Tag: love

Love Means Always Having to Say When You’re Sorry

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

In Love Story, when Ali McGraw says, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” she offers a sentiment that I find deeply flawed. For me, love does mean saying you’re sorry – and often. When you care about someone, and your actions cause them pain, that pain becomes even more significant because of the love between you. It’s precisely why acknowledging that hurt and apologising is so crucial.

Consider a situation where you’ve made plans with someone. You’re delayed for reasons beyond your control, and by the time you arrive, they’ve been waiting for you – possibly having made all the necessary preparations and feeling excited to see you. When you finally get there, instead of offering an apology, you brush off the delay because it wasn’t your fault. You expect the other person to simply understand that external factors were to blame. However, this kind of thinking overlooks the other person’s feelings. Even though the delay wasn’t deliberate, the other person has still been affected by it.

This is the key issue: it’s not always about fault or blame. When we love someone, we need to consider how our actions, even if unintended, impact them. Love isn’t just about being right; it’s about understanding and acknowledging the other person’s emotional experience. Skipping the apology sends a message that their feelings don’t matter – that their hurt is irrelevant. It builds quiet resentment, and over time, this neglect can lead to the erosion of a relationship.

Add to this the fact that even when we know each other very well, there are always moments when we unintentionally hurt those we love. It might be something as simple as not being able to be quiet when your partner needs rest. If one person is disturbed and unable to sleep, it may be because the other finds it hard to stay quiet. Now, the person who has been disturbed could easily think, “Why can’t you just be quieter when I need it?” But instead of expecting that understanding, love should prompt the person who caused the disturbance to acknowledge it and apologise. That’s what love is about: trying your best to ensure the other person’s comfort. And if you can’t meet their needs in that moment, then at least show you recognise that by saying sorry.

The failure to apologise, to simply assume the other person should understand, misses the point of love’s emotional exchange. In fact, I believe this is why many relationships struggle. We often excuse ourselves, thinking that external circumstances, or aspects of our personality, excuse the hurt we’ve caused. But we forget that the hurt is real, regardless of fault. The key is to acknowledge it – to take responsibility for the emotional consequences of our actions, even if those actions were beyond our control.

Returning to Love Story, it’s worth noting that the idea of “never having to say you’re sorry” can also be seen as a reflection of patriarchy. When Ali McGraw’s character says this to Ryan O’Neal, she’s essentially excusing him from taking responsibility for her feelings, giving him a pass simply because they’re in love. But that’s not how love should work. When you love someone, you should be even more motivated to show that you never want to hurt them – and that if you do, you’re sorry for it, even if you didn’t mean to cause the pain.

At its core, love is about effort – about trying your best to make the other person comfortable, happy, and valued. When you can’t achieve that, an apology is the least you can offer. It’s not just about taking blame; it’s about showing empathy, understanding, and a desire to make things right.

Ultimately, love means always being willing to say you’re sorry when your actions, however unintentional, hurt the person you care about. An apology is not about blame or fault. It’s about recognising the emotional weight that love carries and showing that the other person’s feelings matter. After all, love is what makes those apologies – those simple acknowledgments of shared vulnerability – so necessary.

Heteronormativity

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

Yesterday night, I was having a conversation with a friend and my mother and partners were present, too. I mentioned how different the relationship between my mother and my partner was when compared to my mother’s relationship with my grandmother, my mom’s mother-in-law. I told her how differently your son-in-law treats you as compared to how you treated my grandmother.

And she instantly retorted, without a moment’s hesitation, or concern for feeling or reality, “He is not my son-in-law.”

“Huh?” I was shocked. “Then what is he?”

“Your partner,” she snapped back.

Of course, in my head, a relationship that has lasted through twenty-five years amounts to more in my head. For me, marriage is not a piece of paper or standing before any god and promising to be together. It is love and concern that keeps us bound together. Unfortunately, a heterosexual mother wont really understand that.

I immediately wanted to retaliate. “Your daughter’s marriage that has barely passed two years of age amounts to labels and tags and, more importantly, respect, but my relationship that has seen us struggle to be with each other despite all odds, family, work, staying apart and then together after 6 years, coming out as a couple, standing up for each other, making our own lives together, braving hurdles of conflict and affliction, deserves nothing?”

But all I told her was, “my sister has a husband since two years because they are “married” and my relationship of 25 years is nothing?”

I haven’t been able to look at her since then. But it is not just her. It is my best friend who has suddenly become closer to my sister because they have the similar bond of talking about their husbands – which I could never have. Despite the fact that all my relationship secrets she has been privy to, she won’t ever be able to understand – because we don’t base our judgements of equality on love itself, but on gender, on sexual orientation, on what society expects of us.

Maybe someone with a deeper understanding of how things are and what emotions truly mean to someone, may get it. May. But then even if they do, they won’t really understand our throuple. Because polyamory is still a far way to be understood even by the gay community itself.

