The Persistence of love in a temporary world

Last night, before sleeping, I watched a short clip from Ae Dil Hai Mushkil.
There’s a scene where SRK says that one-sided love is the best feeling in the world.

I used to think that line was a cinematic exaggeration.
Then I lived it.

I have wrestled with love for years. Argued with it. Tried to shrink it into something reasonable. Tried to outgrow it like an old habit. And still, here I am, unable to define it without contradicting myself.

I loved someone for years. I know the exact number. I won’t write it. Maybe that’s pride. Maybe that’s performance. Funny how ego survives even in confession.

What confuses me is this, I have healed. I have moved on. If someone mentions her, I smile. If someone asks whether I want forever with her, I would probably say no.

And yet.

If you still search for her face in a crowded photograph years later,
if you silently pray she is safe and healthy,
if her name still rearranges something inside your chest,

if that is not love, then what is?

If you let her go because her happiness demands your absence,
if you archive her photographs like evidence of a former version of yourself,
if certain songs still translate automatically into her memory,

if that is not love, then what is?

Love is not a switch.

It does not respect logic.

It does not evaporate because it is inconvenient, it lingers in quiet corners.

The heart is not a single-room apartment. It is a house with corridors, storage rooms, and doors you don’t open but cannot demolish.

Loving someone new does not always erase what you once felt. That does not automatically make you disloyal. Sometimes it simply means you are human.

Maybe love is not possession.
Maybe it is persistence.

Love is not always violins and sunsets.

Sometimes it is rejection. Sometimes it is the realisation that no matter how much you grow, you will never be enough for the person you love. Not because you lack value, but because love is not a merit-based competition.

Not all love stories are fairy tales. Most are unfinished drafts.

Biology will say love is chemistry. Dopamine for desire. Oxytocin for bonding. Serotonin shifting moods. The nervous system lighting up like a festival. And yes, science is not wrong.

But chemistry does not fully explain why you can continue loving someone you no longer need.

That is the paradox.

Sometimes love remains even after attachment dissolves.

You no longer want to hold their hand.
But you still wish the world treats them gently.

Love is not only emotional or intellectual. It is not only spiritual either. It is embodied.

It is not lustful consumption.

It is the romanticism of undressing someone slowly and seeing their curves and edges and birthmarks and scars and moles and freckles and kissing every single one of them like you are thanking their body for existing, for choosing to be seen by you.

There is something sacred about loving a body not for how it looks to the world, but for how it opens itself to you.

Every curve becomes a story.
Every scar becomes memory.
Every small detail feels like a quiet miracle of existence.

When you take time to notice the freckles, the imperfections, the places time has touched, love stops being attraction and becomes gratitude. It becomes presence.

It becomes an unspoken promise, I see you completely.

In that space, intimacy is not urgency. It is attention. It is reverence. It is honouring someone for trusting you with their vulnerability.

Real love is rarely loud. It is not rushed. It is not shallow.

It is gentle. Observant. Almost scientific in its curiosity.

It studies the person. And then stays.

Our generation loves with hesitation.

Half invested. Half prepared to leave.

We crave connection but fear permanence. We say we are just going with the flow, but secretly we imagine futures in small, detailed ways, shared apartments, inside jokes, quiet mornings.

We fall not only for people, but for imagined timelines.

And sometimes it is the imagined future that hurts more than the ending itself.

Maybe one day she will marry someone else. Maybe I will watch it happen. That thought does not stab daily, but it exists softly, like background music you cannot fully mute.

And maybe that is acceptable.

Some loves are not meant to end in marriage.

Some are meant to reveal the depth of your own capacity.

Between beginnings and endings are moments of magic. Brief. Sacred. Temporary.

Sometimes that is all love ever promised.

Love is terrifying because it offers no contract. No guarantee. No insurance policy.

You give your all without knowing the outcome.

That is why people avoid it. They fear being hurt. They fear hurting someone else. So they construct emotional walls and call it wisdom.

But protection is not the same as living.

Love anyway.

Even if it breaks you 18 times, risk the 19. The question is not whether to love. The question is whom you choose to risk yourself with after you have learned from your failures.

Love can take you to heaven. It can drag you through hell.

It makes poets and fools out of the same person.

But a life designed only for safety?

That is efficient survival.

And survival has never been the purpose of the heart.

Maybe years from now, none of this will matter in the way it does today.

Maybe her name will become just a memory.
Maybe the songs will stop translating into her.
Maybe my heart will learn new languages.

But I hope one thing never changes.

I hope I never become someone who loves cautiously.
I hope I never reduce love to strategy or ego or convenience.
I hope I never become so “mature” that I stop feeling.

Because whatever that was, however incomplete, however one-sided, however temporary, it proved something to me.

I am capable of depth.
I am capable of reverence.
I am capable of loving without ownership.

And in a world where most people are half-invested and half-guarded, I would rather be the one who felt fully… even if it cost me.

If that’s foolish, I’ll accept it.

If that’s a strength, I’ll grow into it.

Either way, I won’t regret loving.

— a heart that refused to stay guarded