It has always bugged me that “love” is simultaneously the most misused and the most stigmatized word in our country. Every time I have watched a movie where the hero goes to a girl he has seen hardly twice in his life and says “I love you,” I have cringed hard. I have even written about this “love at first sight” atrocity and the misuse of “love” before.
However, whether it is the influence of our movies or not, I don’t know, in real life too, people approach someone for the first time to confess their feelings with nothing short of “I love you.” Even when they have never even talked to the other person once! And since there is no dating culture here perhaps, the “I love you” is termed a proposal. So when a girl says “He proposed to me,” it most probably means that he came and spoke to her for the first time with “I love you,” and her saying a “Yes” is inevitably a “Yes” to marriage sometime in the future. No compatibility check there, I must say.
Probably because this “proposal” is, for all intents and purposes, absolutely against our “culture,” the one where we glorify getting total strangers hitched based on everything other than compatibility (really happy for the ones for whom it has worked out, by the way, and no offence meant – truly!), the ones who do not belong to the category of misusing “I love you” have nothing short of a phobia of these three little words. I mean, it is so bad that it is looked at as a heinous crime by the respected elders and mocked by the little ones who ape the said respected elders.
I first realized how really horrifying it is when Vedu came back from playing with her friends years ago and told me that the boys there made fun of her for saying that she loved her mother, me. Their logic was pretty foolproof (duh!) – “Are you going to marry your mother? Then how can you say ‘love’? You should only say ‘like’.” Vedu, who has always been pretty chill with the taunts of her peers, probably told them that they were crazy and came back home. That day, we had our little “love-filled” talk about how “love” is an emotion that comes in all forms and applies to anyone who is extremely dear to one and how we never have to shy away from expressing love or using the word.
Many months after this incident, she came back from school one day and told me that a girl in her class wrote “I love you” on a piece of paper and that the paper was “CAUGHT” by a classmate, who ran to the teacher with the hot news. Before long, the news was viral all over her class and her wing! Whether she meant it for someone, possibly a boy (!!!), or not was the topic of discussion among most, I guess. It was a celebration for the others and a true nightmare for the poor girl, the heroine, or as per the others, the anti-heroine, of the story.
That day, she had a serious talk with her class teacher, a couple of other teachers, and even the wing head, questioning her why she did it, lecturing her on how she should not have done it, and warning her never to do it ever again. The whole thing was such a fiasco that I’m sure that the poor girl would think twice before saying “I love you” to even her future partner. I don’t know if she went to her parents that evening and told them what happened and if they consoled her and made her feel better. I sincerely hope so! But when I heard Vedu say that she and her friends she is the closest with would only whisper “I love you” in each other’s ears since they would be made fun of or scolded if others heard them say it, I knew just how pathetic our society is.
That day, the girls and I had another long talk about love, this time with a mini-version of this blog plugged in, telling them that “I love you” is in no way a sentence that should be looked at as taboo, how it is simply three words that just means what it says, “I love you.” We talked about how bad it is that someone says, and in this case just wrote on a piece of paper not really even addressed to anyone, something that is essentially a compliment, whether the feelings are reciprocated or not, and everyone comes out, guns drawn, to shoot her down as if she made a full-blown hate speech?
I hear kids as young as 4 or 5 using the F-word and the S-word without a care in the world for who is around or how it makes them look. And apart for a short one-sentence reprimand or an angry look from the teacher, if at all she is near earshot, no one gives a damn. The other kids don’t run to the teacher in herds to report it or excited to see what punishment will come out of it. But here, for three little harmless words, her own classmates got all riled up and ran to the teacher with the news, only because from a very young age, it has been drilled into their head that “I love you” is WRONG – something to be scorned, something to be laughed about, something that definitely came in the realm of “forbidden.” In hindsight, I feel that it is probably this “forbidden fruit” syndrome that makes our people misuse the words “I love you,” even where they don’t really fit the situation.
That day, as I talked to my girls, I reiterated that “love” is a word so pure and positive that, no matter what anyone else says, they should never look down on it as something wrong. That love is not only about romance and getting married. They can love their parents; they can love the teachers they really connect to; they can love the friends they are closest to; they can love the people in their lives who make them feel special, loved, and cared for; they can love animals; they can love places; they can love books and movies and music; they can even love thoughts and ideas; they can love just about anything in the universe, and there is nothing wrong in that. And there definitely isn’t anything wrong in saying those three words – “I love you” – if they really mean it and when they want someone to know that they are dear to them.
I hope that someday, our people will understand that in this world full of hatred and darkness, “I love you” is not something that little kids should be reprimanded for, something that they should be ashamed of, and something that is made to look like a vulgar innuendo. It is something that they should be encouraged to nurture as a pure feeling in their hearts, something that they can use freely and innocently as a true expression of their purest emotions, without any worry of being judged or scolded. For now, all I can do is hope that at least my girls do not fall into the trap of this ridiculous “I love you” phobia, and for that, I will keep telling them how much I love them, as much as I can.
Also published on Medium.
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