A heartbreak, scientists have proven, causes us to feel as much as pain as a physical heart attack. It even has the sinister sounding name of ‘Tako Tsubo cardio-myopathy,’ or more simply, the broken-heart syndrome. The person is in major distress, and there is that intolerable pain in one’s chest, and yes – there is a real physical damage possible to the heart even though one’s arteries might be clean as a whistle, ECGs regular and nothing might have indicated a potential for such pain. People recover from it, of course, but yes – the broken heart syndrome is real.
Love hurts, or at least, has the potential to hurt. The pain of losing someone you love is an awful, awful pain. It is bad when your lover leaves you quite unexpectedly for someone else, or just like that. It is worse when your loved one dies or is hurt, and all that love has nowhere to go.The hurt and pain is so much that often times, it scares one to imagine it. Some people come to fear loving itself for fear of the pain possibly hiding in the wings. The only true way to not ever face the pain from love, after all, is to never love at all. But then again, all it does is to leave you in another sort of pain – a dull ache, a loneliness that eats you up from the inside.
Scientists have proven that loneliness may lead to serious illnesses, including cancer. No – not the same scientists who studied the broken-heart syndrome, this is from researchers from UCLA who actually proved that chronic loneliness can actually trigger changes in gene activity that affected antibody production and anti-viral responses. Feelings of happiness and love cause our body to flood with cortisol and oxytocin, and their findings were that without these, something happens to our immune system.
Is our choice then between heart-attacks and cancer? Are we doomed to be hurt? Are we ganged if we love, and darned if we didn’t? What other choice do we have, really? Turns out, there is another way - a more healthy way to allow love to be a healing, healthful force in your life. It requires that we allow ourselves to love and to be loved without seeking to possess or be possessed.


If we can love with the joy of the here and now, be present for what love has to offer, and yet also hold that love in its beautiful joy also shifts and changes, and that in its ebbs and flows, there will be some hurt, some joy and if we can cherish all of what love brings as a human experience, and allow it to be without demanding of it, then perhaps, we can love without hurting or being hurt – at least, not too much.Sometimes we might teeter on that cutting edge at that abyss of pain, and at that time, friends help. Poetry helps. Philosophy helps.

Science? Well, the jury is out on that

​As written for and publisjed by The New IndianExpress

In many of the mythological stories one grows up with in India, as well as in the more western fairy tales of romance and love, there is often the tests that love has to go through before it is hailed as true and worthy. In Indian mythology, there were stories of the lover travelling across seven seas and seven mountains, battling untold miseries, demons and temptations, to get a token that the beloved asked for in a moment of whimsy. Or bows had to be strung, flowers plucked from treacherous mountain tops, jewellery made or houses built.  There were royals who decried that the suitor must prove worthy of the royal heir’s love by solving a dozen puzzles, battling wild animals and what not. 

Other cultures had similar stories as well. Japanese stories of star-crossed lovers who wait eternities to meet their loved one, Hawaiian stories of a lover chasing the moon where it meets the sea to bring pearls like never seen before. Hundreds and thousands of stories of lovers proving their love’s true worth before the happy ending.

In real life, or IRL as we know it nowadays, do we still test love before accepting it? We may not ask for the moon or jewels or what have you, but test we still do. All the time, some times. The tests are often quite small: “Give me your phone, I want to see your pictures.” “What’s your password for your google mail?” “My mother wants to meet you. What are you doing this weekend?” If the answer is not quite what is expected, the grades on the love test start to dip.  There are so many other little tests, like when you are walking together and you are reaching out with your hand, and though both of you are looking ahead, you still look if your hand is being held. Or that time when you are in a mall, and you watch to see who your lover is watching.

Even after years of being together, the testing continues in subtle and not so subtle ways: could be about who brings the milk in, or walks the dog on a rainy day, or who gets to decide where one goes for the Sunday dinner.Then, can you really stop testing ever? How long before you know well and for sure that all the testing is done and it is a given, now and forever? Or are we doomed as a species to forever test and be tested, with only the intermittent lulls of peace and quiet, like summer and Christmas holidays between unit tests and term exams at school?

An old friend once had an insight to offer: the real test, according to them, was if you could scratch where it itched and let your body be as it will, making whatever sound it would, whenever it needed to, without feeling judged for it. “Have you found that love?” I asked, and that friend laughed, “No, I still judge!”

As written for and published by the New Indian Express