#valentinesday #friends #singlelife
Edited By Lasya Adiraj
Being single when everyone around you is in love is hard. To see people falling in and out of romantic love, have crushes and declarations of undying affection sure is not easy. But do you really have time for the drama? The sadness of a break-up, the mortification of having upvoted your crush’s Quora answer from 2015, to come to terms with the fact that your partner loves Elon Musk or that they are an eco-fin major with a minor in communism/Pol Science. What with the hundreds of assignments, covid variants dropping faster than T. Swift’s albums, your professor seeing you doze off on zoom – No you don’t. Trust me, you don’t. Love will find its way once you have gotten all your LOR’s, internships, credits, extra credits, TAships, post-grad uni with a seafront view, a ten-minute walk from the beach, well-furnished…. you get the idea.
Does that mean you don’t find happiness? In moments of intense singlehood and loneliness, you might think so. Tumblr posts don’t help. With aesthetic backgrounds of cottage core and dark academia, love, yearning, and poetry in fancy Persian scripts can make things sadder. To prevent this, I suggest switching to TikTok.
But if you are like me, quitting your teenage Tumblr phase is hard. So, you stick to it. In a college setting, around your happily-in-love peers, valentine’s day brings a whole new surge of self-doubt about love and life. And because the algorithm recognizes misery and loneliness, it churns out more and more posts that make you want a stupid partner. Posts about I love you’s in “remembering your coffee orders, making food for you, making sure you dress warmly when it is cold outside.” Things right out of a perfect rom-com. As if you’d open your eyes and life would be magic.
What is this magic? I don’t have much to compare it to but maybe some experiences from my last semester have made me realize more about love than DDLJ ever could. Starting from being unsure about returning to campus, if the one and a half semesters of our first year was enough to blossom into a friendship that would get us through Ashoku. And that too when university sounded like one of those glorified jails from the Nordic countries, with Wi-Fi, good food, and ‘friendly’ management. It was hard, missing one’s family, friends, and lives outside. But in the tangle of deadlines and breakdowns and homesickness, somehow life gave glimpses of magic. It shone through in every sunset witnessed in the Sonipat skies, in smiles of friends, in their laughs and tears, in being sad and happy together, in being there for each other when things would get too much. Life was so dull and full of adventure at the same time. One minute you could be laughing at a meme and the next having an existential crisis while eating Maggi with your friends.
And maybe I had been wrong to think I would have to get everything done on my own. Friends wake you up for your 8:30s, make you stay up at night to watch the sunrise because they know you would never wake up for it otherwise, set up plans for completing 10,000 steps every day only to break it again and again. They sit and watch your favorite movie with you even when it’s unrealistic and cheesy and the hero is literally doing the bare minimum, you should not be attracted to this! They make you dress warm and accompany you on midnight sub-zero temperature jalebi-eating quests to the Dhaba. They know your subway order, that you hate coffee, and that you still mourn the departure of your favorite professor and potential thesis advisor who left for another university. And soon, you realize you know too much about these people as well 0 their tells, their patterns, their coffee addiction (precisely the reason why you hate coffee), their questionable music taste, and how they dance an awkward two-step every time they have to stand still. Friends are beautiful, magical, like sparkly glitter kind of magical.
So maybe the grand, earth-shattering love will come when it has to or even if it does not, as long as you have people who remember your Dhaba order, things should be fine.