A blog of my feelings…ranging from commenting about other's blogs to commenting about stuff which happens in life and from posting mails which I like, to ranting on stuff.

Been quite a while since I posted… No, not that I had a lot of work.. No, not even that I did not have any topics to blog upon, and No, definitely not that I wanted to take a break from blogging.. Just that I was too lazy to sit and compose a post.

I have been a part (again, just a part) of many discussions related to relations / relationships / how to maintain them /  what goes wrong / why it hurts etc etc… and thought it would be best if I do a post on the same.

A friend of mine has started blogging coz of my advice. One of her blogposts is about having expectations in relationships. I’ve always been of the opinion that "EXPECTATIONS LEAD TO DISAPPOINTMENTS, SURPRISES GIVE YOU HAPPINESS".

Another friend of mine just broke up after an affair of almost two years… and it was kind of tough for me to even speak to her coz I went through all the emotions yet again coz of my breakup after three years! But, I guess I succeeded in getting her back to normalcy.

Another friend of mine had a huge heartbreak coz of the reason that the guy on whom she had a huge crush on, just relocated out of town. She was more friendly with this guy and she was fearing what would happen if she confessed her crush / love to him.

Again, relationships are not only about love. I can categorize relationships into three different kinds:

Formal – With office colleagues; with business acquaintances; With people whom you don’t know, but would like to get to know etc.

Informal - With friends; School-mates; Classmates; Course-mates; Uncles; Aunts; and so on.

Personal – With that special person – We can term this kind of relationship as LOVE!

I’m no expert in this.. but all that I am telling here is something that I’ve tried and I think I’m successful in bouncing back to normal in no time. Also, I assume that this is the best way to lead a normal life.

My first thought on my dad’s death was as to why we have so many "Relatives" to give us pain when the connecting link of my "DAD" itself is non-existent anymore? Now, it is more than three years since dad’s death.. and the relatives continue to be a pain in my life. I consider mine to be a close-knit family – Me, Mom, Dad, Sister. Sister got married, so she went out of my inner circle to a part of another family… and brought her husband (my brother in law) and her kids into my next circle. (BTW, my innermost circle continues to have "ME" and then, did mom,dad come. That explains why it was Me, Mom, Dad.)

Now, since Dad is not there anymore, my question, and rational one in my opinion, is that why should the relatives who were related to us through dad’s side continue to bother us? Why can’t I be left to lead my own life? Why should my mom be bothered with all their rants and troubles in life when she herself has a lot of rants / troubles in her life? Logic naa?? Lekin no, Mom does not agree to this… I dunno how to convince mom… but I am not going to stop trying.. I will try, try and try till I succeed!

Why do people get scared of getting into a good long lasting relationship? I can give only two reasons for that:

1. You are scared of losing that person
2. You consider yourself better off alone.

I belong to the second category. So, lemme analyse the first category once for justifying to myself as to why I belong to the second category:

By losing someone, You have two things to think of:

• Why did the other person move away? Something wrong with me or something wrong with him/her?
• Why can’t I cope up with this loss? After all, he/she is just one amongst the millions of beings on the planet.. Why do I make this mistake every time? What should I do not to get this miserable feeling again?

Once you get the answers for the above points, it will be better for us to move on. Till you get the answers, it would be better not to think of something else.

Moving on, Is it fair if we keep expectations in relationships? Expecting something in a relationship so basic about the other person understanding your feeling is not et all wrong.. but at the same time, we need to also think as to are we understanding them? Did we ever think as to why the other person is not understanding us or what makes him/her act the way he/she does? Unfortunately, we see only our side of the coin and not theirs!

And in case we try to see their side of the coin, all that we do is assume stuff and rant about how dented / pathetic our side of the coin is… We dive deep into ourselves and bring out the most negative / pathetic side of ours to the front and think that the other person did not like us coz of this particular side of ours. This is hyper-pessimism. There is of-course another way to think.. To think that the other person did not realize our worth and that is the reason the other person did not bother to understand us as he/she was too inferior. This is hyper-optimism. Most of us are either in any of these corners. Any moderate thoughts on the same would be helpful, but how many of us think moderately?

