In love or in a relationship?

So which of the two are you in, in love or in a relationship? Let’s analyze the common responses....

i)                    Neither, I am single – Well dude, you aren’t. Let’s deal with that in detail later on.

ii)                   Both; aren’t they one and the same —Again wrong. They can’t be more different.

iii)                 And if you say, you are in one but not other, maybe you are having some clarity about what I am getting at, but let’s sort it out anyway.

So what do they mean anyway, being in love or being in a relationship? Weren’t we made to understand that they are one and the same? Aren't all those romantic movies about this only, about people who fall in love and get into a relationship and live happily ever after? Doesn’t being in a relationship automatically translate into being in love with that person?

Well the first point of difference between the two is the number of parties required for either. Being in love is pretty simple and straightforward. You can fall in love with someone all by yourself. No need for any approvals here, no need for any reciprocation or agreement. If you fancy someone, you like their actions, their appearance and the way their presence or company affects you, you are in love with that person. That's why I ruled out the first response in the list above. Everyone is in love with someone or other, whether they let the other person know of it, or accept it themselves, this much is always true (now please don’t give me examples of ascetics; they aren’t reading my blog anyway!!). A relationship on the other hand entails two parties, with mutual consent. Though people get into a relationship due to mutual love for each other (or maybe because of peer pressure, as most of their friends are in a relationship too), the love part may not remain true or relevant throughout the relationship. Relationship by nature is a solid identity provided to a much more abstract concept of mutual love. Though the love still remains just between the two parties involved, the relationship part expands to encompass all the people who come to know of it. Thus a relationship is a much wider thing, as its existence is not just in the approval of the two involved parties but in the knowledge about the same of people around.

A second point of difference lies in the way either get terminated. Though a point of termination is hard to define in love, it generally happens pretty naturally. One fine day you realise that you don’t actually feel as strongly about someone now as you used to. Meeting them, talking to them, being in their company doesn't give you the same thrill as it used to. You may try to give reasons to yourself for that, and they may or may not be true. Maybe what I described above happens only temporarily, and things get back to the previous state pretty soon. But the point remains that, falling out of love doesn’t need any external actions, not even the need to inform or get approval of the person you stopped loving.

A relationship by nature is much more complex to terminate. It’s like a contract drawn out with many witness signatures, where the parties forgot to mention an expiry date or an exit clause agreeable to everyone. You may stop loving the person you are in a relationship with, but still for the rest of the world you two are in a relationship, which again compels you to hang on to that person. Many a relationships are bound not by love, but by this external expectation of being a couple. In these cases a relationship becomes not a room that encloses your love, but rather a prison which doesn’t let you escape from it.

A queer and interesting thing to notice is how people don’t really give much thought to either of the above terms, and often use them inter-changeably where actually they don’t exactly convey the meaning they expect. When you actually said “I love you” to someone, and they accepted it, what you started off was not your love with that person but rather your relationship. The love started much earlier and the sentence was just an expression of an already existing feeling. And similarly, you didn’t experience a love failure when the other person turned down your proposal, but rather just failed to get into a relationship. Again a breakup is not the culmination of love but rather the relationship. Breakup doesn’t happen at the exact point when you stop loving someone. You would have reached that point much earlier. Break-up happens when the process of putting up an act of being in a relationship with someone you don’t love, for the sake of the external world’s expectations actually becomes unbearable to you, and you decide to rather get out of it than playing along. That's why most breakups are a greater shock to your friends and acquaintances, than to you. The people in the relationship most times do have a clue. If they are still caught unawares, then it just means they were dumb enough not to get the clues or just didn’t want to acknowledge them.

Finally one major point of difference, and the most controversial of them all, is the number of parties you could be in love or relationship with. Though love is made out to be exclusive and draped in a veil of purity and chastity because of this exclusivity, the truth of the matter is that it is the most non-exclusive feeling. You could love more than one person at any time. That's because you don’t actually love people, but rather the character traits that they embody. You love the personality type that they represent, and this personality type is actually a reflection of your own self, the way you see yourself, the values that you hold dear, the actions that you deem acceptable. In loving someone, you are actually looking out for a part of your moral standards in them, and you can’t help loving everyone who meets these standards.

Relationship on the other hand, is built on the premise of exclusivity. As it’s a social structure, and not exactly an individualistic one, the rules of engagement of a relationship keep changing with the prevailing social standards of the day. Thus in the Arabic world polygamy is an acceptable relationship standard, while the same thing is considered taboo in the Hindu or Christian way of life. The way you look at a relationship thus is not dictated by just your preferences, but also by the kind of society you live in. Though relationships have evolved over the ages under many tags, from arranged marriages, to love marriages, to live-in relationships, or just being committed with someone, the basic premise still remains in the quest for social acceptance and trying to define something abstract and thus bringing in more stability to something which otherwise is too undefined and volatile. While this tag does lend stability, it also may acts as a limiting force as we discussed above.

Finally, it hardly matters what you call anything, as long as it feels right. Just ask yourself if you are personally happy with something or someone and you aren’t in it just because that's the right thing for you to do according to someone else’s standards. If the answer is yes, you don’t need to define it. Just go ahead and experience it and life would be good.