As young romantic hearts most of us create a picture of how our life together with our chosen partner will be like. Flowers on every anniversary, the number of flowers equaling the number of months or years that we are together. Romantic cozy evenings on the sitting room couch with a drink of your choice in hand. A quiet evening or late night stroll hand in hand…. going to parties and hanging out with friends, looking our best, dancing, arms wrapped around each other…soft music and dimmed lights. Sitting together in deeeeep companionship, chatting about our world, what’s happening with our friends and work…watching movies together…never being apart.

Lots of dreams and lots of desires.

No! I’m not going to lash out and say ‘All this is nonsense!’ for it does happen. But not in the way that we imagined it would. Here is my own experience.

The flowers gradually stopped coming because it was too mushy an affair. There was no time for evening strolls because the late working hours and the darn traffic did not leave either of us with any energy to step out even on to the balcony forget the stroll. If either of us did go out it was to rush to the nearby grocery or vegetable vendor to pick up a bread loaf for breakfast or some onions for the evening meal. No quiet evenings because either a marriage party or the Mata Jagran in the adjacent building had blaring music playing on the loudspeaker up until the wee hours of morning or because what seemed like a friendly leg pulling session ended up in a cold war and you ended up voting for the blaring loudspeaker. Party invitations or throwing parties became a nightmare because they not only ate up the weekends leaving no time to finish the household chores which had gathered dust from the week-before-the-week-before but created more cleaning up.

A friend of mine, who recently got married, discovered that her husband didn’t like watching movies especially in theaters. And yes of course she loves watching them in the theaters. So her dream of cuddling up in a dimly lit theater with her beloved, turned into instant smoke.

Words of the ‘wise ones’ pour in when the topic of marriage and love pop up in gatherings. “ Ah! Gone are the days of love. After marriage it is all about being practical in life. This is reality.” This infuriates you even more because you had once silently vowed that you are going to prove the ‘wise ones’ wrong.

Quite a wry picture of love huh!

Faced with disillusionment, people often whine, nag and shrivel into the ‘cynical’ ones, never losing a chance to make a snide remark at their partner’s cost or cribbing about the yawning mismatch between their desires. Some get moulded into the ‘I am a victim’ mode where their dreams and desires get filed under what they recall painfully as ‘nostalgia of youth’ and their present a dull and indifferent life sacrificed to walking the non-scenic flatlands of marriage. And then there are the defensive ones with the I-don’t-give-a-hoot attitude, terror stricken that their dreams/desires will get trampled and instead isolate themselves emotionally from their partner.

We become so lost in cribbing and complaining about unmet dreams and desires that our eyes often miss out the play of love that keeps repeatedly unfolding right in front of us.

Of course everybody draws a different picture of what form they would like to experience love in. But disillusionment, resentment and frustration come in when we block ourselves to other forms in which love can appear to us.

A few days back as I was busy with housework when my husband suddenly came up to me looking upset and concerned. When I asked him why he was so distraught he blurted out that he was sorry that things were not turning out as rosy as we had imagined it to be. For a few seconds I did not know what to reply but just hugged him And in those few seconds all those moments of love flashed in front of my eyes that had no resemblance to what we did once imagine love to be like.

The support that he gave me in settling down in a completely new house and making me feel at ease with the rest of the family, his untiring help with household chores- including cooking, washing dishes, his flexibility and openness that allowed me to share family problems without any hesitation,

But most of all his non-interference and yet eager interest in seeing me pursue my personal interests, his respect for my privacy and my choices, which has given me the feeling that he is indeed a friend and not a ‘husband’.

And in those few moments I experienced the love that no chocolate box, bouquets and candle light dinners could ever match. Love, in a marriage, is not about never being apart and doing everything together nor is it about ‘you do your thing and I’ll do mine’. It is not about managing but about sharing time and space, it is not about holding on but letting go of ego, it is not about compromising but about being flexible, it is not about logic but about the heart.

The next day I found a bunch of flowers next to my bed…