What does it mean to be with someone?

To jump head first, or to ponder? The answer my friend, is not blowing in the wind.

I promise this is the one of the last coming of age writing I do, because I have come (of age), and as our beloved Indian elders say, ‘yeh sab ab mujhe shobha nahi deta’. But I have been thinking about what does it mean to be with someone, what changes? Why is it such a big thing?¹

The decision

Despite what we are made to believe, the default state of humans is being single.² Thus, you must like someone enough to get out of your stable state and open yourself up to unpredictability. Of course this post assumes that you, like most people don’t like uncertainty. If you like unpredictability, then please be unpredictable and stop reading. Mental parkour. The rest of us, old uncles and aunties, can read on below.

Entropy, is a concept in physics which basically measures the randomness/ disorder in a system (not to be confused with system in system pe system). When you are with yourself, to a very large extent, you can control the entropy of your system i.e. your life. But when you open your arms and life to someone else, you take on their problems, issues, circumstances into your life and increase the entropy of your life.

Now you’ve gone from a one body problem to a two body problem. You would assume that two bodies have more entropy than one body. E2 > E1.

So the argument is that in a cost benefit analysis, you need to love someone enough to bear with all the troubles and issues that they bring into your life. That is what we see around us. All of us, and our friends in toxic relationships say, ‘But I love them. I have never felt like this, and will never feel like this. No matter how many times we fight, we always come back together’. I will not go into the larger argument for why this is symptom of a toxic relationship, but you get the point. We accept that the other person will bring instability and issues into our life, and justify it by the magnanimity of our feelings to them. That is the natural line of thought.

And it’s the wrong line of thought.

Jaane kyu (jaane kyu) dil jaanta hai, tu hai toh I’ll be alright

Apparently with the right person, most things are not an ‘issue’. Nothing feels like an obligation, nothing feels like a chore, you don’t have to do what you don’t want to do. Apparently, with the right person, as a two body problem, your entropy goes down instead of up. Crazy right?

Every happy couple that I have met (and mind you, most couples are not happy couples - they’re couples because of the thousand other reasons or justifications) says that their life has improved since their partner has come into their lives. And by improvement, they do not mean the generic metrics of improvement such as (i) there is someone for you in moments of weakness, (ii) you have someone to cuddle with, (iii) it seems ‘fun’ to hang out with them etc.³ None of these are benefits which are exclusive to a partner (although now that I think of it, there isn’t much redline difference between what one gets out of a good partner vs. what one gets out of a good friend other than physical intimacy). All of this can be achieved in one shape or another through other sources.

For you to choose a partner, a life partner, deeper thinking is required. Also I realised, i should have caveated this article by saying that these meditations are only for people who want to find a life partner. If you are not, none of this matters, go ahead and have fun and experiment. If i may say, you may need to go through the ‘no thinking, having fun’ phase to realise the importance of ‘sit down, and please think I beg you’ way of choosing a partner.

The most important thing I have realised (which like other important things you realise is more of a non answer than an answer) is that when it comes to choosing people, you need to think of (i) the chemistry i.e. are they generally a chill person that you enjoy spending time with?, and (ii) do they have the qualities of a person you want to have as a partner?⁴ Only if both first and second are fulfilled, should you ideally, date them. Step one and two ideally work chronologically. But sometimes step one is so overwhelming, you skip step two. I would assume sometimes it works in your favour, because the magnetic attraction existed for a reason, and maybe other times you get royally screwed, haha.

Love (pardon me for the comparison) is much like regulation law.

If you do not pay adequate attention, you run the risk of under regulation (in this case, only following your initial feeling of attraction will lead you to the ultimate oh shit moment when you realise you never stopped to check your compatibility and dived in head first) - this is a type one error. If you regulate too much, you run the risk of stifling the regulated entities (in this case, if you overthink everything and remain undecided because you cannot arrive at an answer, you let the love go because of inaction) - this is a type two error. I’d heard trial and error, but it feels like we are all living our lives between errors. And we love in between errors, the times love itself is not the error.

The big thin(g/k)

All this mental gymnastics reminds me of this meme.

But jokes aside, when did it become THIS hard to be with someone? I myself remember the previous times when I decided to be my ex partners - it was not as difficult as it seems now. But then, I also wonder are they my ex partners also for this very reason?

