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CROSSTALK

Love's paradigm shift

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan
ONCE a lover's heart worked like a varifocal lens. It blurred the background and focused on the object. Devdas had focused on Parvati, Romeo on Juliet, Farhad on Shireen, Majnun on Layla, and Ranjha on Heer. In their days when lovers loved, they couldn't care for the rest of the world. They died for love; they also killed for it.
Today's love is comparable to wide-angle lens at short focal length. While the object remains the same size in the image, more of the scene is included. The focus is still fixed on the object but the background also dominates the scene. When was the last time anybody has heard of somebody who has died or killed for love? Love these days goes as far as falling in love only. Staying in love is a subjunctive thing.
Modern love has been defined by US psychologist Eric Fromm, who died in 1980. He said: "Love is often nothing but a favourable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect." All lovers have expectations of each other. If they have expectations now, they also had expectations before. The tragic stories of magic love in the past are perhaps extreme examples when expectations were disturbed in their exchange.
For example, a heartbroken Devdas couldn't bear the separation from his beloved Parvati and drowned his sorrows in the bottle. He died in front of her house seeing a blurred image of her running towards him before the gates closed and she fainted behind it. And a distraught Romeo killed Paris in front of the Capulate's tomb because Paris wouldn't let him see Juliet. Mistaking a drugged Juliet for dead, he took poison and died on the spot.
Farhad threw himself from the mountaintop after hearing the misleading and motivated news of Shireen's death sent by her other suitor Khushrow. When Heer's jealous uncle poisoned her to death, Ranjha also ate poison-laced sweets and dropped dead next to his beloved. Spurned love for Layla drove Majnun insane and he spent the rest of his life writing poems on the sand with a stick. Majnun was eventually found dead in the wilderness near an unknown woman's grave.
Since then, love has undergone a paradigm shift. It's still the same gaze, wink and stare. It's still the same nervousness, uncertainty and eagerness of heart. Men still covet women and vice versa. Even better, the law of magnet has changed to accommodate more options. The same poles now attract instead of repelling each other. If love was possible between different genders in the past, it's now possible even within the same.
But expanded scope has only narrowed it down, because today's love lacks in concentration. Colombian-born writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes heartsickness in one of his stories: "Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching." Love has diminished in its psychosomatic intensity, its passion now rationed by more practically-minded lovers approaching it like cardiac patients. They give up exertion at the slightest pain in the chest.
Today's love operates on the comfort level of a thirsty man sitting next to a ready-to-go pitcher of ice-cold lemonade. Lovers are ready to enjoy their thirst so long as they can quench it before it hurts. So the hollowness, the emptiness and the aching are no longer the name of the game. Love has become a disposable emotion; it exits one, enters the next.
In Marquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores, the 90-year-old narrator, a bachelor who lived on paid sex, sums up his habit: "Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love." In fact, modern lovers can't tell the difference. They don't know which is more fun between burning of the heart and burning of the flesh.
These lovers also don't know that love is mere mortal's only chance to experience divinity. One can live inside one's body and still occupy another's soul. True lovers transcend themselves in their messianic madness; they live and die for each other in the only transaction of life when giving gains more. They often live in pain and die in vain, but that in itself formulates the bizarre calculus when lovers expect fulfillment in selfless exchange.
On February 14, we are going to observe the Valentine's Day, and lovers will express their love for each other by sending greeting cards, presenting flowers, and offering confectionery. The exchange will come neatly wrapped, but what about expectations? What do lovers expect from each other when they exchange gifts? Or, is love only gift wrapper deep, symbolic of today's relationships? The surprise lasts until the gift is opened, then the object loses its objective.
The consumer culture has destroyed love. In our mad love for consumption, nobody is consumed by love anymore.
The writer is Editor, First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star
Email: badrull51@yahoo.com