We grow up believing that relationships are supposed to deepen with time. That love, once found, only matures—its fire softening into warmth, its passion evolving into companionship. But lived reality often tells a different story. Relationships can grow distant. Passion dwindles. What was once extraordinary becomes ordinary.

In the beginning, everything feels charged with wonder. You look at someone and see perfection. You can’t believe they are yours. They look at you as though you are their world. Every touch feels like a revelation. Even the fights are epic because they matter so much, because they spring from too much feeling rather than too little. I remember once, he held me and wept, whispering again and again: “Don’t leave me.”

But time changes things. The gaze that once saw you as beautiful begins to notice flaws. What was once fire becomes routine. Sometimes one partner still longs, while the other retreats. That imbalance cuts deep—it leaves one yearning and the other indifferent.

And so I ask: why does this happen? Do we not understand what love really is? Or does love itself alter with time? For me, love doesn’t fade in intensity. I still feel connected to the movies I watched as a child. The people I knew in my early years continue to live vividly in my memory. Yet I also recognise how we outgrow many things. Parents, once gods, reveal themselves to be human, flawed, vulnerable. Lovers, once idols, become people—with their own limitations, their own irritations.

Yesterday, he told me he disliked certain things about me. He called me obstinate. Such a small remark, and yet it cut deeply because I was already spiralling low. I was desolate the whole night and day, and they both noticed—Anand and he. But they stayed silent. They kept their distance. And in that silence was the sharpest wound of all.

Perhaps this is what time does to relationships. The grand passion softens, the idolisation fades, and what is left is a quieter truth: not what we feel, but what we choose to do for one another.