Twin Flames!!

Really...

let’s talk about unabashed, unapologetic romantic love.

Shall we?



“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” used to be my 101 of love for a long time. Catherine had said this about Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. It was part of our course, and we were sold on it. Every girl from the classroom. We had assumed our life’s purpose to be a simple one, around that age and time. We needed to find our own Heathcliffs!

What is love, I have often wondered. Surely, it is not the red balloons at the traffic signals or about the Archie’s greeting cards that sell over the first fortnight of chilly Februaries. It is profound, much more profound than that, of course. It is perhaps the strongest emotion we human beings are capable of. It is often larger than life itself. It can change the life that you lead, and it can change the person that you are. It is important to know how every love stories is immortal in its own way even if it does not result into a forever. You are never the same person before and after it. Think of it - shall we ever be able to love as innocently, as entirely as we had loved in our first crush?

What we know and believe to be love in our teenages is really what the scholars have come to name as: Twin-flame Love!

The thing about soul-mates, the thing about being made for each other! Plato, the Greek philosopher, talked about that back in those days, and we talk about that even to this day. They say that humans originally had four arms, four legs, and a single head made of two faces. They were complete in themselves. But the gods felt threatened. They split humans in half as punishment for humanity's pride and doubling the number of humans who would give tribute to the gods. But then, each human would then only have one set of genitalia and would forever long for his/her other half; the other half of his/her soul. So, by mistake, the Gods had created Love!!

It is said that when the two soul-mates find each other, there is an unspoken understanding of one another, that they feel unified and would lie with each other in unity and would know no greater joy than that. As I read more about twin flame love and the different stages, surprisingly I found this is exactly the same concept that they use in the Yash Raj movies or in Disney fairytales. It does talk about the very same story, of having someone marked for you, and until you find your soul-mate your life is but incomplete.

For a long time, I too had believed in it. I had imagined that there’s someone up there, possibly in a silk robe and long, white, flowing beard, who manufactures handcrafted hearts to the world. But before he sends them down, he playfully tears them into two halves and floats them in the air. For the entire lifetime of these two souls, their sole task is - therefore - to find out the displaced other half, and in union shall they be complete. In fact, when I was in school and had just watched Dil to Pagal Hai, I half expected that one day a tune will start playing from behind some closed door, and in a moment I will know who it is!

I even came to know of it as true, when I had met a boy and fell in love at around the age of eighteen. We had gone the usual way as is commonly travelled by one and all. We had professed our love to each other when the time had come, shy and yet eager. We had marked the first days together, or everything from the first movie to the first boat ride. To the first day we had kissed. And made out. And told our parents. And fixed the date. And had gotten married, eventually.

Fifteen years have passed since that first of the firsts had happened. We’ve had our share of things, let’s say. We’ve spent endless days of anger and dismay. We’ve spent endless nights of candle lights and whispers. We’ve grown apart, and we’ll fallen back together. Almost in a cycle. And in the process, we’ve grown up.

As much fairytale as it sounds, now I know at every step of our lives together how the myths and magic frames of Twin flame are really, well, just myths. How matches really are not quite made in heaven but right here, on the dry, coarse earth. Now I know how a marriage needs to be match up to its demands and desires, to its fames, fortunes and fates. It is not an easy happily ever after, ever, as the Disney hard covers would like you to imagine. Girls are not to sit pretty in nice, rich clothes playing the damsel in distress. Neither can they and nor they should. No prince charming comes on horseback. Girls come back bitter and drained out from offices, just as the boys do. They fight over the chores, and upon how the other is so lazy or irresponsible. They fight over what each other’s parents had said six months back, and how they had not turned up somewhere that the other has wished they did. They fight. They fight it out at the kitchen, over the dining table, in the bed. They realize that agreeing upon their political orientations and religious beliefs, and sharing intense likes or dislikes over movies and storybooks do not make their marriage. That, marriages are made of real lives, and real lives rub against each other into bruises. They become lonely, detached, dismayed. They work their way through the dense forests, amidst the hungry, sly foxes. There are digressions; detours. There are despairs and even dooms. And yet, if they wish they can get up, rub the dust off the knees, and move. They can stay or they can quit. But they know now, and remember, that they cannot take things for granted. For granted it is not.

They walk a long, long way, and then they finally come home. To themselves.

And so have I done, too.

My heart is still not the one which had beaten to the rhythm of a Yash raj tune. My heart is sturdier and stronger than that. More than that, it is complete.

I am not a twin flame lover anymore, and neither is my spouse who had once played the role of the Charming Prince and rode the horse. No, not anymore. We have both come of age. We’ve grown up. Together!

An edited version of this post first featured as the Valentine's day post on Bonobology.