Everyday Musings > Absence and Presence

I watched 'He's not that into you' day before. An average film about women who are unable to read the signs men give out, and wonder and worry about love, having it and not having it. I was perplexed by the end of the film about what their conclusions were. Through the film they had a character called Alex who cut through the confusion and gave a girl tips on how to figure when a guy gives you a brush off and by the end of her several dates, men who fall in love seemed an aberration. But then Alex goes and falls in loves with her and all the theories bookmarked turned to nought. It turns out no one knows what makes love work after all.

My friends and I constantly chat about love. Perhaps because someone in the group is either falling out of it, into it, or wanting to. So it's a perennial topic. On my way back home, I remembered something that seemed to connect and could, maybe, shed some light on the issue.

I love white. It's a beautiful soothing colour that stands for calm, peace, serenity and purity. But White, I believe, is not a colour. It is the absence of colour that defines the colour white. White has all the colours of the rainbow and they fuse together to create the impression of white, but white is not a component in it.

I wondered if that could be true for love as well.

The heady feeling, the jelly legs, the not being able to speak or think with clarity, the feeling you can't explain...we look for definite signs when we fall in love. We've read about them in books, seen them in movies, but that need not be the only signs of love. What if it was the absence of all things we are sure of as being love also defines love? Is that perhaps a better judge? Could we start interpreting signs of love differently?

So, say you meet a guy or girl, and you like the person, spend time, talk, smile, call, meet up for coffee etc. But when you start to think if its love, you say nah, no, I don't feel the usual symptoms. Or take the case of an arranged marriage. A couple met, got married, took up responsibility together, brought up children, have a deep understanding of each other, accept each other's faults, but when asked if it was love that keeps them together, say oh we had an arranged marriage, and just grew to accept the other. I wonder if, in our daily life, we're missing the negative spaces, the things that are not love that may also define love.

A thing can be defined by its negative space, by what it does not seem to be. If we look around us, we'll find negative space in everything, the absence which marks a presence. Like night is the absence of day, death is the absence of life. Michelangelo said of his sculpting 'I saw the angel trapped in stone and I set him free.' He sculpted the negative space. He chipped away all the stone that was not the angel, and the angel appeared.

So what if we chipped away all that is not love and then found love by doing that. Like the friends in Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na who one day realise they're in love. So if one doesn't feel negative towards a person, doesn't hate them, doesn't not care, doesn't not understand, doesn't not feel something nice when one is with that person, then it could logically mean that there is a possibility of love. And probably, if the mind explores, ta da, love happens.

For those of us looking for love, perhaps it's always been around. But maybe we've been just been too distracted by the traditional signs of love to see the presence of it.