Dysfunctional Romance And What Can One Do?

by DKashyap

Dysfunctional Romance And What Can One Do?

The feeling of romance just like any other emotion, even though it is the strongest known to us, is just another feeling in the compendium of human emotions. In and of itself, it cannot be judged as good or bad, all we can say is that it is a powerful feeling indeed. The way we experience life as humans is complex and intricate. No emotion by itself can guide courses of healthy actions and almost no logical suggestions to live life seems appealing if it doesn’t take into account our emotions.

 

This age old fight between logic and emotions, the heart and the mind is one of the most tragically false dichotomies that prevail in our culture today. You are presented with a choice of either being exclusively emotional or ruthlessly ‘practical.’ And of course every choice will be judged according to the people you meet and the side they chose in their lives. The combination of logic and emotions, especially in the subject of romance, is really hard to find in the dominant discourse around the matter and its far-reaching consequences. Generally it is not even considered a possibility.

 

Trying to empathetically understand and explain the choices people make is not the same as saying “I agree with them,” but to say “because I don’t agree with a choice you make I will not try to understand it,” is a position that will hinder in gathering crucial knowledge about human behaviour and rectify the choices in question.

 

Recent extremely tragic loss of a talented and budding actor like Jiah Khan, as made public by her alleged suicide note, points at the same problematic and potentially fatal understanding of romance in our culture and its place in our lives. The moment we loose the sight of the idea that ‘emotions are for me, I am not for emotions,’ we loose the whole context and undermine the importance of out lives themselves. Perhaps I understand why Jiah felt the way she did and lost all hopes of any future happiness. Just a read though some of the lines from her suicide note may reveal how it is all too easy to loose the perspective when one is hit by a strong sway of one of the most intense emotions known to human beings; love.

 

“I’ve already lost everything.

I feel dead inside. I’ve never given so much of myself to someone or cared so much. 

I can’t eat or sleep or think or function. I am running away from everything. The career is not even worth it anymore.

I have no confidence or self-esteem left,

I wish you had loved me like I loved you.

I am nothing. I had everything. I felt so alone even while with you. You made me feel alone and vulnerable. I am so much more than this.”

 

It is easy to negatively judge Jiah as an ‘extremely sensitive’ person, after reading the above excerpt, however I would like to add that we sometimes become completely different people when we are in love and thick  of unrequited romance. I say that not only as a psychologist, but also a person who can largely be categorized ‘overly’ sensitive, by most standards and who seem to be struggling in mostly just one area of his life; romance.

 

However, my fascination with studying romance; its nature, its causes and its effects, never just stopped at the problems I personally faced, even though they got me interested in the subject in the first place. Relationship counselling, an important part of my work with people, requires me to understand romance as a human phenomenon and not just an individual one. The experiential understanding and text book knowledge that I have applied as a professional in helping couples ensure their emotional health with or without each other, has helped me understand a lot about my own romantic self.  

 

Identity and Self Esteem Crisis

 

Individuals are required to change or merge their names (mostly women) with their spouse after marriage. With names we sometimes psychologically merge or completely give up our identities as individuals when we find ourselves in the throes of passion, marriage or no marriage. Everything our partner says or does, affects us ten folds more compared to most people around us. Their opinion of us suddenly becomes our opinions of ourselves.

 

This ritual of this unnecessary conflation of; who we are and what we want from life as an individual person with another individual’s identity and dreams in life, is performed under the name of love and approval of the society. However, the dysfunctional side of it is when one is unable to find happiness in and through the relationship, one experience a complete loss of sense of who they are or were before they were romantic partners to their lovers. I guess something similar was felt by Jiah when she wrote “I am broken inside. You may not have known this but you affected me deeply to a point where I lost myself in loving you.”

 

When one goes through identity crisis in the negative phases of a relationship one seems to loose faith in their capabilities to deal with the basic challenges of life, they would have easily dealt with before they got into the relationship. This is a textbook marker of low self-esteem. I was very saddened but not surprised when I read Jiah write this line in the alleged suicide note “I have no confidence or self esteem left,”

 

A sense of helplessness builds in, when one tells oneself that they can’t deal with this failure in romance and if they did not make it with their lover or if my love was never returned by him/her in the way I want, life is not worth living. Because life was essentially thought to serve the feeling of romance and not the other way round wherein romance was to be enjoyed by me and in my life as one of the many forms of feelings that I am capable of experiencing.

 

Even though I may claim to have some understanding of the source of Jiah’s immense pain, I am deeply saddened by the choices she made to deal with that pain. I wish she chose differently.

 

I was also equally, if not more, shocked by how some people reacted to the situation. I also wish that people, who were condemning her decisions in vile and angry words as a cowardly act on social networking websites, also made different choices and first attempted to understand the source of her suffering even though we all wish that the realty were different. This understanding is necessary for our society and for us as individuals who sometimes find themselves as failures in life when they fail in love. Hate and disgust for an action do not motivate you to understand that action and learn about it. I wish we could learn to love ourselves a little bit more from this incident, or enough to know that when we face a conflict between the heart and the mind, we have the skills and the will to make the choice to work with both, so that even in the face of potentially crippling effects of love, we find ourselves capable to come out on the other side of the adversity as stronger and wiser versions of ourselves.