#2 Article at shaadicafe.com (click here to read)

 

It would be too cliched to say that life goes through stages. Shakespeare did, poets elaborated the obvious and exaggerated the meaning. This, we were taught by rote from secondary school. A lot of things happen in this routine and every human being goes through it, lives and dies.

A vicious cycle.

When it comes to complications of romance, it has its own defined everlasting flow diagram. Like a symbiotic creature, romance moves as a part of life. Life exists because of it and it exists because of life.


We, animals with the sixth sense, are abundant in expectations. There are no boundaries to that aspect of emotion and nobody has been able to lay out the basic rules of expectation. What is too much of it or what is too less of it? We will never get the answers.
Is growing old good or bad? Expectation also ages with us and we are never too sure if it is good or bad.



When 13 years old: We can’t look at this age as a mere number. It sends alert signals to the parents and prestigious shots to the person who has reached the number. The expectations begin from the external appearance. There is an adrenaline rush when the prettiest or the cutest looks at you. Like the chemical bonds of oxygen and hydrogen to make the perfect structure of water, we want to be tagged only with the good looking person. We attempt to look the best, dress the best or simply be called ‘the best’. Call it infatuation or crush, we labelled them as love.



When 16 years old: Career and crush converge at the common road (to think of it, I wrote a perfect alliteration here). We are forced to focus on one by every elder we encounter while thoughts deviate to another. Life promises too much at this juncture and optimism is raised. We are trying to win the best of both worlds. We think we are funny and tend to assume that popularity is by doing many things at a time. We learn to multitask and somehow manage to do excel in one or two things. With chaos in oneself, this age is definitely not too sweet.



When 19 years old: We are actually bidding good bye to the adolescence. With that, we are also bidding farewell to most crushes. At this age, we make choices. The surprising fact is that, choices seem less than what we began with. This age is critical when it comes to cupidism. We seem to make intelligent decisions. Romance seem to make more sense than what we thought. We seek for long term romance and understand that strength lies in the mutual trust. Relationships are made and broken and ‘expectation bars’ are raised and lowered. This age is a period of realisation that ‘love’ at 13 was dumb.

When 22 years old: Man has been able to solve all mysteries of deep waters but never the expectations that arise out of a human being. At this age, we want to look the best, have the best of career, take the best decisions, look for a long term relationship and expect more and more. Most of the problems start here. The best part of this particular age is that we believe in love whole heartedly. We are not too stupid or too intelligent to be in love. However, this age is the mother of all expectations.

We cannot stop our ever growing and always changing expectations as it is a part and parcel of human nature. But maturity does teach us to strike realistic views with the unrealistic expectations. Learn, adjust, understand and reason out. After all, compromising is not always a bad thing!