When I met M, I was in college. She went on to become my closest friend in due course of hers. She had a huge crush on a boy from her neighborhood. She told me all the dreams that she wanted to fulfill with this boy. Sometimes I felt that she is in love with the boy, although she never stated it with exact words. One day, after class when we went to the canteen to eat something, she confessed her feelings to me and also described to me a great preparation to propose to her. She was nervous and full of anticipation. She sometimes talked too much and sometimes she was silent. I tried to calm her mental agony or her arousal in whatever way the readers put it. I don’t know if I was of any help. Being a person who thrives on romance, I really got super excited about the whole thing. The next day at the university, I waited impatiently for her. She didn’t come to the first class, which made me almost crazy with anticipation. She was not able to concentrate. The next class, she walked in, she looked at me as if she was trying to suppress her smile. She took a seat right next to me and in a low voice, half shy and half triumphant, she told me that the boy had accepted her proposal. Her eyes sparkled with excitement. After class we went to a coffee shop for elaborate discussions on the topic. She described the whole incident with such animation that I really envied her happiness. She kept thinking that M has the true love of her life. But was it true love? Or is true love and the eternity of relationships a figment of our imagination? After a year she told me at the bus stop, while she was waiting for the bus to our university, that she was madly in love with a classmate of ours and she wanted to break up with the boy from the neighborhood. I was extremely puzzled. Before this I thought that she had received the love of the person she wanted so much, so what went wrong? Why did she fall out of love with her?
I asked him the reasons for his sudden change of heart. She told me in a guilty voice that she wasn’t in love with him anymore, but she didn’t know of any particular reason. She told me that she never realized that she was moving away from him. When exactly she started feeling for our classmate was absolutely unknown to her, as if some magic spell had been put on her. Her eyes seemed so helpless. Previously, she used to feel that people who claim that they fell in love with someone else while still in a relationship were weak people with no strength of character. She believed them devoid of the ability to feel love in her true essence and lacking in devotion and commitment. But looking at her face I couldn’t see any of it. She had a huge crush on our classmate, she had the same glimmer of excitement in her eye as she did for the boy who promised every smattering of commitment and devotion. She was embarrassed to feel that way, for another boy, but the feeling of hers itself had no impurity. She never wanted to betray anyone, but she had fallen in love with her even without her own conscious permission.
My theory of eternal love was shaken for the first time. Now, when I look back after so many years and think about all the other similar incidents that act as proof of my new theory, I feel wiser and less naive. I feel like we’re like molecules that are in constant Brownian motion and as molecules we keep bumping into different kinds of people. Sometimes we bump into people who capture our interest and we fall in love like molecules undergo chemical reactions. The stability of the newly formed compound predicts the future reactions that these constituent molecules might undergo. Similarly, when two people form a relationship, the length of time they will be together depends on the depth of the relationship. Also in both cases circumstances have a very important role to play. Who you will meet next or how the same person you loved so much will change over time or what unavoidable circumstances can separate two people are some of the reasons why love, although it is still an eternal feeling, does not exist for eternity. .
