IN LOVE, 'I AM GOING TO BREAK YOUR HAND' MEANS, 'I NEED IT BADLY, DARLING'

There is an old saying in English: “Many are the stars I see, but in my eyes, no stars like thee.”

Tomorrow will be the ‘Valentine Day’… I wonder, if I still say this to my wife, my Valentine for 28 years! “Old is gold,” yes, I know, is another very old saying in English… But, again, I wonder, if that’s how we truly feel, when it comes to our Valentines!

Well, it’s very sweet when we say, ‘hearts do not age’… Love, as Bette Midler’s beautiful song, ‘The Rose’, says, ‘is a hunger, an endless aching need.’… I love this song for its deep meaning laced in hope, tenderness and, yes, a lot of pain, too…

I am sure, almost all of us have felt and expressed to our partners, in our intimate moments, what Alfred Nature said, “If I had a flower for every time I thought of you, I could walk through my garden forever.”

But, after close to three decades in my marriage, I know as much as all married couples do, that, we will never have flowers in our hands for every time we think of our partners… We will have sharp knives, too!’’. And, yes, we will never walk through our gardens, forever!

What we do, and I hope you agree with me, is that we will learn to say to each other what the title of the famous book by  David Viscott on relationship says, “I Love You; Let’s Work it out”…

If Love has to be real and marriage has to be stable, I don’t think it’s possible, if we are not ready to endlessly ‘work it out’…

To me, ‘to work it out’ means, to cultivate in our hearts loads and loads of patience and forgiveness… loads and loads of compassion… Loads and loads of far sight. I said, ‘far sight’, which means holding in our hearts the long vision, the big picture, and never getting caught up in what we feel and vent out to each other when we are hurt or feel let down…  It’s what the singer Beyonce says, “Love is an endless act of forgiveness… Forgiveness means me giving up the right to hurt you for hurting me.”

We may have fallen head over heels when it all started… But, if we haven’t yelled and thrown our hands up as we progressed in our relationships, I really think, we haven’t loved at all…

Yes, we all have been frustrated and lost hopes, many, many times… and, we all have felt hurt and let down… And, here is where a strong belief in the statement ‘I love you; let’s work it out,’ comes to our rescue… We have to keep sailing, adjusting constantly our sails as the uncertain winds blow… We have to keep holding our forts!

In her latest book, ‘Becoming’, Michelle Obama shares her own frustrating moments in her relationship with the man she had fallen in love, adored and stayed married to, Barack Obama. She recalls the moments she frantically juggled and felt helpless when she lost her good babysitter… She, so honestly, recalls these moments when she had burst out at her husband, “You are of no use to me… the babysitter is!”

Sounds familiar!!!!

One morning, as I was leaving the house in a hurry, I had got it from my wife, “You, you, you… I am going to break your hand!”

And, what was my crime?

I wanted to give hundred rupees to our house-keeping lady who was expected in a while. But, as I was rushing, I just asked my wife to do the needful… “I am keeping it here,” I said, placing the hundred-rupee note under the beautiful glass-bottle she had just bought the previous evening to store and keep drinking water on our dining table. So, she did not want the bottle to break… and, that’s all she meant when she brought her knife out screaming, “I going to break your hand!”

But, for a moment, I did react, “What did you say?”

Barack Obama ‘is’ more important to Michelle even if she had screamed at him - yes, in her moments of ‘rush’ – ‘You are of no use to me… my babysitter is!”

I know, to my own Michelle, her new glass-bottle can never be more important than my hand…

So, in Love, ‘I am going to break your hand’ actually means, ‘I need it badly, darling!”

A Happy Valentine Day, in advance.

GERALD D’CUNHA

Pic.: Shoba N Krishnan

Videos: YouTube/Bette Midler