It’s not easy being in college surrounded by friends who take pride in falling in love while you played the role of a sympathetic witness. Yes, that’s me. It’s not that I didn’t yearn for the attention or the affection of the opposite sex. I did. But at the same time, I believed I didn’t deserve the same. The reason being simple. I was the plain Jane who looked good only when there was a movie made on her life. I was that sidekick whose only brush with love was to be the messenger of the love letters of her best friend’s boyfriend. My self-esteem was all-time low and I believed that the pigeon in life had better chances of having a love story than me.
And it’s the kind of fear you are scared of sharing with anyone. Sometimes, I would try my best to cover that fear with a truckload of make-up. Thus began my tryst with beauty products and every penny I got as pocket money was spent on creams that promised miraculous glow, on darker than midnight kajals or lipsticks redder than the shade of blood. With every attempt to make myself look like the girls I saw on the cover page of magazines, I started losing the confidence in myself a little at a time.
That’s the age when someone falling in love with you was more important than you falling in love with yourself. So, when one of my classmates said he is in love with me, I was in seventh heaven. I didn’t matter whether I loved him or not but what mattered was someone was in love with me. And I began the relationship with a lie—I told him that I loved him too. There was a sense of belonging in being in love. Was it peer pressure? Hell, yes. I was no longer the girl who was the colourful background to someone else’s love story. I had a love story too. And that’s all I wanted.
As our last day in college drew closer, our relationship too started getting colder. There I was heading towards my first heartbreak but without even feeling a pang of sadness. All I wanted was to have the last say so that I can go and tell my friends it was I who broke up with him and not the other way round. That’s how my first experience with love started—as a great story I could share with my friends.
After that, I still had a few more relationships. But none lasted long. Until I met one of my colleagues who said was in love with me but wasn’t sure if I would ever be in love with him. When I asked him why, his response left me dumbfounded.
“You are in love with the idea of being in love. You want it to be perfect. You want to make your friends jealous of your love story. But have you ever wondered if you would ever fall in love if there was no one looking at you? If there was none to take notice of your love life?”
The anxiety to be in the protagonist of a perfect love story had kept me away from the love I deserved. It took me seven failed relationships to realise that!
