Baybeh Don’t hurt me… don’t hurt me… no more!
SORRY. I could not resist. 😀
A few days ago, I had a really interesting conversation with a few friends about why relationships fail. Is it because a person falls out of love with another person? Is it because the two in the relationship don’t evolve at the same pace? How can you say the relationship is doomed from the start?
We came up with an interesting theory which I’m pretty excited about! Ready? OK. *drumroll please!*
You don’t fall in love with a person. You fall in love with the idea of being with that person.
Based on what you know about someone – through their interaction with you, through their facebook profile, blog, tweets, pictures etc, you construct an identity for them in your head. Based on this identity, you start thinking about what it would be like to be in a relationship with that person.
Now the initial success of the relationship depends on whether or not the idea you have constructed of the person in your head matches up to what the actual identity/ personality of the person in question. (An excellent reason to be yourself totally and completely without any pretence of being something which you are not AT ALL TIMES!! You do not know WHO is falling in love with the idea of yourself you are projecting!)
Sometimes, the identity and personality match, but when you’re in the relationship, your personalities and identities evolve at different paces!
According to me (great love scientist of the 21st century *snort*), THE ULTIMATE SUCCESS of a relationship depends on both the pace of evolution of the identities of the two people AND the level of flexibility of the two individuals in the said relationship!
By this I mean, a relationship is probably NOT going to survive if you are in love someone’s personality circa 2003 – when you had similar opinions about things and liked the same music… but thanks to life and your individual experiences of it, you both evolve into different people… who you might not be so supportive of. Similarly, you might also evolve in such a way that your personalities end up complimenting each other’s! And your bond becomes stronger!
IN CONCLUSION – No need to cry your eyes out about an unsuccessful relationship! It was just not meant to be! Your complementary person is out there somewhere going through life and evolving in such a way that makes you fall in love with the idea of being with them… eventually falling in love WITH THEM.
NOW GO DANCE TO THIS AMAZING SONG FROM THE NINETIES (with a kind of creepy video) (I would not recommend watching the video if strobe lights make you go into epileptic fits.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1LG5E55II8
Credits: Guneet Narula and Samuel Thomas – with whom I have awesome discussions such as the one from which this blog post stemmed.
P.S. Don’t think that because there is no mention of physical attraction or chemistry in the blog post, I have completely discounted it. I do think both are factors which play a substantial part in causing one to “fall in love”