Dear Jasmine #4: Fight for joy

I would like to sit next to you on soft green grass under a vast blue sky as I talk to you.

Kiss, 1959, by Saul Steinberg

Question 4:

Dear Jasmine,

I am in my 30s and I'm single. I'm single because I have been unable to move on from a relationship I was in 3 years ago. Towards the end of our relationship, my partner wasn't giving me any time, was ignoring my phone calls, and I felt so alone. I turned the hate and anger towards myself feeling like I was the problem for not being enough in the relationship. I felt shame. 

I ended the relationship because I couldn't take the pain of being ignored. I think about him all the time, constantly over-analysing what I should have/could have done to keep the relationship. He moved on so fast and so easily, yet I could not. I always swing between hate and love for him. I feel shame that I still love someone who did not treat me with love. The feeling of inadequacy has seeped into my everyday life along with a sense of profound loneliness. How do I get myself back?
— Self-Esteemless in Bangalore

Dear Jasmine, 

How do I believe in love again after my partner of three years 'fell out of love' with me abruptly, citing no reason, suddenly growing cold? Since our breakup, although I have no grief or love left, the realisation that someone who used to profess forever commitments to me can just switch to being apathetic about me for no discernible reason, haunts me and makes me flinch from the idea of romantic love. I find myself cringing and films and novels I used to love, and the bleakness is unbearable, how do I believe in love again when it is apparently so fickle?
— Wants to Listen to Arijit Singh Without Scoffing

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Answer 4: Fight for Joy

Dear Women,

Two years ago, I sat next to a close friend of mine who was telling me the story of how a man who said he was going to marry her, later decided he wasn’t going to do so, and they had broken up after the parents had gotten involved. I remember we were sitting on the soft green grass on a somewhat warm evening and she was telling me how heartbroken she was. I can’t say I had a solution to her broken heart, but as her friend, I could sit beside her and that’s what I did. If you can allow it in our collective virtual imagination, I would like to sit next to you on soft green grass under a vast blue sky as I talk to you.

I’m assuming both of you know what a ‘fact’ is. It is a thing proven to be true. A fact is not up for debate on Internet boardrooms, not on your local Instant Messaging group, and not flung around in world parliaments (though it is suspect whether any genuine thought enters in there). You don’t see people sitting around in virtual/physical armchairs debating the existence of the genetic code or proposing that rainfall is caused by an army of green pixies holding yellow watering cans in the sky or it is fake news that octopuses have three hearts, nine brains, and blue blood. Facts remain facts. It is a fact that our planet rotates around itself and revolves around the star in the centre of our galaxy, and it has been doing this for millions of years. I want you to sit with this fact and hold it in the palm of your mind. At this very moment, you’re on a gigantic planet that is making impossible circles in two directions. Think about this for a whole, hot, solid minute. Look at the clock and follow the second hand while you do this. I’ll also do it with you at the end of this sentence.

Now that we have acknowledged the gravity of this life (literally, because the reason why we don’t lose our minds while the earth is rotating and revolving is because of gravity) let us consider two other facts:

1. Your romantic relationship is over. 

2. You cannot change the past, no matter how hard you try. 

Being stuck in our past and inside our heads is a self-made prison. I agree with Neil Gaiman when he says that hell is not somewhere you go to, it’s something you carry around with you. Right now, you’re both carrying around a personal hell and living in a self-made prison supplied to you with the actions and opinions of your former romantic partners. It’s not just you, everyone has these mind-prisons, if I may call them that. They just look and feel different for all of us. We construct these prisons from the opinions of others, the carelessness of the people we are most intimate with — friends or partners or parents — and the codified beliefs of the desi society. Every single person you know has a prison in their mind that they’ve built based on an experience that happened to them. So, you have one, too. I sincerely request you to destroy this prison, walk out of it, and be free.

Your partners have “moved on'' with their lives, and it is time you move on, too. If you want a sign that your grieving period is over, this is it. I’m holding a sign under your virtual window right now. The sign says, “It is time to go.” It is time to go, Self-Esteemless in Bangalore and Arijit Singh Listener. It is time to get up from this place of sadness, of being arrested in time, and of shielding yourself from the joy and beauty of this life. If you need a closure ritual before you can move on, I encourage you to find one. Heck, I want you to create a closure ritual and end this suffering for yourself. This pain of yours is not serving you. It is imprisoning you. No matter how ridiculous that scene from the Bollywood movie ‘Jab We Met’ might be, telling your ex they hurt you, getting rid of old memorabilia, and the modern-day version of blocking them for good on social media tells your brain that this is the finish line and you’re not going to carry this weight forever and beyond. Create a closure ritual tailored to your relationship, and execute it as soon as you can, as best as you can. Do not feel ashamed at being as ridiculous as you want. Bury a locket. Write an honest but scathing email about their callousness. Have a drinking session with your girlfriends (if you drink). Delete all old messages and photographs. Sob to heartbreak songs and let your mascara drip. Wear mascara before you sob to heartbreak songs so it can drip. Do whatever you have to and let it go. Closure is your way of telling your pain it has overstayed its welcome, because it has. 

You deserve to treat this current cycle of your life and this version of you with care and nurturing. Your partner had no right to make you feel ashamed, Self-Esteemless in Bangalore. Your partner has no right to take away the saccharine gladness of romantic movies, Arijit Singh Listener. Also, you did not make a mistake by dating these respective people. It was a cycle in which you were made to feel special (we are all made to feel special at the start of most relationships) and then, it ended with an unpleasantness you still carry around. Bittersweet as all this may be, the planet has been rotating and revolving, the seasons have gone and returned, but you’re still standing at the altar of your break-up. Destroy that altar, move forward, and fight for your joy. I really, really want you to be happy and have a whale of a time at this thing called life. Do you know why? There’s nothing more affirming than a woman having a good time!

