Edited by: Shloka Sankar
What happens when love falls a little too short, when there’s too much of it to handle when things start to slip out like sand? Our hands lay bare with fingernails digging into our palms that once were tangled with one another’s. Love is complicated. What happens when you hand that out to a generation that has butter fingers for hands, and yearning isn’t yearned for; things fall and break. What do we do? We tie them up in strings, threads, and anything that connects, and everything ties itself together until they aren’t. Welcome to how we look at love here, where a spectrum falls short of love, lust, and more.
College becomes a hotspot for giving up high school crushes, and that one special one from 2021, a list of unsaid confessions from 2019, and hand-measuring contests from the tales of tuition romances. In a cauldron of hormonally charged decisions, feelings fall short. Overpowered by desire, the line between needs and wants keeps getting thinner, receding to an unfortunate state of absolute oblivion. Writing this, as a 20-year-old person, whose experiences greatly differ, my observations of how romance works in this generation are also foggy. These understandings that I have derived from what goes around, swing back and forth from attitudes of winning over someone and simply wanting to lose to let the other win. With ideas of wanting to hold the power and upholding fragments of ego broken from previous encounters are attempted to pile up against giving someone more of what you are.
What happens when we try to balance our tote bags with pieces of our ego on a scale on which the innermost parts of ourselves want to simply yearn and give someone more than what we are in the first place? In college, many of these abstract concepts, and collections of words like the sentences in this article try to pour themselves into the vessels of teenagers. These teen years that last for a year or two circle around a carousel, against the ambition of wanting maturity that lies beyond and childhood that is much farther in reach. A yearning to forget the complexities of romance is in a constant repulsive, yet attractive magnetism of jumping across time towards plain, simple pleasures shrouded in “maturity” and adulthood. This transition often finds itself in huddles of self and the other where failure to meet expectations constantly runs towards you, faster than your desire to embrace adulthood.
Teenagers in college oscillating between tired yet reminiscent adolescence and the eager anticipation of adulthood vessel themselves in a state of confusion. This state, however, can be seen as well and understood less. Purely relying on experience, one’s realizations occur, and egos already start to break into fragments or bloat in ways that push others atop the table. They say that experience is the best teacher, but what happens when the experiences of the other become the lesson for someone else? Besides college becoming a playground for emotions, relationships, and new experiences; it also becomes an exhilarating and overwhelming sea of opportunities with people fishing around for the best not knowing that the sea itself is polluted. People in college constantly look for instant modes of gratification whether they’re substances, material goods, or other people. While some get a hang off of substances within their proximity, others look for something that breathes, complains, feels, listens, and gives great cuddles. The problem with fishing is that you can always find a bigger fish, or a better fish that might be smaller, or a shark that’s both big and better but would end up eating you instead. With the sea so big, committing to a fish gets difficult when the adrenaline from the hunt is the instant gratification everyone needs in college. The fish are caught, jump back in the sea, and get carried away by the waves looking for an angler offering a better bait hanging off of a fishing cord disguised as food.
Understanding the analogies as written above can be difficult to comprehend, let alone explain to anyone else. Drawing boundaries and putting any actions undertaken during the pinnacle of early adulthood in boxes of moral differences can be unfair if not impossible. Spanning across this spectrum of ambiguous judgments are multiple forms of relationships that take shape, or the lack of them. There are multiple factors that can help formulate them which are made optional to the people involved in them, whether the fisher or the fish. A level of commitment, dedication, degree of sexual contact, depth of friendship, and a few more terms are met on a flexible basis, open to discussion, change, and even gossip. In a college that’s open to a liberal approach to education, relationships start to follow a similar course. As liberal as relationships and romance can be aspired to be, they’re also at the same time held with solidifying absolute feelings of love either from one corner, from both corners, or from none. Following a liberal suit, figuring out oneself in a new and exciting college environment can be incredibly difficult and complicated, however, that being said, we’re also handed the responsibility to handle others. In the phase of figuring things out, we often end up disfiguring one another, fluids embodied in vessels, also end up breaking.
These vessels named across the spectrum with varied prefixes to ‘ship’, span from relationships, situationships, open relationships, delusion-ships, and imagine-ships, and as I type this, more prefixes are added to ‘ship’ on Twitter. One of my friends describes their relationship as an “exclusive situationship out of desperation”, while the other one describes it as “an open relationship but with only emotional commitment”. We’ve come a long way from using phrases like “friends with benefits”, and “one-night stands”. The scope of how we explore ourselves and other people has stretched so much that we’re constantly struggling to define ourselves and what we have and/or want to have with others. We have so much, yet nothing at the same time. Call it gluttony, or any of the seven sins out there, or call it “boys will be boys”, or “she’s just a girl”. What we are is “simply confused”, and that’s okay because with adulthood knocking at our doors, we constantly run back to the window looking at our teen selves trying to hide like a monster under the bed. We’re a confused generation, we’re figuring it out, and until then, let’s just see how this game of love, sex, and dhoka (betrayal) works out.