What is love?

It was a lovely day in Chennai. The road is slightly wet, so that the there won’t be smogy road dust when vehicles rush by, and its not so much wet that it splatters muddy water on someone’s dress. The sky painted itself grey. The whether is in such a way that if someone was on the bed, with a comfy blanket, they would never ever get out of that. Yet, Raj is out there walking to a cafe.

He sat at the corner of the cafe, the chair made a squeaking sound as he shifted. Across the table sits Maya. She was welcoming Raj with a smile. Kinda smile that made Raj ask “Are you okay?”. She started, “You know, I pulled all nighter and finished watching the series, Your lie in april”, compiling and explaining what she watched. But Raj wasn’t really listening. He was collecting data.

Just two people attracted to each other, he thought. He looked into her dilated pupils. Evolutionary biology, that’s all this is, he thought.

“Are you listening?” she asked, slightly tilting her head to the left.

“I am”, lied Raj. “You were talking about how heartbreaking the climax is”. Then she continued.

But his mind was already dissecting and analysing the interaction. Why was he here? Why was she? How much was the odd that both feels same for each other? It was just a stroke of luck, wasn’t it? A statistical anomaly that two people felt the same thing at the same time and make it work out. The odds were astronomical, and yet, humans chased this anomaly like it was oxygen.

He looked at Maya’s hand resting on the table. He felt a sudden, illogical urge to hold it. His brain, immediately intervened. Caveman brain, it whispered. You just want to survive and reproduce. You’re looking for a mate to bring the childlings into the world.

“You are doing this again?” asked Maya. “Dissecting and analysing”.

“I am just thinking” said Raj looking at the sizzling brownie they ordered. “Do you know the Cornetto analogy?” asked Raj.

Maya made a fond sigh, “No, enlighten me”.

“There’s this line from a movie, Sillukarupatti, where the heroine goes like..” Raj started, gesturing with his spoon. “she just likes the chocolate at the bottom of the Cornetto icecream. But to get there, she has to make herself believe that she liked the cornetto icecream in whole, that make-belief factor is what she calls love”.

“That’s kinda.. cynical” said Maya!

“Is it? Or is it just seeing the pattern?” Raj leaned forward. “We treat love like a transaction. I give you safety, you give me validation and vise versa. I remind you of your father and you remind me of my mother. Are we just finding the ‘parent version’ in each other, so everything would be familiar? Are we in a loop?”

Maya pulled her hand back. The distance between them across the small table suddenly felt vast.

“So, that’s what I am to you?” she asked quietly. “A transaction? A mother-figure replacement?”

Raj felt a spike of panic, a glitch in his rational brain. Safety, a voice in his head said. To feel safe is to be loved.

“I didn’t say that,” he stammered. “I’m talking about the species. The ancient days. Did cavemen love? Or did they just need that to not die?”

“I don’t care about cavemen, Raj,” Maya said with her firm voice. “I care about us.”

She stood up. The movement was sudden, triggering a primal alert in Raj’s brain. Threat. Loss of attachment object.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going home,” she said. “Because you’re right about one thing. Love is about safety. It’s about feeling like someone has your back, like a parent protecting a childlings from the predators. But you? You’re not protecting anything. You’re just dissecting the childlings to see how it grows until you kill it.”

She walked out.

Raj sat alone. The cafe noise rushed back in, clinking cups, laughter, the hiss of the coffee machine. He looked at the empty chair.

What is love? the chair asked. Though its just another verb, why everyone has different meaning to it? Oh, Is it a choice? the choice we make consciously or unconsciously to be with someone whilst thriving together?

Is it love when someone remembers the little things about you? he thought, remembering how she orders his coffee exactly the way he liked it without asking. Is it love to fight for them?

He felt a sharp ache in his chest. It wasn’t logical. It wasn’t a survival instinct. It wasn’t a pattern he could trace back to his ancestors.

It was just him, in the here and now, missing her.

He stood up, leaving cash on the table. He didn’t have the data. He didn’t have the well-developed rational brain to figure out what love is. But for the first time, he realized that the “caveman brain”, might be smarter than he gave it credit for.

He ran out the door, not to reproduce, not to survive, but simply because the silence she left behind was louder than any theory he could ever write down.