Until Death Do Us Part

When first we experience what we think of as love it is by and large a feeling. The only thought, if anything, that crosses our mind is “How wonderful life would be for me if (s)he is my spouse”. This romantic love is more an experience of feeling happy with even the daydreams of spending time with the loved one, one of taking pleasure in stealing surreptitious glances and secret smiles – not to mention the clichéd murmuring of sweet nothings in each other’s ears. A love that stays put at this stage if it turns to marriage is more likely to be heart-break for one if not for both. When love matures, consideration for the other gains more importance. Now, in addition to thinking about how happy your love will make you, you also start taking pleasure in making your significant other happy. When love starts making you think in terms of actively taking pleasure in making the other happy – and not just as a means to an end – it is mature love. Yet! There is a sort of love that is not given to the ordinary people to feel. When all the giving can only be a one-way street, due to external circumstances, and when the life that you end up leading in one of unremitting drudgery and deprivation, it takes a different order of love to transmute such a life into one of happiness because you are living with your love. Such a love story I had the honor of reading about in the recent past. A story of a woman, whose husband was crippled within a year of an arranged marriage and whose parents urged her to divorce him and closed their doors on her because she would not. She not only stayed with him, nursing him and helping him try to earn a living but also disdained any description of her life as one of sacrifice. That is the only real life story that makes me want to write about it. I do not know any of the characters personally and, thus, were I to write it the characters in my story may end up bearing no resemblance to the real life characters.