The art of having your "Happily Ever After"

When we fall in love with someone, we think we’ve booked ourselves an eternal place in “Utopia”. Is love the name of what they show in a 3 hour 40 minutes Indian movie? Or an even shorter (which means minus the dancing on the trains and jumping from cliffs with a cheesy love song) one hour 35 minutes western movie? Is it what the authors of mills & boons and the likes portray in a 400 page novel? 



The reason why the movies and novels look perfect to us and we get deluded is simple. They cannot show each day of a person’s life in a 3 hour movie. So they choose only the few exceptionally good moments from the lifetime of a person and make a movie out of it. My view point about this is this: There’s only one Sunday in a week, there’s only one day among the 365 days of the year that you get to celebrate your birthday, there’s only one day of graduation in the whole lifetime. The point being: you cannot be in a celebrating elated mood at all times when you’re in love. Extremely overwhelming days will be like your birthdays, once or maybe twice in a year, good days will be like Sundays, once or maybe twice a week and usual fine days will be the ones which would make most of your life. That's THE reality of life even in case of the bestest of relationships and truest of feelings.    

Know and believe that there will always be certain things about each other which the two will never be able to know or understand; things which would be illogical for one and mean the world to the other – Accept them sincerely and move on. There are these other things which you will know about the significant other but only with time, that’s not a one day or even a one year thing. It requires spending days and nights together, it requires eating and socializing together, it requires going through bankruptcy together, it requires shopping and having kids together. It requires “Time” – Be patient and know that ‘knowing’ someone as complex as an ever developing human being is a lifelong process. Enjoy it.

No matter how perfect you think your story is, the ‘He’ part of him and the ‘She’ part of her will always be different and if that makes you uncomfortable then you need to consider homosexuality. ‘He’ needs to read the newspaper and she needs to talk, more often than not, at the same time. She likes pink and he likes blue. She enjoys casual shopping sometimes and he buys only when his last pair of sock has been stolen – Accept it and move on, you are not in kindergarten and these are NOT the things which really make you who you are. Never ever make these as a reason for argument. She should realize he likes reading the newspaper and do not freak out as if he’s cheating on you with the newspaper,  unless it’s something extremely important and he should keep the paper down in case she asks him to, without wincing and sometimes even without her telling him to do so, depending upon how well he senses her need. 

I read it once that when you love someone, you open yourself up to hurt. The man who loves you will end up being hurtful unintentionally every now and then, but believe that such incidents lessen with time. Ignore them and never judge him on these or conclude anything from them. 

Talk. Open up. Converse. Don’t build up the heap of half-dead issues in between the two of you because before you know it, you’d be sleeping right next to each other but from heart and soul, would be gazillion miles apart. Believe that in a relationship, all mistakes are forgivable and no issue is big enough to make you choose a lifeless stupid issue over an alive loving life partner. Reconcile and waste no more than a day over it. I might win the argument and satisfy the left half of my brain but I’d lose the major asset of my life or at least create an opportunity for him to step a little away from me because I chose my ego or at times even logic. Choose the man you love over things, arguments, anger, hurt, expectations, diamonds, profession and at certain times even kids.

Also, never go silent only because you think that’s going to get some message across to the other partner. It may work at some rare situation but usually all it does is widen the gap between the two, leaving to make ‘assumptions’ which usually are the most negative things a person can think. The silent partner would expect that ‘she’ would and should know what his silence mean this time because that’s what a relationship is about. Wrong!!!. That’s what ‘telepathy’ is about! Yes ‘she’ should know you that well to make out what your silence number 40 means and how is it different from silence number 63, but still the best way is to talk about the issue and by talk I don’t mean ‘yell’, ‘blame’, ‘resent’.

Even the best and the most perfect relationships need some adjustments, some letting-gos, and some move-ons. Don’t keep a count as to how many times he let go or how many times you chose to drop it. That’s an accountant or a secretary’s job to keep a track of things. Let go, forget which one of you had let it go and move on.

Finally, I learnt that love and relationship are constant work, unless you make the above mentioned efforts, you’d be among the group of failures. It’s not easy but so is climbing Mount Everest or going to the moon, but the outcome of it is so magnificent that it’s worth the pain, the tears, the efforts, the selflessness and the sacrifices. Anything that has the capacity of generating peace, inner happiness or major achievements requires hard work. 

Most of the times, a small text message, a one line email, a hug without a reason, a loving touch to break the silence and a kiss without a logic is the only distance that there is between two people and would do what even a thousand words or perfect scientific explanations would fail to do. Quality matters, not the quantity. Never think twice before doing any of these, no matter how much your smart-ass brain tries to convince you or makes you question it, do it. You’d save two lives and a treasured relationship. 

If at the time I die, I have even 10 moments in my memory which gave me an extremely joyful experience of my life then I’d proudly say I lived my life with the man I love and I had my ‘happily ever after’.