Today I woke up and read a post by a gay friend. He is one of my oldest friends in the community, and he had a post about gay marriages and in the comments section someone mentioned if it was possible in India. He replied with a list of couples and neglected to mention my name with my partners. Of course, it is because he sells the idea of gay marriage. I don’t fit the bill with two partners.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not against gay marriage. You see, my point is I am not against any marriage of any kind. If there is love and concern and respect, any relationship between people is a marriage to me. But when the gay community falls back upon a heteronormative standard, it seems ludicrous.

We are not the same, we are different. Our sexuality ranges a whole spectrum of colour. We are gays, lesbians, bisexuals, trans, pansexuals, demisexuals, non-binary, sapiosexuals, asexuals, and a host of others. How can we fit ourselves into the normative standards of man and woman? We are not as simple as that. If any relationship can be simplified, that is.

I do not think that the human race is equipped to understand differences. Even if they accept them to be socially cool, they will never really understand them. Because you see, people do not understand love. If you get the nature of love, you will accept it in any form.

Most people understand what is different, because all of those differences cater to the five senses. Love becomes an abstract concept that can only be felt. And the brain insists that there is only one kind of abstraction. The way someone looks at a dark person or an over weight person and forms an idea of what he or she or they must look like. People look at love as they grow up and think that’s the way all love should be.

In order to simplify things, they actually create chaos. Accepting all forms of love becomes so simple. Love is love, after all.

This also then brings my self to my attention. I got stuck on a label, too. A “son-in-law”, what is that but a heteronormative label. And technically, though my mother didn’t say it in this way, she is right: He is my partner. Not any son by law, because neither does the Law accept our relationship in this country, nor does she treat him like a son. The sad part is that he treats me like his husband and lover and treats her like she is his mother.

And that is what shall keep us together for another 25 years.

Parents

Published on by Harpreet ChhachhiaLeave a comment

I was just scrolling though instagram and I read a post where someone was exuberantly praising their mother. I am going to say something real here. We all have parents. According to society and many religions we are suppose to love them. But it’s not always possible.

Firstly, I do not come from the mind set where being brought into this world is something to be lauded. The world is a crazy place. It’s filled with angst of living right from the get-go. Sure, it has love and beauty, but the hate and the ugliness over powers the former most times. I understand all the copious ideologies that talk of light overcoming dark. Pick up movies, books, education, theology, and they will talk about the reason-to-be and why light is better than the dark. I don’t think either is better. They’re the same. Birth isn’t better than death. And being isn’t better than non-being. The best questions Shakespeare asked were in Hamlet’s famous soliloquy.

Parents then aren’t meant to commemorated. Loved surely. All living beings need love and should be. That’s the point of life actually. But loved blindly just because of blood ties. Na. Any woman who works hard and gives her children the best life she can give them should be loved. But not celebrated, the choice of being a parent was hers. So the duty of being a good one isn’t anyone else’s but hers. Therefore, the duty she has taken on becomes the judge of her parenthood. Not the children. The children haven’t chosen her to be their mother. So they aren’t in any way responsible for her as adults. It’s love that makes them responsible. Not duty.

I speak from personal experience and so I shall also talk about things when they go wrong. When you have a father who isn’t capable of love or parenthood but capable of reproduction and does, you’re also in some deep shit. The idea of respecting a person who falls in his duty is preposterous. Krishna himself said this to Arjun at the brink of a war. When the people who create culture fail to uphold it there is a collapse of society. We do not live in the wild, where animals stay with their parents up to a point and then don’t bother if the parents are old enough to care for themselves or not. We live in a culture that has created these rules. If an animal is a bad parent, the child dies, here society prevents that from happening. And thus, pathologies develop. Serial killers go on rampages. The idea of duty becomes the benchmark for everyone.

I live with anxiety and depression created by an abusive father and fear of the world created by an over protective mother. Yet, I function in society because that is my duty- which I never asked for. Essentially, I should love being who I am. But I do not. I have made my peace with it. As such, I have made peace with the fact that parents are human beings who are capable of disastrous mistakes. They are to be loved, yes, but worshipped, no.

I had aunts who cared for me like they were my parents. One of them filled the place of my father. Strong, supportive and loving. She did more for me than my father ever did. It was not her duty to do so. She had not given birth to me. But she loved me like I was her own. Some say, that was because she did not have children of her own, but that doesn’t mean she did not love me. That only meant that her duty would have been to her own children first. And I would not expect any less of that. But would she have loved me less? I do not think so. Irrespective, of that digression, I will just reinstate that motherhood or fatherhood or parenthood, itself, is created by love. If it is a hallmark of duty, it needs not be respected but taken as a matter of life. If it is an act of pure love, it won’t need reciprocation.

No one asks to be born. And as such the one who procreates has a moral obligation towards culture itself to make sure that the offspring contributes to the love needed in the world. Nurture is always more important than nature and that is a parent’s job. Not the child’s. As you grow you can appreciate what your parent has done – but in the sense, of how well they did their duty. Love is a necessary by-product of that duty. And one need never be grateful to be loved.