All's unfair in love...

Once in a while, you read something, some short passage from a book or magazine or something, that just makes you sit up and go "Wow! That's just what I've been thinking!". I guess one of the talents of a great writer is to be able to take universal human thoughts and feelings, and express them in clear and compelling words. One such quote, which perhaps struck me more powerfully than any other thus far, comes from The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh:

[T]hat state, love, is so utterly alien to that other idea without which we cannot live as human beings — the idea of justice. It is only because love is so profoundly the enemy of justice that our minds, shrinking in horor from its true nature, try to tame it by uniting it with its opposite [...] in the hope that if we apply all the metaphors of normality, that if we heap them high enough, we shall, in the end, be able to approximate that state metaphorically.

At the time I first read this, I had been thinking quite a lot about the general lack of fairness or justice in human relationships, and in particular the apparent paradox that the closer a relationship between two people is, the less 'fair' it seems to be! The above quote (and its context) seemed to me to capture beautifully the opposition between things like logic, reasoning, calculation, and justice on the one hand; and feelings, emotions, intuition, and love on the other hand — an opposition that perhaps fundamentally defines human nature. Since then, the turbulence of my own relationships has caused me to ponder further on this conflict, and I have been led to the conclusion that therein lies the solution to my paradox: the closer a relationship is, the more heavily tilted it is towards the pole of feelings/emotions/intuition/love, and thus the less space there remains for the other pole of logic/reasoning/calculation/justice!

However, it is not necessary for a truly close relationship to exist in order to observe the effects of this conflict. In fact, it is most dramatically illustrated in settings where the feelings the two people have towards each other are asymmetric, e.g., the classic case of the one-sided lover. This is also the context in The Shadow Lines, where the narrator is deeply infatuated with his cousin, who doesn't really care for him. In fact, romantic infatuation tends to be such an illogical, unfair thing even to begin with. You could fall head over heels in love with someone who hardly knows you; someone who doesn't even care about you, who's done nothing to 'earn' that love. At the same time, you might have feelings of only mild attachment or even indifference towards someone (say, a family member) who truly loves you and has done everything they could for you. So clearly, there is a certain kind of love, the most storied and enigmatic kind, which cannot really be 'earned', which does not follow any kind of logic of justice or reciprocity. And it is this conflict of the overpowering emotion with the logical side of the human mind that has caused so much distress and sorrow to lovers (particularly males, perhaps, but that's another story) down the centuries. For there is perhaps no greater human desire than to be loved as much as you love; no greater pain than the knowledge that your beloved doesn't care for you. Ghalib, as always, expressed it wonderfully:

दिल-ए-नादां तुझे हुआ क्या है
आख़िर इस दर्द की दवा क्या है

हम हैं मुश्ताक़ और वह बेज़ार
या इलाही यह माजरा क्या है

[What afflicts you, o naïve heart
What cure is there for this pain?

I full of yearning, and she fed up
O Lord, what tangle is this?]

Another way of looking at this is to think about a case where two people really do share a close mutual relationship, whether friendship or love. The closer we feel to someone, the less expectation we tend to have that they should reciprocate our favours; in fact we perhaps even cease to regard them as favours. Whereas in a more formal relationship with an acquaintance or colleague, we tend to be much more aware of a feeling of indebtedness towards them when they help us in some way, and we consciously seek to repay such kindness at the first opportunity. In fact, one of the features in the development of a close relationship between two people appears to be a gradual shift in the extent to which they feel the need to be 'fair' to each other. The sense of this is captured in a meme contrasting a 'friend' with a 'best friend': A friend, it says, is one who will share her lunch with you; but a best friend is one who will even snatch away your own lunch. A friend is one who will be careful to return a book you've lent him; a best friend will forget all about it and laugh it off when you remind him... Despite being half in jest, this sort of juxtaposition does in a sense seem to get at something fundamental about the nature of a relationship based on love (taken in a broad sense), as opposed to reciprocity or fairness.

So if it is true that love and justice are at some level essentially opposed, does this mean that in our relationships with people we can only have one or the other? Evidently not; indeed, in practice there is bound to be a mixture of both these facets of our nature, and as just noted, the process of forming a close relationship appears to involve a gradual shift in which one gets prioritised. But perhaps a realisation of this conflict has some implications for the processes that are most likely to lead to the formation of successful relationships. For instance, in India we have a widely prevalent custom of arranged marriage, which undoubtedly does lead to happy outcomes in a large number of instances. Is it, however, the optimal way of finding one's life partner? It would seem self-evident that the most important ingredient in a successful marriage is love, almost by definition. Whereas the process of arranging a marriage represents an attempt to find an appropriate partner based on reasoning and calculation: the personalities should be compatible, there should be common interests, the families should resemble each other in lifestyle and culinary practices, and so on. Can such factors really predict for the blossoming of true love? It would certainly appear not, given the opposition we have just been discussing. Indeed, there are numerous clichés about (romantic) love which seem to reinforce the notion of its irrationality and unpredictability: "opposites attract", "love at first sight", etc.

Does it really make sense, then, to try and 'arrange' love, or is it best to just let it happen naturally? I think, if parents are to be fair to their children, they should take the latter approach. But then, parents also love their children. So, in a way, even the prevalence of arranged marriage serves to demonstrate my point!