Love, Actually, Is Nothing
It is a truth universally acknowledged by friends who have spent long languorous evenings with my friend Professor X, that he – a learned man by profession – transforms into a veritable seer once the nectar of the gods starts flowing through his veins. His most memorable epiphany may have meant something quite different from how I interpreted it in the far corner of my mind (where I had retreated to by that point in the evening), but its essence did not get befuddled even when my everyday critical-thinking mind eventually took over.
‘Why,’ he asked me with a conviction and clarity that can only be induced by alcohol, ‘did we not know in our 20s and 30s that love, actually, is nothing?’
And I, who had been blaming myself for falling in love with the wrong persons repeatedly, suddenly realized that love really is nothing: we try to shape it into this or that and fit it into our many relationships – sometimes romantic, sometimes social, filial, and familial – and when it does not fit in, we fall apart. Like I did when my marriage ended one sunny morning in India, 13 years ago, with me running in my flipflops across the manicured lawn below my apartment building to save my life and finally accepting that the person I was determined to love all my life was the one sucking the love (and life) out of me. I had married him for love, of course, and there had been the bright and brief flashes of love even amidst the beatings and the serial brutality, but this love was trapped in our marriage; it escaped when I finally found the courage to walk – no, run – out.
I fell apart when my partner tried to strangle me and would have totally shattered had not my love for him abandoned me just when I needed to put my life back together for the sake of the six-month old in my arms. Before that beautiful sunny autumn day, I had been desperately holding on to my love for him. He had been my partner for five years; of those five years, I had been married to him for four and a half. I had refused to release that love in the hopes that it would intervene to end the abuse that had become a ritual during those years. But love does not care for relationships, and I began realizing this slowly during the first few years after I escaped my marriage.
This realization – introduced first by Professor X’s drunken observation and reinforced subsequently by the aftermath of my marriage – grew in my mind, unnoticed, for the next five years as I built up my life, career, finances, and myself, again, from scratch. Meanwhile, I had an infant to raise, and parents who could not see me cry. I had moved 1900 miles away from my partner, but his abuse had followed me there, back to my childhood home. Endless litigation, defamatory emails to professional contacts, false accusations before family and personal friends, sudden unannounced visits, violent confrontations, and constant surveillance, the list goes on. The legal system had loopholes and those in law enforcement were in awe of powerful men with political influence and financial capital. I had neither. Therefore, once again, I decided to move me and my son away from this dark, threatening presence.
When I moved to America on a Fulbright fellowship in 2016, I was entirely on my own. I landed in Philadelphia, and I did not know the place or the people. I was only aware of some distant or forgotten connections and would have to rekindle them once here. As I did so, I realized that it was freeing: living this life where I was able to depend only on myself, to test myself and the limits of my capabilities, to get to know who I really am. So I stayed back after my fellowship period expired, solo parenting, working fulltime at a precarious job with inadequate pay, being forced to constantly switch between color-coded, racialized systems and societal interactions, and all the while, continuing to fight unending legal battles back home (thanks to the love-of-my-life-that-never-was).
Sometimes it all got to me, and I realized gradually, that for the sake of the little human dependent on me, I would have to find my own coping mechanisms. I became my own therapist. I started retreating inside my own head, and retrieving and dusting off my realizations about love during the only time that I could: on the 30-minute train rides to and from the city, or the 15-minute walks between the train station and the university. Taking this time out of time, I began to reflect on the true meaning and purpose of love and loss in my life, and how they have affected my relationships. And I started to have minor epiphanies. I did not have to journey (back) East or go to the jungle or the mountaintop to acquire this understanding. Nor was I totally isolated and cut off from human contact while undertaking this quest: I had my child to take care of and I spent sufficient time with my growing network of friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. But for the first time in my life, I did not have any of my permanent and prior familial and familiar relationships to fall back on. And I did not have any sustained relationship with the outside world to bog me down as I moved between rented apartments and precarious, underpaying jobs.
This forced me to develop a new, consistent relationship with myself, and to place myself in the spotlight where I was the only constant, and the people around me were all moving, shifting, changing: the distant cousin who helped me settle in Philadelphia when I first arrived grew close like a sibling, found a new job, and moved to another state; my writing partner who held me accountable as I put my research together, talked to me about her own trauma, helping me put mine in perspective, and moved back to her own country after her fellowship ended. I had multiple such occasional, transient, but meaningful and life-altering human encounters with people who showed up when I needed them and left when they had to.
These encounters made me realize that love also is like this, constantly moving in and out of our lives. We cannot decide when it will show up, or in what shape and form. It has its own agency. It flows between people, through objects and ideas, in chance encounters or lifelong relationships. But it comes to us when we need it; we only have to be able to recognize and accept it. Ascetics travelled the world looking for love, singing about it, and reveling in it. My favorite Sufi poets seemed to have found it, in that amorphous entity they decided to call god, but who could be beloved, friend, foe, the feeling itself, or sometimes even the self. I found it, fleetingly, at the University of Pennsylvania trolley station as I huffed and puffed down the steep stairs, carrying my (then) five-year-old, his bag of supplies, and my documents, books, and laptop. It came in the form of a SEPTA token from a person who also gave me directions back to my cousin’s home in the suburbs: I was at the university for the first time to register as a visiting fellow and begin my academic journey in America. By the time I put my son down and turned to thank the person, they were gone.
