appropriately and prevent them from emotionally and physically endangering themselves in life ahead.

A clear understanding and mindful decision making in this regard can help initiate many relationships on the right note, so as to prevent future upheavals and can also steer the existing problem facing relationships in a hopeful direction.

In this dynamic world of the 21st century with numerous options, one has to take conscious efforts of saving themselves from falling into the trap and disarraying one’s emotional and mental foundations and building fulfilling relationships.

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