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A Time For Change

A year, ago I had started this blog to write in particular about a relationship that had recently demised. It was one of those that leave a bleeding wound, heal over time to become an unsightly scar - the kind of scar that might make a stranger ask you "How did that happen ? It must have hurt a lot" You pretend it is nothing and make light of it.

We used to talk of unconditional love then, M and I. I asked him once :

Isn't divorce a result of conditional love being lost? We start out hoping for the other to be a near replica of an ideal we have etched in the mind forgetting only too often that we ourselves are fallible. Then there is all the baggage we accumulate from tears unwiped, hopes belied, expectations unmet, silences misconstrued - everything that the family law attorney summarizes in such legalese as "insupportable and irreconcilable differences" - is that not all about Eros deified as love ?

And he replied:

Divorce is not a conditional love being lost. It has nothing to do with love. It is the consequence of value systems and opinions and acts and a slew of other subjective elements that have dispersed toward different ends. Divorce does not indicate fallibility on our part. It only reflects an act that one had to take recourse to, given that the alternatives may not be the best for one or both parties. But when it does happen, one comes face to face with the effects --- loneliness, bitterness, should have, could have, would have, regrets --- one makes rounds into the cemetery of the past to nurture that what is dead. Our habit of mourning the dead, our habit of mourning the “loss”. There is no Eros that is lost … only the mirage of blissful marital permanence that one had when one walks up the aisle or the seven steps around the sacred fire becomes real ….that being that the permanence as one had hoped for is temporal. Eros is never lost.

In hindsight, he and I had a short burst of unconditional friendship that may have stayed that way had Eros not come in the way. The journey through eighty-one continents (each day we spent together felt like discovering one) of love is truly over. It's time to change the tagline of this blog.

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