Skip to main content

Love till morning


Last Christmas I gave you my heart But the very next day you gave it away This year, to save me from tears I'll give it to someone special

Wham! sang those lines in 1980s. They wouldn’t sing it today. No one wants to give their heart anymore to anyone, it seems. Maybe, there’s no heart anymore.

Situationship has become a regular word in English. 

Relationship is a burden today. Why endure the stress and strain caused by such commitments? Love the skin, enjoy the sex, and say goodbye when you are tired of it. You can have multiple partners too. The New Indian Express tells me [18 Dec 2022] that there many types of relationships (situationships?) among the youth today.  Cookie jar relationship, for example, refers to dating multiple people before deciding who will be better for you even if it is for a few days. Keeping one on the hook because either one of the partners is not ready to commit even for a few days is called benching. Roaching is when you hide from your partner that you have many such partners. There could be more.

The writer of the above Express article claims that this kind of relationships has an advantage: “Allows companions intimacy without commitment.” I wonder whether that is really possible. Can we have any meaningful relationship with another person without some commitment? I feel tremendous commitment even towards my cats! Can you love without commitment?

Well, I guess I belong to another generation altogether. Sometimes when I deal with the young nowadays, I feel that I don’t belong to this galaxy at all.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 431: Last Christmas I gave you my heart But the very next day you gave it away... Weave a story or write post on the brevity / superficiality of relationships nowadays. #Relationship

 

 

 

Comments

  1. JaiDecember 21, 2022 at 8:02 AM

    You are absolutely right, Tom. Even I cannot imagine any intimacy without any commitment in the relationship or situationship or whatever. I guess we have become too old to understand the kind of things the younger generations come up with. On the other hand maybe the younger generations are too young to understand the value of a relationship with true commitment.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 21, 2022 at 9:26 AM

      I'm absolutely convinced that i have become a kind of scarecrow among the young generation 😊

      Delete
  2. Rajeev MoothedathDecember 21, 2022 at 2:18 PM

    An interesting piece...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yamini MacLeanDecember 21, 2022 at 4:58 PM

    Hari Om
    What is being discussed is the difference between lust and Love. Far too often the former is taken as being the latter. The freedoms of today are a treasure, for sure... but with freedom comes the responsbility of avoiding licentiousness. That requires engaging one's intellect... not that often to the fore when hormones are raging! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 21, 2022 at 6:55 PM

      True, it's lust vs love and the youngsters are failing to draw the necessary line.

      Delete
  4. parwatisingariDecember 22, 2022 at 11:02 AM

    Tomichan you nailed it again. unfortunately the word intimacy was not understood either us, or the generation before us, intimacy is not about sex... it is about feeling safe in a relationship. Essentially kids are so bubble wrapped that they don't know intimacy. forget with another, they are not comfortable with themselves either.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 22, 2022 at 1:10 PM

      Most of my students loved their Covid masks. When the air became safe enough to remove the mask, these students didn't. I asked whether they feared the virus or themselves more. Most were honest to tell me that they kept the mask as a self-defense mechanism. So, you're right, they are not comfortable with themselves and that leads a lot of problems.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...
13 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more