Often we spend enough time in our mind-prison that we tend to find comfort in it. You really don’t have to. If you’re scared that too much time has passed and how you will make up for all this lost time, I say to hell with all that. See Fact#2. Imagine you’re trying to catch the train to a hill station and it is the last one, but you realise you left a bag behind. Are you going to miss the train to go and get your bag back? Or are you just going to get on the train? Depends on what’s in the bag, I hear you say? Yes, it does depend on what’s in the bag. Right now, the bag is dead weight. We know this because of Fact#1. Do you still go back and get that bag? 

Get on that life train, Self-Esteemless in Bangalore and Arijit Singh Listener. Get on and see the sights of this life. There will be new fears, new challenges, and of course, a feeling like you lost a certain number of years. Face all these head-on. You’re on the life train to fight for your joy. If you feel like you don’t deserve this, affirm that you do. Why hold onto the past so dearly that you cannot make space for the present and therefore, the future? Do things, move your bodies, actively invest in your own life. If you haven’t taken care of your physical body in a while, get yourself a spa appointment or a fitness centre membership or buy tons of skincare. If you have the financial means, take a small vacation solo or with friends. If all your friends around you are married and happy and social media couple-stars, go and make new friends. You’ll be amazed at how many single women would love to be friends with you. If I introduced the two of you, both of you would become friends. Ah, friendship, the bedrock of all good relationships! 

Of all the things movies and media have gotten backwards about romantic relationships, I am glad we come to realise that many of them are problematic and that they have to go. First, we need to stop expecting our romantic relationships to last a lifetime. If they do, great. If they don’t, we need not put ourselves under such pressure. A relationship that has ended is not a failure. Life is not a grading test. The idea that anything has to last forever in order to have value is robbing us humans of our capacity to enjoy our lives. I asked you to think about the Earth right at the beginning because our Earth is tangible proof of the fact that a season doesn’t have to last a lifetime for it to be valuable to our planet and to us. Do you ever want the monsoons to last all year long, or the summer to never fade? Our lives mirror the universe, and as long as we live paying tender attention to the present, we don’t have to focus on making delight last forever. We only have to enjoy it. 

Second, we also need to stop distilling all the relationships of our life into one single person, our would-be-life-partner, because it is too much burden for one person to bear. Would this take the fun out of you’re-my-one-and-only? Sure, it would. Would having an intersectional, healthy community to balance the emotional load for all of us help? I like to think so. In my mind, this community is built on shared human values and offsets loads that single people, nuclear families with children, and ageing folks who may or may not have lost their partner have to carry by themselves. I don’t mean a joint family because as we have come to learn, they come with many problems of their own. I mean wide open spaces and structures of living that allow humans to cooperate better and distribute emotional loads that we now carry alone.

There are so many people who are “single” because they’ve either divorced, widowed, estranged, or not found anyone at all. Why do we stigmatise being by oneself? Why does our existing society want to make nuclear islands out of us? People always say you need to find someone or you will “be alone”? In a world of 7 billion people, how is anyone going to be alone? Do they mean that people who don’t have partners are going to be isolated from society, instead? Why is friendship not flowing freely after a certain age? Why are boundaries being drawn clearer after friends are getting married? Why is our whole capitalistic society built around twos?

I bring this up because I also have many letters in the Dear Jasmine inbox from people asking about love and finding partners and navigating loneliness. Love is worthy, glorious, and heartbreaking even if it lasts. I will go out on a limb here to argue that people’s loneliness is not because of being single, but because single people are not as warmly welcomed into society. Society, as a whole, often looks at single people with pity. Imagine, a whole group of people look upon a single individual with sadness instead of including them into the fold and saying “Hey, we are all here, come join us!”. That’s messed up, don’t you think? Humans are not here to make islands of ourselves. We are not here to isolate people from experiencing the world in all its splendour because they’re not buying a ticket for two. We are not here to make less of anyone because they’re not ticking off a checklist. We are here to hold and honour and include people in the circle of life. We are here to share, comfort, and sit down beside people we don’t know and offer them a cup of tea and our time.

I’m sorry your breakup was hard, Self-Esteemless in Bangalore and Arijit Singh Listener. I’m sorry they were a jerk to you. I hope they’re considerate to their next partners, better at managing conflict, and more measured in the way they undertake relationships. For both of you, I hope that you choose partners more suited to you next time. Look for people who will lift you up, be your best-friends, and will genuinely be glad that you’re in their life. Do not settle for anything else. I wish that you will be able to separate your self-worth from the way people behave when they want to end relationships. It will be hard to say if your next relationship will be immediate and whether it might take you to the moon and back. It could happen or it couldn’t. Either way, I urge you to remember that it doesn’t define you. 

You are not one-half of a relationship. 

You are not a child, sibling, parent, employee etc. 

You are you. 

You are worthy. 

You are enough just as you are. 

It gets really hard for us to remember we are our own people before defining ourselves in relation to someone else. For you, I hope you can remember this, get out of your mind-prison, and get onto that life train. There’s so much out there in the world for you to still experience and learn and live. Do not hold yourself back. Every time you feel like you’re stuck, look at the clock for a whole, hot, solid minute and imagine this planet rotating and revolving. Imagine that you will be here at this exact time of the day tomorrow, but you won’t be in the same place in the universe. That, in itself, is magical.

Go out there and fight for your joy. I really hope you will.

Love,
Jasmine