When Vulnerability Withers

Your excuse could be coming back home late from work every night. You seem to believe that the quarter of an hour saved at the non-operational Gurgaon toll booth doesn’t really help. Your work requires you to wake up early and so it requires you to go to bed on time. You talk about never having looked at anyone at your office in that way. Work is priority, and we know how much you mean it when you say that. “I am dating my laptop”, you say, following it with a slight chuckle (and a suggestive hand movement, if you’re a guy). I mean, there’s just too much to work towards career wise. And, it shuts everyone up around you.

Your excuse could be a checklist which most candidates fail to comply with. You seem to believe that a person must be something more specific than just a person for you to feel some attraction. After all, as we all know, mystery never has a role to play. You want someone who shares the profession, or probably not. You say you have a type, which ironically is defined by the characteristics of just one person you were once with. The checklist provides you with enough reasons to speak of when someone asks why you don’t feel anything for the friend you spend a lot of time with. If all else fails, you say that your parents wouldn’t agree. And, it shuts everyone up around you.

Your excuse could be a statistic that tells you how arranged marriages last much longer than love marriages. You seem to believe that your parents deserve a say in who you should spend your life with. You talk about how they know better because of age. You digress into the way you’ve been brought up and how you owe them the right to decide what is good for you. After all, they have your best interest in mind. An arranged marriage lasts longer because of acceptability to compromises, you quote an article. Your parents had an arranged marriage, too. Maybe, you’ll have an “arranged-cum-love” marriage and everything will fall into place. So much like it is the multi-usability and convenience of a “sofa-cum-bed” that you talk about. And, it shuts everyone up around you.

You could find a quadrillion more excuses to shut people up, but none to shut the voices in your head that speak of a longing to meet someone who’d give you company in the office cab, or keep you up all night on a free minutes calling plan. You know how falling for someone who is the complete opposite of your criteria makes for a more interesting story to narrate to your friends for years to come than to talk about someone who magically fit a little over half the things on your list, and thus made the cut.

You think the excuses will cure the disease that you call an inability to fall in love again. A belief that a safe distance preserves you for the love that will come with marriage is more synonymous to hara-kiri than to self-defense. It’s not the fear that you must fear, for it is to be embraced as a sign of possibility of feeling the love again. As long as there is fear, there will come a love to restore the balance. Because if there was no fear of being broken down by love again, there would be no reason for love to come around one more time or maybe more, and someday shut not just the people around, but the voices inside your head.

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Here's leaving you with this beautiful illustration I found on zenpencils. You might want to download and zoom in on it to be able to read the text. Also, don't judge me because I called this beautiful. I'm really macho and shit, ok!

Image Source: http://zenpencils.com/comic/103-c-s-lewis-to-love-at-all/