Love that outlives definitions

By Priyabrat Biswal

IN the late eighties, when college corridors still echoed with chalk on blackboards and transistor radios carried the world’s music into college hostels, “love” was a fragile word — something whispered, never proclaimed. For those of us from lower middle-class families, it was not a luxury we could openly afford. Love was not roses pressed between book pages or grand confessions scrawled in letters. It lived instead in the brief alchemy of stolen glances across a lecture hall, in conversations carried out under the shade of a sprawling banyan, in the reckless courage of sneaking into a matinee show while our eyes darted nervously for familiar faces that might expose us.

Back then, love was more restraint than surrender. The thought of physical intimacy was as unthinkable as reaching for the moon. Even the brush of a fingertip could set off a tremor of guilt. So we clung to definitions instead of embraces, building our romances out of borrowed words. I remember once reading: “Love is not finding someone to live with. Love is finding someone you cannot live without.” It felt like scripture, the purest distillation of what the heart longed for.

But time has a way of reshaping even the most sacred of words.

On today’s campuses, love is a performance, quick and consumable. It blooms in hashtags and selfies, vanishes in the brief cruelty of a text message. For Gen Z, love often means living together, parting ways, moving on — without backward glances. Marriage, when it arrives, falters more often than it endures. To those of us raised in conservative cocoons, it feels jarring, like watching a temple stripped of its sanctity and turned into a marketplace. Sometimes it seems as though love itself has been emptied of its old, solemn gravity.

And yet — just as I was ready to surrender to cynicism — I encountered Abhishek and Ananya.

They live in Bhubaneswar, tucked away in a quiet corner of an elegant neighbourhood. Outwardly, they appear like many successful couples in their late thirties: both well-qualified, both with respectable careers, parents to a radiant young boy. Their lives seem carefully arranged — steady jobs, a comfortable home, a promising horizon. But every true story carries its own undercurrents, and theirs is no exception.

They share their household with Abhishek’s aging parents. The parents are not cruel, not caricatures of tyranny, but their presence stirs daily ripples — expectations unspoken, small frictions, invisible weights. For many couples, such quiet storms might harden into arguments, grievances, even fractures. But Abhishek and Ananya carry their bruises with grace. They let no bitterness take root. They smile through fatigue, shoulder more than is fair, and treat sacrifice not as a burden but as a chosen language of love.

It was only last week, when illness confined me briefly to a hospital bed, that I witnessed the depth of their devotion. Ananya herself was unwell that day, yet it was Abhishek who remained by my side from morning until dusk, managing every detail of my care with a tenderness that seemed second nature. His presence was not merely helpful — it was a quiet benediction. And then, in one of those still moments when conversation lingers between laughter and silence, he said something that unsettled me.

“When I grow old,” he murmured, “I want Ananya to leave this world before me.”

At first, the words felt like a cruelty, a selfish desire. How could a man so devoted utter something so grim? But when I asked why, his reply unfurled like a truth too rarely spoken.

“Because,” he said, his voice steady yet touched with sorrow, “Ananya has given everything — her time, her strength, her dreams — to me and to my family. She has never placed herself first. And I know this world. If I go before her, no one will guard her the way I do. She will carry her grief in silence, and it will devour her. I want her spared of that. I want her to be the one to leave first, so she never has to taste that loneliness.”

The weight of his confession silenced me. My eyes blurred with unbidden tears. In that instant, I realized that every definition of love I had once held — whether lifted from dog-eared novels of my youth or debated in the rhetoric of modern relationships — collapsed before this singular truth.

Because love, in its truest incarnation, is not the poetry of endless togetherness. It is the unspoken vow to shield another from pain, even if it means carrying that pain alone.

Abhishek and Ananya reminded me of something I had almost forgotten: love is not about discovering perfection in another, but about offering protection — even when it costs you everything.

And perhaps that is why, despite the world’s restless reinventions, I continue to believe: real love never goes out of fashion.