Rise and Fall of the Love Empire

Day and night with a flambeau in our hands, we are progressing towards a more hi-fi and technology-driven world. While we stretch our hands outwards to grasp and clinch this new technology, our hearts and brains are turning more and more towards the inside. Exactly when something becomes easy to access, its value falls in our eyes. This is true with almost everything- Be it money, education, shelter or even love.

Yes, love. There is an ample amount of love in the world around us. The most popular ones being- Parent-child love, teacher-student love, romantic-love, and, friendly-love. However, accept it or not, the essence of each of them is slowly drooping. There has been a significant reduction in people who want to get married in their 20s or even after that, thus, forbearing themselves of a stagnant and stable romantic love life. A fall in marriages is being complemented by a fall in the desire to have kids. People are abstaining from raising children and thus, devoiding themselves of the joy of parenting. With busier schedules and rising mounts of egos, people have been extricating the roof of elderly love from their heads either by sending their parents to old-age homes or by shifting into nuclear families. The bond between teachers and students has more or less become selfish and goal-centric; neither the teacher nor her students put in enough effort to know each other beyond the narrow lenses of books and marks. Out of all these pejorative perspectives, there’s one with a ray of hope still left. That’s friendship love.

Friends are our chosen family and whom we choose becomes a part of who we are. In today’s world, people are becoming increasingly open to their idiosyncrasies, sexuality and autonomy. Thus, it becomes crucial for them to stay in an environment of like-minded individuals- people who think like them and people who support their tenets. Interestingly, researches have shown that a person’s friends know him exactly as much as he knows himself. Further, studies have also shown that having a healthy friend circle reduces a person’s risk of dying from chronic diseases by as much as 50%. Well, this is more risk reduction than that from quitting smoking.

Ironically, people tend to attach conditions to their friendships. We love our friends because they satisfy some of our conditions while movies, books, and poems praise unconditional love, a love free from all inhibitions. However, the other side of the story is that, unlike unconditional love, conditional love demands us to come back to it again and again; to choose it every single day for the same reasons. Is it not the actual beauty of it? Not being tied to somebody yet coming back to them every day, or perhaps not even leaving them for once? It’s beautiful and majestic that even though our genetics subconsciously force us to love our family and children, our friendships are purely a matter of choice. Perhaps, with growing ages, we have started to love freedom more than ever. Even love cannot be coerced by society, DNA, or whatever else! 

So, take this time, to rethink why you're friends with somebody and thank them for being that way :)