From polyamory to long-distance relationships, navigating through many faces of love

We play with fire every day. Imagine giving the softest, most fragile part of yourself to another person saying, “Here, my heart is yours now. And with it I also give you power over me – power that can break me, unmake me, and totally destroy who I am.” Because isn’t that what love is, in all its immense and terrifying beauty? Like fire love lights up, nourishes, enchants – and like fire it engulfs, ravages, ruins. And yet we go recklessly seeking love, wait longingly for it, cajole it into our lives with absolute surrender. At some point, when it breaks our hearts – what a mess we make of our lives! We must be truly insane to play with this fire every day. 

And while we know that neither playing with fire nor love is a cake-walk, we wonder if there is a better hand than the one dealt us. Since I am polyamorous I get asked if loving more than one person at a time is easier than the austere limitations of monoamory. “It must be,” says a friend tired of tiptoeing around the perimeters of loyalty and exclusivity. When I tell her that there are boundaries here too and every freedom comes with its own set of responsibilities – in the case of polyamory to ensure jealousies are coped with, for a start – she throws up her hands in frustration. A straight friend running out of ideas on how to address the vagaries of men asks her lesbian mate, “We women are better at relationships, right? We are givers. Being with women must be such pleasure with no complications.” “Wait till you fall in love with one,” comes the sharp response.

Couples in long distance relationships hard pressed to meet in-person ask if love in the same city is better. Dating folks between Whitefield and Cooke Town in Bangalore, chuckle. The city’s renowned traffic has given ‘distance’ a whole different dimension. Committed lovers share the strenuous pressure to meet regularly, the constant demand to nurture that runs on a relationship escalator with predestined milestones. Another friend balancing work, children and dating asks if living-in kind of love is smarter. “I can do with extra working hands in the house,” she asserts. “And what about the monotony that builds over time”, I ask, “the getting on each other’s nerves, the romance waning with everyday chores, the suppressed anger at disappointments?” She throws a cushion at me, justifiably. 

No such thing as perfect love

And it goes on. In a world already coming off at the seams overloaded with responsibilities, scarce resources, and the exhaustion of the constant hamster-wheel of life – everyone wants a kind of love that is simple, light, and less complicated than the ones they are living. They want the successful, no-mess love. However, from witnessing and experiencing various relationships of love, I have grasped that ultimately there is no such thing as the perfect love. Or its easier, prettier, cooler variants. All love is difficult, complex, tough work. Young love suffers from the foolishness of inexperience; old love dims with the weariness of wisdom; love that transgresses boundaries is denounced; the one sanctioned by family suffocates emulating unquestioning stereotypes. No love has a ‘lite version’, comes with a fool-proof manual to tackle disasters, or a blueprint of the ideal. Instead, it arrives with infuriating puzzles, unsuspecting snares, and unpredictable temperaments. While all poetry liken love to the radiance of spring, in reality one lives through all of its seasons – the scorching sun, the incessant rains, the dark winters. Eternal spring is a mythical land and love remains at its core messy, volatile, exacting. 

But I have also realised that once you accept this truth – that love is a supremely imperfect, arduous, constant work-in-progress experiment, riddled with mistakes and failures – it starts to come into its own skin. Gone are pressures to excel, points to score. Love is unburdened from the weight of a million expectations – to cure all suffering or be the talisman against star-crossed destiny. It is allowed to be playful and joyous, an exploration of the self and its relationship to others. Love slows to a relaxed pace meandering through life’s experiences, with no deadlines or destinations to achieve. With no tests to examine its merit, this love takes kindly to blunders, making space for lapses. It does not bother to compete with available templates, instead finds its own language to make its own stories. This practice of love takes time, effort, and patience – every day – it’s like learning to cook and giving it your own spin. The spill, the scald, the bleed – are all essential ingredients. But its most enduring quality is the permission it gives to judge ourselves less harshly, be compassionate to our own faltering ways. Because without forgiveness, how can we ever imagine to heal what we have broken! 

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