Love and its many tales

Love and its many tales

Love… and the many tales 

I love you… and so!

Author: Patriccia Balan

Publisher: Turtle Books

Pages: 138

Rs. 200
– Punya Srivastava

​​​​​​​I simply loved Patriccia Balan’s I love you… and so! Why? Because with each page that I turned, I could see a mirror being brought close to my face; not too close to blur my vision but close enough to actually see my definition of ‘love’, warts and all, getting dented a bit here and there.Love ain’t something definable. And thank God, Balan does not even attempt to do that here. Because love means different things to different people. And this is what sets the tone of this book from the word go—to ‘not’ box, to ‘not’ judge how different people interpret love differently. How wonderful it would be if one could be grateful in love. With gratitude in place, love is unconditional; absence of gratitude renders it a commodity subjected to terms and conditions. Our projection of what ‘should’ be love creates unnecessary drama and trauma in our lives. “What blinders have I put on in the name of love?” she asks simply.

Balan succinctly points out how we manipulate ourselves and others in our lives in the name of love. For so many of us, the feeling of being in love or being loved holds greater significance than simply ‘being’ love. ‘Being’ love is accepting all that ‘is’ as it ‘is’, without judging our choices as good or bad. 

Through 17 chapters, the author talks about various relationships and the expectations associated with them. She shares experiences from her own life as well as anecdotes related to people around her. Talking about romantic relationships, she points out how we put our partner on a pedestal, making ourselves small in turn and diminishing our self-worth in a bid to make them stay in the relationship forever. And when the relationship goes downhill, we allow ourselves to be held captive by the choice of ‘maintaining the relationship forever’ that we made all those years ago.

I would highly recommend a thorough reading of this book to one and all. For it is this book that tells you that instead of going the cliched way of “I love you, so I trust you wholeheartedly,” it is much better to operate from the space of “I love you and I am willing to be aware of everything I am with you and you are with me and we are with each other.”