Again, one more common thing that used to happen with me is that I used to assume that I suffer from "Bipolar Disorder". I know that I don’t get hyper high or hyper low in any feeling, but yet, I faced all the symptoms of this disorder.

And if you feel that everyone is pushing you to the depths and you continue to feel miserable (like what I used to feel very often earlier), you think that you need to cease to exist as a social being, here’s my answer to that. Just sit back and answer the following questions:

"Don’t U think U are taking matters too deep into yourself and you are just dragging them too much? Why don’t you just forgive and forget? Why are you so bothered abt this?"

The next step is to just start ignoring all those people who think that way. You need to get "Hyper-Optimistic" to get out of your "Hyper-pessimistic" moods. You know you are worth much more than what these dumb bastards think of you! Be with it! Don’t just be bothered about all these chota stuff in life.. I know it is not as simple as it sounds, but that is the way it is supposed to be taken care of.

For me, all relations are a pain except the one of plain no-holds barred friendship… which is really hard to find! I’m glad to say that I have finally found a few people whom I can say "Friends for life". They blog, they share my sentiments on many things and they are just like I am… So, 3 cheers to me!

A close friend of mine mailed me to ask the difference between love and friendship. The argument was something like this:

What is the difference between love and friendship? Aren’t they the same??

I often get confused between the two. Isn’t love there in friendship or isn’t friendship there in love??? I love my friends and the person who I love is my friend. Then what is it that makes them different…

Many believe that love is the basis of all relations. Shouldn’t that be friendship? Take any relation and it begins with friendship. The understanding between the siblings is developed because they are friends with each other. The teacher student relation is built because the teacher understands the student as a friend would. The mother understands the child because she gets down to the level of the child and tries to make the child feel comfortable and be friends with him. Even the great love stories like “ Laila Majnu “, began with friendship that blossomed in their early days.

I feel I often mistake love with friendship. When we say we are looking for true love, do we actually mean that we are looking for a true friend to share everything we have? The good and the bad both. They are so mingled. How do you differentiate between the two?

And my answer was:

There is love in friendship and there is definitely friendship in love. In my opinion, there is no difference between love and friendship. But one thing, love usually ends up in lust and friendship does not end et all.. We tend to say that we are looking for true love when the person whom we might have assumed to be “in love with” did not act as per your expectations. We tend to give a higher place to the person whom we are in love than with whom we are friends in our social scales. We tend to vie for that person’s attention at all times. A lover gets pardoned more times than a friend. We tend to fight easily with friends coz of the affection and understanding we share with that person but with love, we tend to first forgive that person for a mistake.

We need to be real careful before we give the status of a lover to a friend.

It is just a psychological aspect.. if your mind instructs you to accept a person as a lover, it gives you an entirely different outlook on that person. But unfortunately, many people would not have these thoughts in their mind and that is the reason, there will be conflicts, depressions, devdas’s etc getting created.. suicides happening etc.

Another very important thing to be kept in mind is that we would have spent only 1/3 of our lives with our parents, the rest 2/3rds should be spent with friend(s) whom we call husbands / wives / lovers / fiance / fiancee etc.

That’s my take on Love and Friendship.

I continued the same conversation thru IM with another close buddy of mine and her opinion on love/friendship was awesome.. I am posting the same here:

First U have this extreme bonding with a person which 2 people have

When two people are such strong friends that they cant live without talking to each other for a whole day,

They have to do everything together & then one of them feels that he / she want be with the other forever ,

Then U start thinking whether this is love, then start imagining whether U’ d be comfortable if U were to make love with that person..if the thought isn’t uncomfortable then I think it is love.

But before that this bonding (friendship) has to develop.

15-May — Deleted personal clues!