When viewed from a cool, unemotional distance, teenage love is basically a bundle of jumpy nerves groping another bundle of jumpy nerves. Since the human nervous system operates on the principle of electricity, whenever two such bundles meet, there are bound to be sparks, short circuits, sudden flares, and on occasion, even a total
blackout where the participants yell, scream and fall as they search for a candle in total darkness. Of course, the exact reverse is also known to happen; sometimes the two nervous bundles fuse together instantly, each nerve ending finding its exact and complementary twin in the other. This creates a sparkling magic of emotions, an enthralling fireworks of feelings, captivating them both from top to toe, drenching them with happiness of a kind they never thought they were capable of feeling.
The problem with this kind of turbo-charged love is that it is technically impossible for it to last. So for a few weeks at the most, the couple will find each other dazzling, stunning and mind-blowing. But soon enough, our endocrinal systems lose the ability to keep injecting those feel good hormones, and consequently we slacken.
Adjectives undergo a slight alteration. The couple start finding each other cool, great or nice. After a few more weeks, the couple no longer have the kind of nervous strength left to do their mating dance act, that is, go all out and impress the other. Whenever they meet, they no longer feel shooting thrills drenching them from top to toe.
This is the time where other parts of their mind begin to surface. There is the calculating mind, which thinks of love as a conquest, and the lover as a conquered person. This mind wants to make sure that the lover won’t move away and date others. It’s also scared that since it cannot do these crazy, passionate and wild gags anymore, the lover might fall for another person who can do those gags. Possessiveness takes over and new text messages like “where are you”, “who’s with you now”, or “I don’t like you talking to that person” appear. As the endocrinal system fades away even further, injecting fewer feel good hormones, the calculating mind strengthens its grip on the person. A whole list of dos and don’ts drop down and begin binding the lover much like a spider binds its victim with its sticky strands. This is a retentive stage of love, where the couple begin to tie each other with ropes, making sure the other doesn’t escape. Now they are “going steady”, which is another way of saying they are bound hand and foot, gagged, blindfolded and immobile — but still in love.
This is a retentive stage of love, which can last a lifetime unless more vicious emotions destroy it. Violence, for example, remains crouched until the couple start going steady. It surfaces through the viciousness of their fights which they will certainly start to have. Greed is another trait that lies dormant, then slowly activates and begins taking away much more than it gives. Jealousy is another villain that begins tormenting the lover for small breaches of trust, magnifying it as monstrous and destroying all trust, faith and goodness. How far the relationship now survives depends upon how much they can dissolve their viciousness and replace it with warmer, positive and more genuine expressions.
Still, there is nothing wrong with this type of bound and enslaved love. Yes, it’s a far cry from that “Formula One” feeling; they are no longer in a Ferrari but a slow moving lorry. It’s like a wild bull morphing into a tethered and domesticated cow, tame and slow in expression. But it’s still very good and very genuine. In fact, that flash feeling was all the true romance the human body was designed to experience.
It’s sad that the basic design of life hasn’t much room for romantic expression. In that sense, we are still animals, and when we are in heat, we do a ritual mating dance, we fight for our sexual rights, then quickly mate, produce offspring, live as long as it takes to ensure the kids are fully grown, then quietly die. The principle of life essentially wants to prolong itself and each individual human is just a tiny dispensable link in an endlessly long chain.
Can we break this jinx in our DNA? Can we redesign ourselves to feel endless passion, non-stop thrills, re-enact the first flush of giddy love time and again, each time feeling it as fresh and new as if it never happened before? The answer is yes. But not before we gain a deep understanding of all the layers of our conscious and unconscious being, and start a process of consistent effort and practice, eventually gaining absolute control of our emotions, thoughts, dreams and finally, the whole of ourselves.
The author is a film director