Compromise: The Little Secret

Compromise: The Little Secret

She says, “do not compromise because of me”; I say, “there cannot be a relationship if there is no compromise”. She says, “be what you want to be and I will be fine”; I say,” that way one day I will be what I want to be, but I will not be fine”. And then she smiles at me, and I smile back.

Love, the little four-lettered word, has caught human fascination since the day Adam met Eve in the Garden of Eden. The poets have painted their thought of love in alluring words. The painters have written their imagination on love in colors and canvases. So have done writers, philosophers, thinkers, and everyone with enough grey-matters, through ages. Some, have given love the prime position in life, making it the holy grail, and then others have been harsh enough to depict love as the conspiracy of the God to keep the human generations going; a mere physical attraction of opposite sex. And the debate continues on conditional love, unconditional love, true love, false love, and so on. All said and done, no one of us has escape from this heavenly creation called love.

What is most widely believed and anticipated is that love is just a feeling that is amazing, enthralling, fascinating, enchanting and joyous. So all of us fall in love, many of us are courageous enough to cherish our love and give it a shape of a beautiful relationship and some of us give it an enduring life through the bondage of marriage. But what happens to most of us is that our love loses its vigor in the midway, succumbing to the practicalities in life; caste, career, family, aspirations, and some other not so important ones. The amaze, the thrill, the fascination, the enchant, and the joy face a slow death; and love meets the obvious dead end. The romanticisms linger away, the poetic thoughts disperse and the un-kept promises suffocate in the absence of the air of commitment. Love fades away …for most of us.

What is to be blamed? What happens to us that the air of life comes out of the balloon of love?? The root cause of this phenomenon is the thought that love is merely a feeling. So when the feeling changes, love die. We don’t feel the same thing for the same person. And then all those romantic feelings turn into irritations and frustrations. And we wonder, “why don’t I feel the same thing for him/her any more?’’ The solution is, thinking love to be a verb, and better an active verb. Love is not just a mere feeling that is subject to change like the weather changes. Love is a deliberate human phenomenon. If the feelings are gone, then a human being has the capability to replant, feed and nourish the feelings. Yes, we can love deliberately, to whomsoever we want to. It is not just a feeling that gets scratched away with the slow and rough friction of practicalities in life. We can learn to love, when we love to learn.

Revisiting where it all started; the story of me and her and the debate over compromise. We all are like different straight lines, with pre-determined slopes and directions. And two only meets when at least one bents a little. This is when compromise takes the central stage. If you want to keep fueling your love, learn to compromise. You may miss a few increments, a few deadlines and a few trifling things in your life. But in return what you get is someone beside you, always, whenever you need. Love lives when we say “well, I can do this for you”. And love dies when we think, “why should I compromise for someone else?” All compromises are not sacrifices, like all losses are not losses. I am not advocating for changing the entire direction of your life for someone you love. You should have a mission in life which should remain unaffected by anything in life. What I am vouching for is that slowing down a bit, broadening our paths a slight, opening our thoughts a little so that the one accompanying us can identify with us. If we retrospect what our partner think, want and prefer and customize ourselves a bit, it costs a little but pays a lot; an accompanying hand forever, if not more. And you never know, you may need one, really, one day 