RULES FOR LOVE - WHEN LOVE IS THWARTED AND NOT ALLOWED TO FLOURISH

"You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams."

― Dr. Seuss 

Love is a feeling of well being and of good emotions. It is an activity that keeps us in good spirit and is liked to our emotions. Let us engage and create feeling of love by making self capable through appropriate changes in our dealings with others. There is no other way to love and be loved. The physical intimacy devoid of good feelings is not love but lust. People often fail to conceive love as pious in essence, as while dealing with others, let us take care that our dealings make them cheerful, by helping them to come out of their problem, appreciate their successes and be grateful for help received from them. All these activities are to express love. 

The benefit of giving love to others is that it appeals to our heart and makes us connected to others, provides stability and security, removes fear and gives a feeling of being good towards other people. One can get to know love by first generating such feelings of being good to others. How can a person feel love from others if he is filled with ego, anger and selfish tendencies? These negative emotions suppress inner urge to love others. 

Love is beautiful, and some would even say that love represents the apogee of human nature. Hence, it is a very complex feeling, and people who are unable to understand its depths habitually ruin it, as it happened in one of my recent lectures, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.

Firstly, this amazing book written in a minutious style outlines the fact that love can't be ignored when confronted with social boundaries. The books presents a beautiful story and how conventional society seeks to destroy true love because of its lack of understanding and wrong perceptions.

The protagonists of the book are Estha and Rahel, who are fraternal twins. The have a special kind of love between them, and the bond they share is special, almost incomparable to any other bond I have read about, as they "thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us." The story is mainly presented through Rahel's eyes. 

Their relationship is initially presented as being harmonious, Estha being eighteen minutes than Rahel, an both children seem to have different personalities. On one hand, Estha is serious and earnest and well behaved. On the other hand, Rahel becomes preoccupied with things and can't seem to sit stil has an active imagination, as she seems to exist in a version of reality that's all her own. Rahel's imagination is very different from Estha's; hers is more childlike and wondering, while Estha's thinking is pessimistic.

Furthermore, as they grow older, despite having a continuous connection,  but it is different in nature, they do not longer share that initial special bond. Rahel and Estha are not uncomfortable standing around each other naked, even as adults, thus their relationship evolves into an incestuous one, a supporting example of love that breaks customary rules of society. This type of relationship is made to sound like one that continues to extend past the usual boundaries of love that brother and sister habitually share.

Seccondly, Ammu and Velutha's love is another of the important forbidden love cases in the novel, because of its tragic outcome that is Velutha's death. Velutha is a carpenter and works at Paradise Pickles and Preserves, having the low status as an Untouchable in the caste system. Velutha falls in love with Ammu, a divorced woman  who is associated with an upper caste Syrian Christian Ipe family.  From my perspective, their love is the strongest in the book, because they continue to love each other despite their tragic fates and the dismal consequences of their forbidden love.

 Moreover, to Ammu, Velutha is the "God of Small Things" , as he allows her to escape the prejudice and obsession with class that her family has. Because they both appreciate the small things in their lives, they have a special connection that proves to be unbreakable, even in the face of danger and death. This is the most obvious case of love that violates the rules laid down by society, as Indian culture does not allow love between two people who are not from the mase class.

All in all, falling in love is one of the best things that can happen to a person if it is based on society's rules and perceptions, but when this feeling does not follow those rules, it can represent the worst thing that someone can experience, because love which is not allowed to flourish is as tragic as death.

"If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it." 

 - Ernest Hemingway