Long Distance Relationships | yahoo.com
Let's be honest. Given a choice, I would never pick a long distance relationship. I mean, what's the point? Like Deepika says in Love Aaj Kal,
"Kya fayda? Relationship ke jo achche things hai woh nahin."
(What's the point? The benefits of a relationship aren't present.)
And yet, I guess long distance relationships do happen. No one gets into one for the sheer joy of it. It's practical (like the movie says) and we live in a world of super-pragmatism.
Anurag Kashyap makes an interesting observation (in his commentary of Dev D - quoted in context only, not words).
"In that time, people used to write letters to and wait for months to hear from each other. In this day and age, they talk every day, they chat and email. They are a part of each other's lives. They are emotionally connected. So the frustration is just physical."
Interesting point that. It isn't just the sexual deprivation while being completely fulfilled on all the other fronts. There is that loss of a tangibleness in the relationship. For a hardcore sentimentalist like me, I wonder where's the romance in memories of emails and phone conversations?
There is that sense of incompleteness, from not really knowing what the other person looks like, at the point of time. Is he smiling, does she incline her head to one side when I say her name? Even more, in detail, I can explain the delicious aroma of the samosas frying next door but can he really grasp the entirety of what I'm saying? Does,
"I'd love to be sharing them with a hot cup of tea with you on a day like this?"
..even begin to cut it? Truly, a look is worth a thousand words and more. There is so much that words can't say, after all, that my eyes can.
Which brings me to think about the last time I had a long-distance relationship. I think the biggest problem with it, was that you may still be able to sustain a relationship long distance. But to build a relationship long distance...that just seems impossible to me now.
I think what also happens is that one tends to overcompensate for the lack of physical proximity with an extra serving of emotional intimacy. For what else is our compulsive social networking, our minute-to-minute status updates? We miss the physical company of other people and probably we are all such a lonely generation that we wander into the excess of forced emotional closeness.
To come back to the long distance relationship, I must admit that there is also something vaguely appealing about it, in equal measure. There is the convenience and practicality masquerading as ‘respect for the other person's choices'.
There is the supposed trust and comfort levels that we associate with being able to have a relationship with two physical addresses. Perhaps it is true that some measure of trust does exist but in today's day of disposable relationships and where marriage itself is an ambiguous term, I think it is largely about shutting your eyes to what you don't want to face. Somehow a relationship whose manifestations are no more than an email inbox and a mobile phone just seem easier to shut away or even ignore. What can be more attractive to a generation of people hungover on choices and control?
There is a certain romanticization too, of the other person, of the special bond etc. But when it comes down to it, people are just people; it is our individual experiences with them that make them special to us. And there is that indefinable something that draws us to a particular person and not another. I'm just saying that we're ignoring that altogether in a long-distance relationship.
It's like perfume. There's no point trying to describe it, you just have to get close and smell it to know what it's like.
