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
37 comments
Read more

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics
14 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 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
13 comments
Read more

Kochareekal’s dead springs

“These rubber trees have sucked the land dry,” the old woman lamented. Maggie and I were standing on the veranda of her house which exuded an air of wellbeing if not affluence. A younger woman, who must have been the daughter-in-law of the house, had invited us there to have some drinking water. We were at a place called Kochareekal, about 20 km from our home. The distances from Kochi and Kottayam are 40 and 50 kilometres respectively. It is supposed to be a tourist attraction, according to Google Map. There are days when I get up with an impulse to go for a drive. Then I type out ‘tourist places near me’ on Google Map and select one of the places presented. This time I opted for one that’s not too far because the temperature outside was threatening to cross 40 degrees Celsius. Kochareekal Caves was the choice this time. A few caves and a small waterfall. Plenty of trees around to give us shade. Maggie nodded her assent. We had visited Areekal, just 3 km from Kochareekal [Kocha
8 comments
Read more