Tanushree Gupta
The depiction of romance has existed and evolved in media for centuries, but I think it has slowly ruined real love in my lifetime. Romance movies were the best and worst things to happen to a six-year-old me. Movies like DDLJ and Om Shanti Om are undoubtedly some of the best pieces of cinema. They, like many movies from across the world, garnered a massive fan-following of people who admired the qualities of the heroes and heroines, hoping for a love like this to knock on their door someday—unexpected and spry. As a child, I believed that if people were not capable of loving so intensely and deeply, movies like this would not be made. I was sure that dating would look like this for me as an adult up until I was seventeen. Reality bulldozed through my bedroom wall at eighteen.
However, it was not just movies. I got my first phone, and unrestricted access to the internet with it, at the too-young age of thirteen. Scrolling endlessly eventually led me down the rabbit hole of dating advice on TikTok, and then Instagram when TikTok got banned. In hindsight, most of that advice was nonsensical, but tiny words on a colourful screen looked like the truth to my younger self, who was admittedly gullible. The supposed signs, ideas, and rules created by hundreds of people mixed in my head, contradicting one another and reshaping the dramatic view of love I already had. They did nothing to ground the fantastical fake scenarios that played out in my head before I fell asleep every night—quite the opposite, actually.
I always thought of my knight in shining armour (the fourteen-year-old boy I had a crush on) and how he had looked at me for a second or asked for my notes in class because a stranger on the internet told me those were signs of reciprocation. It took disappointment after disappointment for me to consider that maybe I was being lied to. Media literacy gained importance in my life.
I watched content like this evolve into something monstrous. Now we have rigid standards and expectations of people to be perfect— theories and rules based on personal experiences which generalise the progression of relationships, and so much pressure to act a certain way when in one. I do not think it is all bad. It is influenced by power dynamics between men and women that the patriarchy has created—independence is currently a bigger priority than romantic love for many women. In a period like ours, when men have the ability to express the most harmful sentiments against women without consequences, it is unsurprising that many are setting the bar higher to protect themselves, including myself. But these contrasting opinions on dating, some extremely idealised and others hateful, have overwhelmed me, and I found myself questioning them greatly after my last relationship ended.
Eighteen years of my life as a hopeless romantic, most of which I spent thinking about how love would transpire, led to me questioning what love even was to me. Handling rejection after rejection, and then completely undermining the obvious issues in my relationship because the idea of having what so many happy couples did was more exciting, made me realise that there had to be a middle ground—an area between looking at everything with rose-coloured glasses and scrutinising the actions of the person I like.
This was not ground-breaking by any means, but in the midst of recovering from the whiplash that was the end of my last relationship, I finally put down my phone, opened a journal, and wrote at the very top of the page: “What is love?” The words stared back at me as if they were pondering their meaning as much as I was. As hard as this question was to answer, I did. I wrote multiple pages describing what love is to me, thinking about the relationships in my life that were not romantic, and it finally clicked. That middle ground opened up in front of me, and my mind filled with clarity.
I found that, to me, love is not meant to be hard. It is not meant to make me feel skittish and nervous all the time. It is meant to make me feel comfortable and courageous. It is meant to give me more strength than it takes away. It is meant to be performed effortlessly, received with gratitude, and meant to create joy. I realised, a little painfully, that nothing that has ever made me feel like a weight dropped in my stomach could bring me love. I also realised that it, in fact, comes when you stop looking—because when you stop looking, you stop needing it to complete you. That may be the most exasperating and overused piece of advice, but it is often the truth. At least, it is my truth.
Soul-searching in a notebook made me realise that finding the one was important to me, but it could never take up all of my efforts. Not only is that unsustainable, it is unrewarding. It matters more to me that I am making myself happy and caring for the people already in my life. It matters more in the long run that I build myself up through experiences and rest. I have reached a point in this journey where I feel okay at the idea of being single for the rest of my life—not because I’ve accepted that I’m unlovable, or because love is a fruitless endeavour, but because I let go of the idea, the one that has been fed to me since I was six, that I need another person to complete me.
Am I still a romantic? Yes. I still daydream when I cannot sleep. Am I still hopeless? Not so much. If anything, I’m more hopeful than ever that my patience and intuition will make my life all the more beautiful. Dear reader, if you are in the same place as I was—confused and frustrated about love—I encourage you to forget everything you have read here. Put pen to paper and explore your mind. Somewhere underneath all the voices that have reached you, including mine, you will find your own, telling you everything you already knew about yourself.