Like love often does. It will not be trapped inside relationships of gratitude or dependence, companionship or convenience. It cannot be controlled: it is not up to us to decide that we will love the one person forever, or that we are done with our connection with someone. Like my friends, Sam and Dil, both of whom reentered my life after 20 years at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through WhatsApp chats and daily check-ins, we kept each other sane amidst the global chaos. We were inseparable at journalism school two decades ago as we prepared to enter the adult world, but once in that world, we went our separate ways. Sam left journalism to reenter the tech world he organically belonged to; and Dil remained a journalist for a while before getting married and moving to South Africa. But the love we shared drew us back to each other when we started reassessing our human relationships in the face of death and an inescapable disease; it was a love without artifice, without expectations of professional or personal gain, and without any fear about the consequences of putting ourselves out there.
This is the kind of love that sometimes spills on to the street as the song, sweat, blood, or tears of protestors marching for the rights of fellow humans to live with dignity. Just before the pandemic started, the streets of my home town in Assam, India, had erupted in protest against a citizenship law that threatened the rights of indigenous people. I watched from across continents. And then, just a few months later, not eight miles from where I was in suburban Philadelphia, people got together to chant ‘I Can’t Breathe’, the last words spoken by George Floyd, Eric Garner, and who knows how many! While Covid-19 prevention measures were physically distancing one human from another, even within homes and families, the outrage against the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd had rekindled deep-seated connections between humans of all color and class who came out united to protest.
This love that connects people does not always have to propel us to take to the streets. Sometimes, it makes us involuntarily cringe when we watch reports of police brutality on the news. At other times, it is the reason why we surreptitiously reach for the box of tissues when a character in our book or movie is harmed. It is for this reason that we allow this love to redeem even the mega villains in our books and movies. Unless they are Voldemort – from the Harry Potter books my son refuses to read and I’ve read and reread about five times now – and have no capacity for love. It is okay, however, if you are Professor Snape and just do not have the words.
Like my family, that does not voice their feelings. I lived my life terrified of articulating love to them: so when my sister forces me out of the house when I am depressed, drives me to the mall, and makes me eat an ice cream flavor I do not like, she does not tell me why she did it, and I do not want to become the drama queen by letting her know I know. I see it, accept it, and say nothing, because as the other professor, my friend X, affirmed, albeit inadvertently, love really is ‘nothing’.
Love certainly is not a thing that can be shaped to fit into our inescapable relationships, or controlled by our desire to cling on to certain people. Since kindergarten, we are taught to cubbyhole everything we own; but love will not be owned or contained. After years of living a precarious life – building and losing and rebuilding and leaving and scattering – I realized that nothing is under our control. Control is an illusion we create to cope with the precarity of it all, and it is the breaking of this illusion that makes us miserable when love leaves.
In recognizing and embracing love, we must also be willing to accept its loss. I never thanked the owner of the SEPTA token but I felt the love. Some may say the token was just a token of basic human kindness or decency, but kindness does not always have to come from condescension. And can one be a decent human being if they are not prompted by love? I thought I had lost Sam and Dil. I was ready to accept the loss and yet, they came back. Dil feels it was her choice to never stop loving us even as she was riding her own life’s rollercoaster. Why talk about loss, she asks me. And I think maybe that was why she was the one chosen to bring us all back together. On the other hand, I was too weighed down by my ego and societal pressures and family expectations and the unbreakable bond of abuse to admit that love had abandoned our marriage: I just did not want to lose my husband.
I know now that I was confusing love with relationships, which are not involuntary like love. If love is the energy that flows through people, relationships are the fairy lights that string them together and make them glow. Even when the glow is gone, the strings continue to connect people. When love leaves, it is up to the people to decide the best course for their relationship. Sometimes, the most decent thing to do is to walk away. At other times, because of mutual needs, relationships require working on. These needs – of dependence, companionship, filiality, to name a few – may inspire bonds of equality or hierarchy but they need to be cultivated and nurtured.
After I left my husband, our relationship of abuse continued in new ways, as did my trauma. My entire family was subjected to social embarrassment, police action, litigation, spoken and unspoken threats, and verbal abuse because my partner’s wounded ego just could not let me walk away. I felt enveloped in a dark cloud for years after that last sunny morning, running away in my flipflops. But looking back now, I realize there had been love in the dark days, even when I was being battered at home: like when my hairdresser at the salon touched my arm and asked about my bruise. ‘Insect bite,’ I said, and felt only my embarrassment, not the love that showed as empathy through her. When I left the battery behind, love flowed through my family’s support. But I was too busy surviving and raising my six-month-old and trying to look strong for my family, to recognize any of it.
If I had known then what I know now about love and its loss, I would perhaps have handled my trauma better. It is entirely possible that, as Sam fears, what I am projecting as my realization about love now, post-trauma, is actually my sense of gratefulness for the basic human decency and consideration I was denied through the years of abuse. He may be right, but I choose to embrace this knowledge – my knowledge – of love and loss and how they affect my relationships. If, as Joan Didion says, ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’, this is the story about love that I want to tell myself and the world. And I do this so that I can leave darkness behind, anywhere it finds me, and appreciate light, where I see it.
Going forward, I will take love wherever – and for however long – I can find it. And when the time comes, I will let it go.
[Names are changed or initials used to protect privacy; permission to include their stories is granted by the named/initialed individuals.]
Uddipana Goswami is a writer and feminist peace researcher teaching at Kennesaw State University’s School of Conflict Management. A former Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, she is the author of eight books exploring personal and political violence in conflict zones. Her poetry and fiction, including Gendering Peace in Violent Peripheries (Routledge 2023) and The Women Who Would Not Die (Speaking Tiger 2024), draw from her research. Formerly a journalist with outlets from National Geographic Channel to Seven Sisters Post, she has also taught at institutions in India and the U.S., including TISS, Guwahati College, UPenn, and Johns Hopkins.