Charting the map of love

Navigating the landscape of love can mean different things to different people. Arundhati Ghosh shares the many insights she has gained as she journeys through the terrain of the heart.

I have always been intrigued by the ways in which people experience love. For some, it is soft clay, being moulded by two sets of battling hands searching for their shapes of desire; for some others it is an endless string in tentative grips tightening and loosening with tugs and twists. Still others use it as magic powder to add sparkle to dull surfaces.

I have been witnessing love as journeys into unpredictable worlds of intimacies that spill over into possibilities beyond our imagination. But the map I carry as I traverse through dilistaan — the terrain of the heart — have assumptions which are often challenged by stories I come upon. Here are some insights which have been gleaned from several such encounters.

Control is never care

The act of dominating another person’s choices, regulating their emotions, and determining their decisions are often masked as concern for the loved one. ‘I know what is best for you’, the partner rules, not just restricting the individual’s autonomy but imposing their will as well. This apparent expression of care is in fact a compulsion to control.

The controller assumes they are more aware, more astute and certainly more equipped to command the outcomes of the loved one’s life, even when it makes the other person feel resentful and inadequate. Control has a ‘need to be needed’, enforcing dependencies. Control asphyxiates. Care however offers itself without strings attached and respects the loved one’s wishes to accept or decline. Care stands by even in disagreement, ready to lift in case of a fall.

In the rare occasion when self-harm is likely — care cajoles, even coerces and takes difficult stances, but always with the loved one’s freedom and dignity in mind. Where care listens and waits for consent, control takes over agency and regiments.

While care is about love, control has always been about power. No matter how blurry the boundaries may seem in our society where control and care have been conflated too often, in a relationship, it is crucial to distinguish between the two.

Reciprocation is overrated

The pathos weighing down — unrequited love — never sat comfortably with me. As if a love that is unable to induce a mirror image of itself in another person must be bullied to lament. Love is the luminescence we feel in our hearts when we encounter compassion, courage, and beauty in another person.

The one we love may not reciprocate with loving us in the same manner, or loving us at all. Which only suggests our inability to build one specific kind of relationship that we hoped for with them. But it does in no way exclude the many other possibilities of connections of care we can nurture with that person. And who is to say that one of those various ways of relating will not make us joyous?

After all, love has as many definitions as those who love, and we can invent what works for us. Unless, if the other person does not consent to any relationship whatsoever with us, then we must abide by their wishes and retreat. And we can continue to feel grateful that we were, for a while, witness to their shimmer and carry it within us.

Baggage is a blessing

Many friends who are dating post forty are anxious about the baggage of their potential partners. They worry how ghosts from the past will impact their burgeoning new relationships. I, however, feel that there is no need to be too apprehensive. Firstly, post forty it is highly unlikely that we would not have endured a few battles and earned the scars — our baggage to carry. While we hold and heal differently, the bruises are testament to having lived.

In fact, at this age, I would be suspicious of pristine skin devoid of these historical evidences of loving. Carrying the weight of past failures also indicates taking responsibility for at least some part of the damage, and being more grounded in the acceptance of one’s fallibility.

Secondly, I feel the question really should be whether the baggage is being processed. Unlike processed food, processed baggage is indeed a blessing. It makes us self-aware, tempers unreasonable expectations, and never takes kindness for granted. But most importantly it opens us to accept vulnerability and nurture the potential partner’s wounds with empathy.

To turn a popular phrase around, I feel ‘once bitten, twice gentle’. ‘Maybe’ is an acceptable answer: Binaries are tiresome. Whether it is the infamous war mongering of ‘you are either with us, or against us’, or the idea that one can only identify as a man or a woman and nothing exists in between or outside — binaries obfuscate complexity and squeeze away nuance from all experiences. The arrogance of certitude that justifies binaries is also exhausting. Tossed together, the outcomes of the over-assured ‘yes’ and ‘no’ as the only responses to enquiries make for a ridiculously flattened world.

‘May be’ is just fine

Increasingly, I find the need for doubt and tentativeness and ‘may be’ as an acceptable response in conversations about love. Love is messy, irrational — often confusing. It is immensely possible to be unsure of whether we love someone, want to have sex with them, want to live together or break up. We could be in fluid states processing our feelings, not quite equipped for the surge of emotions washing over us, and searching desperately to make meaning of unbearable pleasure or excruciating pain.

There, between the polar certainties of yes and no lie a multitude of possibilities embodied in the ‘may be’ — a kindness delivered to ourselves and others. It is a pause – for more time, less pressure. It allows for relationships to organically meander into their desired flows.

In the art of map making, ‘ground truthing’ is a significant step. After all the data about the region to be charted is compiled by remote means, the cartographer physically walks through the land to verify, validate and revise the information. In matters of love too, much is to be gained by juxtaposing received notions and inherited definitions with lived realities and experiential wisdom. Otherwise, as Adrienne Rich writes in Twenty One Love Poems XIII, “The rules break like a thermometer” because “the maps they gave us were out of date.”

(This column navigates the various worlds of entangled relationships attempting to celebrate, cope with, and reimagine the meanings of our connections. Arundhati Ghosh is a writer, cultural practitioner, social activist, and traveller. All Our Loves: Journeys with Polyamory in India is her first book in English published by Aleph Book Company in 2025.) 

Have something to say? Send your feedback and suggestions to [e-mail]