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 Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

The Napalm Girl

Do you remember the girl in the picture below? The girl who is running naked and crying out in utter helplessness?  She is Kim Phuc . Many of you will recall this picture easily because it is a classic photo that played a role in putting an end to the prolonged Vietnam War (1955-1975). That war remains in human history as one of the most controversial and traumatic conflicts. A futile war in the name of an ideology: communism. Communists and Anti-Communists killed each other with the noble purpose of saving humanity from evils. Like most wars, this one was too a clash of egos. The ego of the capitalist USA versus the ego of the Communist USSR. Capitalism won in the end, they say. But at the cost of millions of lives. Innocent lives. Like what has been happening in Ukraine for nearly three years. In Gaza for over a year. Have you seen little children dying painfully in those countries for no mistake of theirs?   Kim Phuc was one such child in Vietnam. She was nine years o...
12 comments
Read more

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
44 comments
Read more

Is Charley an Escapist?

Illustration by Copilot Designer Charley wants to go back in time and live in the Galesburg of 1894. He belongs to mid-20 th century in Jack Finney’s short story, The Third Level . What triggered his longing for Galesburg of 1894 is his accidental arrival at the third level of New York Grand Central Railway station. Grand Central has only two levels. But Charley lands on a different platform which belongs to the older period. The people’s dress, the ticket counters, the gaslights, the newspaper stand, and the Currier & Ives locomotive all convince Charley that he is standing in the year of 1894. Charley’s grandfather lived in Galesburg. So Charley knows that it is a “wonderful town still, with big old frame houses, huge lawns, and tremendous trees whose branches meet overhead and roof the streets. And in 1894, summer evenings were twice as long, and people sat out on their lawn, the men smoking cigars and talking quietly, the women waving palm-leaf fans, with the fireflies all...
6 comments
Read more

Brainless Facebook

I’m becoming increasingly convinced that Facebook [FB] is for the brainless. No wonder why youngsters have abandoned it and taken to other media such as Instagram. FB censored the links to my blog posts twice in succession last week. The posts are innocuous. 1.      The Napalm Girl : The post is about Kim Phuc, the nine-year-old Vietnamese girl who survived one of the most brutal and absurd wars in human history. FB removed my link merely because the post contained the classical photo of the little girl running in pain. FB’s sense of morality stirred its fervent head. But FB permits utter balderdash written by scoundrels! 2.      Women and Breast Politics : This is the other post that met with FB’s idiosyncratic sense of morality. The post is about how women were made to go bare-chested in Kerala till as recently as the turn of the 20 th century. It contained a couple of pictures which I had copy-pasted from an illustrious Malayalam weekl...
4 comments
Read more