A new beginning

“The world would be a different place if every couple who loved ended up together,” she said with tears in her eyes. 

“We are meant to be together Malvika,” told Rohit with a wavering conviction in his voice. 

The night was young, the full moon was making the dark sands of the beach shine. The waves were caressing their feet and going back to the ebbs of the sea. With every receding wave, they could feel their love getting lost in the vastness of the sea. This holiday had been the last retort to salvage their relationship. They both had agreed upon this, a thing which was an achievement in itself. The secluded beach resort at one of their favorite destinations; Bali. They had their honeymoon over here, so it was an obvious destination choice when they decided to give their marriage one last resort.

“Rohit, we have to realize that this is not working anymore,” said Malvika fighting back her tears. 

“Don’t say that. Please don’t say that its over,” said Rohit with a lump in his throat.

“Don’t make this difficult, Rohit. We are poles apart and I cannot live a lie forever.”

He did not need to say anything; the tears in his eyes had said what he never could. It was over. He knew her well enough to know that once she had decided on something then seldom would she balk from it.

The wind had stopped and the silence of the night could be felt. Once they both longed for this peace, wanting to spend time at places where they had nobody to bother them. But tonight the silence was not romantic, it was just awkward. The ship had sailed and there was nothing that they could do now to make it work. She slid her hand into his, she always liked the way he held her fingers, softly caressing the inside of her palm by tracing the lines back and forth. He was staring at the dark vastness of the sea. He turned to look at her and asked,”How did we end up like this?”

Malvika gazed into the eyes of Rohit. She knew that there was love in their relationship, but sometimes that is not enough. They wanted different things in life. After more than ten years of knowing one another, today, they were mere strangers to each other. She wanted to scream that she didn’t know the answer, but all she could do was kiss him on the cheek. “I wish I knew the answer, Rohit” she whispered in his ears and started walking back to the resort. He wanted to run and hold her back, but all he was able to do was cry. Tears rushed through to soothe the pain only to find themselves failing miserably in doing so. The thing with relationships is that when they are over they leave you scarred. Heartbreaks and separation are beautiful only for the poets, not for everybody. 

Digital love

Nita flipped through the pages of his husband's diary reminiscing the yesteryears, a time when he used to express his love to her in more than three words. These are the thoughts of a woman who wants to be wooed, courted, and pampered again. She longs for intimacy and love. The same can be said for many unhappy couples these days. And the thing which all these people have in common is the too much dependency on the tech stuff of today.

  In this tech world, where nowadays nothing is impossible, it may be delayed for a few years, but eventually what you imagine today becomes a reality tomorrow. Here, love can be expressed in many ways from emoticons to text messaging, from sharing pictures with love messages to audios with songs for the loved ones. Expressing love has never been easier, just at a few clicks or taps on the phone will do it for you. But if you look carefully, this form of love is shallow, lacks warmth and it doesn't have the same long-lasting effect as love had for the previous generation. Sometimes I feel that we don’t give them the credit they deserve. They really are heroes and we should respect them for that. Not only did they educate themselves without the Internet; they also expressed their love for someone in an old-fashioned way, with love letters, bouquets, chivalry. I can say it must not have been easy for them back then also, but they still mustered up the courage to ask the man/woman of their dreams out on a real date in person. Today, how many could do that, asking someone out for a date in person is a tiny bit different from asking someone on the Internet. Even a right swipe on an app could bring two people together, but this love is based more on what you see and not on what you feel. With the rapid advancement the world changed from analog to digital and in this transition, love changed too.

I am not against the tech-savvy generation, but this over-dependency is ruining the beautiful art of courtship and wooing. Life has become a digital platform, and love and emotions nothing more than a digital signal. The internet is turning us all into emotional hypocrites, we fake smileys to hide our true emotions and reply with cute little messages even if we may not feel that way during that moment. Today, mobile acts as a medium to convert our feelings into digital signals but as it's impossible to convert from one form to another without suffering any losses, and in this case, feelings are somewhere getting lost, little by little, with every tap on your mobile screen, with every press of a key on your laptop, and with every click.