I know this will sound quite contrary to some of what I have written above, but I also recently wrote a thread on twitter on why modern love is hard. And I conjectured it is because:

“We’re all mathematicians in search for love, slicing and dicing every emotion for a predictable outcome of love. And that never works. Love was never meant to be a game of exactness. Go out. Meet people. Wear your heart on your sleeve. Experience emotions. Confess your feelings. Get your heart broken. Love again. And again. And again. It's better to have loved, and lost it than to never have tried to find it.”

Here I am advocating for less thinking, and more action. Mostly because it is what feels right to me, at least. It is a tussle between what I want to do, what I am drawn to do, versus my rational sense which asks me to do everything only after carefully thinking through it. If I do the latter, I am more likely to be less screwed in life, and live a more stable life. If I do the prior, as I have previous times, i can get incredibly happy but also supremely screwed as well. This reminds me of this one cute sketch (which i cannot find, so I am drawing it from my memory below)

I was recently in an intense conversation with my friends on love, and life. It was surprising (and not surprisingly at all, because it is the most common trope of people my age) how much we all struggle with love. One friend confessed their anxiety of liking someone too much in the eventuality that their feelings are not reciprocated. The other friend confessed how they often wonder if something is wrong with them because they often find themselves rejecting the prospect of love because of the effort it demands.

Your truly rose to the occasion as the soothsayer. I had a simple premise.

1. Your gut will always tell you what to do.

2. You must always follow your gut.

3. Your gut will be right more often than not.

So I told my first friend to worry not, because no love worth having will come with no risk. A ‘safe’ relationship is one in which you are already so emotionally insulated from the other person, it is a shame to call it a relationship. A relationship worth having always comes with the risk that if it doesn’t work out, you will incur significant emotional losses. So what? We have done it in the past, and survived quite well until now, and so will we hence forth as well. Be giddy, seek the love. If it works out, it works out, if it does not, it does not. Life is large and we are young.

To my second friend I said, when the right person comes along (at least in terms of your analysis of who is right for you), all the ‘effort’ will not look like effort to you. You would want to speak to them, you would want to see them all the time, you would want to stay up for them, you would want to go to sleep on the phone with them (or whatever else the youth are doing these days). The right person makes it easy for you. And if it easy for you, is how you know you’re really attracted to someone. And so if you do not feel like making efforts for someone, that’s completely alright. You never were attracted enough to them.

The gist of the conversation was that you must (i) not self disqualify yourself from potentially fruitful experiences by making up hypothetical bad outcomes, and (ii) whenever there is enough evidence in front of you, you will invariably make the decisions you want to make, so go ahead and live your life. The game is to generate enough evidence.

Love is harder than the seven millennium problems

Only one out of the seven millennium problems have been solved. These mathematical problems are so hard to solve that if you solve one of them, you get a million dollars and lifetime fame. And in enough time, all of them will be solved. But love cannot be. Love is harder than the hardest mathematical problems on this planet.

So I have spent so much of my time writing this, and you have spent so much of your time reading this (thank you for making it till here), we are faced with the disheartening conclusion that, despite much meditations, we don’t know much about what love is, and which love to pursue. We have some heuristics, and I think that that is about as best we come to solving love.

One thing I would definitely want to change in myself, and others is to be optimist about love. It could definitely happen that every time you open yourself to love, you are left worse off and more hurt than before. But if I was asked before I was born if I would choose between a life in which my heart was never broken and I would never feel love vs. a life where I would feel love many times but never find true love - I would choose the latter. I would rather feel the full spectrum of emotions than to be an automaton.

I leave you all with this poem that somebody dear recently shared with me.

Poem by Bell Hooks.

1. This reminds me of someone’s comment on my twitter thread on how people are friends with their exes. I had written, “How can one have a relationship with one's ex partner is a question I often think about”, and somebody replied, quite savagely I must say - ‘You need to find better things to think about dawg’. I feel the spirit of that question reside with me in this post as well.

2. Source: Yours truly and the divine wisdom i receive in my dreams.

3. If someone gives me these reasons for why they are with their partner, I ask for their ID.

4. It is of utmost importance that you write down the characteristics you want in a partner and use that as a template. You can only do this if you know yourself deeply first. Yeah, this stuff is way harder than we thought.