Edited by: Shreya Jain
I have this theory that you can either love someone red or love someone blue.
POV 1: The Red
I have never loved someone the way I love Laalchand. This is the love I’ve always wanted; the love I’ve always dreamed of. He’s the Chuck to my Blair, the Conrad to my Belly. We have that burning passion that they talk about in books, the kind that consumes you. We were made for each other; my body feels like it was made for him. My arms only know how to hold him while he sleeps on my stomach; my legs only know how to walk towards his embrace. My eyes are trained to search for his face in a room filled with people, even when I know he’s not there. My lips don’t know how to do anything except press against his, because a minute that we spend apart is a minute too long. When we aren’t spending time together, we’re on call; when we aren’t on call, we’re texting. When you’re younger, you watch movies where the girl always gets her ‘happily ever after’; whereas after everything, after years of being together, the couple just always has this undying passion for each other. The kind of couples who would rather die than be apart, whose whole worlds revolve around each other. They can’t live without each other, the same way Laal and I can’t.
But what those movies don’t talk about enough is the fights and the passion-turned-hatred; one moment you’re staring into their eyes preying you never lose them and the next, you both are standing in your childhood bedroom screaming at each other, saying things you never thought you would to another person. They’re so bad for you, but how do you leave them? The attachment love makes it feel impossible, and even if it were possible, you wouldn’t want to. Nowadays, when we think of love, we think of passion. And so when we fall in love with someone, we fall in love with screaming and crying and kissing in the rain; we fall in love with cursing their name at 2 a.m. It sounds silly, but we subconsciously decide that love isn’t love without the constant highs and lows. We fall in love with the constant fighting and the constant chaos, and decide that this is the price of ‘true love’; after all, what is love without passion?
POV 2: The Blue
Neel and I have been dating for just over a year. And it’s nice. We like sitting together and watching movies; he is one of my favorite people to talk to as well. When I have a bad day, I know I can call him and rely on him to make me feel better. He understands me and my emotions well and always says exactly what I need. I never have to worry or be anxious about him leaving, or our relationship ending; we barely ever fight. We hold similar opinions towards life; we respect each other. He meets all the criteria on my checklist, and it’s just so safe and comfortable and low maintenance. So why not?
But when I look into his eyes, I don’t feel those butterflies in my stomach; when he doesn’t text me, I don’t particularly miss him that much either. The situation just feels a little… off. If you love someone, shouldn’t they be your entire world? Sometimes it feels like he could walk out of my life, and I wouldn’t particularly miss him; it would just take some getting used to. The reason we don’t fight isn’t that there’s nothing to fight about, but that neither of us cares enough to spend enough mental energy on it. But maybe this is the price I have to pay for having a stable relationship. Anything is better than a chaotic but still passionately in love relationship. I’d rather be bored and in love, than traumatized and in love. I’d rather love someone blue. Right?
I used to have this theory, that you can either love someone red or love them blue. I always saw love as an extreme, and nearly always thought that the only correct way to love someone was to love them red. Over the last few years, I’ve seen some of my closest friends go through relationships that were red and come out the other side, never wanting to love any other way than blue. The lack of respect and boundaries in the first POV is so draining, but then the lack of excitement in the second doesn’t exactly sit well with me as someone who has always been told that love is passionate and all things exciting. I would see people, including myself, go in cycles of red to blue, then back to red… and it terrified me.
It terrified me until I found my purple. Until I realized that you can be excited about someone while respecting them. Sometimes, in a long-term relationship, the passion and the excitement have to be created – but it’s still there, it’s always there. I learnt how to slowly deromanticise the fighting and instead, fall in love with the calm and the comfort while keeping alive the excitement. It wasn’t as much finding a purple as it was creating it; putting those boundaries into place while putting in the constant effort to keep alive the attraction. There might be a little extra red sometimes, or a little extra blue, but at the end of the day, we make sure we are purple.