Episode 2: Love and Care in Relationships

Love & care are the most integral and indispensable parts across all forms of life. Love is a simple yet complex emotion, felt, studied, dissected and theorised by many minds across different generations. While love and its definition is ever-evolving, Noor, Pallack and Gaytri attempt to understand these nuances through their personal and unique lived experiences. They hope to create a candid dialogue around what it means to each of them from where they stand in different junctures of life, through intimate lenses and further contextualised by their feminist journey.

About the hosts

Pallack is a curious thinker and a tired extrovert. She works as a Mental Health Professional and spends most of her time deciphering the world that resides both outside and inside her. Passionate to learn, she wishes to educate and sensitise herself to the workings of the systems she finds herself embedded in. An amateur visual artist, she loves photographing and documenting her days through some form of art and music.

Noor is a multidisciplinary artist. She graduated as an Animation film designer from MIT institute of design, and is currently pursuing a PG Diploma in Expressive Arts Therapy from St. Xavier’s College. They created “”Ocean””, a judgement-free art community space, that fosters connection and explores themes of belonging, togetherness and freedom. They are also trained as a Menstrual Health educator, and facilitate menstrual awareness in marginalised communities.

Gaytri is currently a Communications Associate at Swasti, The Health Catalyst. She loves to bake, watch movies, crochet and hang out with her cats while drinking coffee. She is extremely passionate about social justice, rights, and social norms, especially from a gendered perspective. Occasionally, she loves to theorise about love and other emotions and how they are affected by wider social discourses and factors.

Transcript

Gaytri

Hello and welcome to “Explorations on Feminist Leadership by #One FutureFellows2022”,  a podcast by the 2022 cohort of the One Future Fellows, where we discussed, examine, and learn about all things feminist leadership. I’m Gaytri and my pronouns are she/they.

 

Noor

I’m Noor, and my pronouns are she/they.

 

Pallack

I am Pallack and my pronouns are she/her.

 

Gaytri

And today we will be talking about love and care in relationships. We will be exploring multiple themes like what love means to us, how we form these perceptions, the role of media and the formation of these perceptions, various ways we express love in different cultures, and how we can create love and harmony in consensual relationships.

 

Pallack

The rationale behind choosing this is that we feel emotions, bind and unite all human experiences. Love and care are integral and indispensable parts across all forms of life. And so while love can be experienced or understood as a complex emotion dissected and theorized by many minds across different generations, our attempt together is to understand what it means from our lived experiences, but also contextualized by our feminist journey. With its due twists and turns, we present you today, love and care in relationships. So maybe we start with understanding what it means to each of us. What do you think love means to each of you?

 

Noor

For me, love is like a home. It is held and contained like four walls of safety and protection. And what home means to me is a space to be vulnerable and accepted and nurtured from deep within.

 

Gaytri

What love means to me is, I guess it is about the gestures and the emotions that we feel and words, I guess. Maybe all that is a love language thing, but that’s how I define it. It feels like the end goal of things, the bedrock, the foundation of all my relationships, either romantic or platonic, and I feel like it’s one of the most important, most talked about, yet unexplored concepts out there. My perception of love was mainly romantic in the beginning, like as a child I used to think of love only in a romantic sense, but as I have explored it a little bit more, I’ve realized the importance of platonic love and obviously, like media has played a big role in my perception of love. So maybe we can discuss more on that later, but what are your thoughts on love Pallack?

 

Pallack

So, love for me has meant safety. I think for the longest time, safety and love, these two feelings would have no real distinction in its meaning. Feeling unwavered, feeling unapologetic, feeling unadulterated – all of this has felt very synonymous with love and close to what Noor defines or understands as home so homely. However, with the ever evolving experience of all emotions as we grow old, I think love has also brought me so much joy that it brings me this really, really unique feeling of invincibility. I think love makes me feel invincible, so it could be immunity from my fears, my insecurities, from the everyday intrusive thoughts. And in many ways, if safety is embedded in the heart of love, I think invincibility becomes somewhat of an antidote to all psychological warfare. I feel love can fully hold you and it can consume you. And maybe, just maybe, that’s why it’s so powerful.

 

Gaytri

I think that’s beautiful.

 

Pallack

Yeah, thank you.

 

Gaytri

I feel like I want to build a little on what both of you said about love feeling like home and safety. Like in my perception of love, right, I also have that feeling of like, oh, I want this one person to be my home. But like, like I said, I was quite obsessed with romantic love being the only form of love, because that was the one kind of love that I sort of craved because I did not find it readily available or like, seen around me. So that was something that I used to crave a lot. And like, that’s the whole point of like just like me trying to make the person feel like home, except I never really knew what home felt like. So that like lead to some really skewed perceptions of love. But obviously rom-coms and all these romance books that I read did not help at all. They really just skewed it even more. But I feel like feminism has really sort of helped me develop and understand it so much better.

 

Noor

Yeah, adding to what Gaytri was saying, I think the way love has been defined for us is very ambiguous and abstract and it is always something to long for and yearn for and like Pallack mentioned, it makes us feel invincible. And you know, they tell us that everybody wants love, but we remain totally confused about how to actually practice love in our everyday life and how to express love. Yeah.

 

Gaytri

So where did your idea of love originate from, Noor?

 

Noor

I think it’s definitely movies and rom-coms. Also, Disney movies, a lot. I constantly yearn for like a perfect person who was just good at everything – like looks the most amazing, dresses up amazing, does photography, plays the guitar. Just is some invincible person like Superman basically.

 

Pallack

Right out of all our fantasies together as one human being?

 

Noor

Yeah.

 

Gaytri

Yeah. Movies and books really do that to you, right? Like media plays such a big influencing role in our lives, especially in our perceptions of things. And something like love, which is so deeply conditioned in us, ingrained in us, we are told to sort of crave it, want it, need it. It’s like the end goal, right? Like, especially in the Indian context, if you look at it, love is something that is the end goal. Love and marriage. Like they are taken interconnectedly even though they are not. But that’s always the end goal. Like you are fulfilled only if you have a husband or a wife. Like or if you have a family, as they say.

 

Pallack

Right. I think what we’re trying to also maybe understand is that when we say love, we actually mean relationships here, which is that you know, the idea of our entire purpose or existence boiling down to maybe having a very, very fantastic, dream-like relationship? That is full of love and care. However, just however I feel I’ve had the good fortune of understanding and observing and feeling love by perhaps my mother’s affection, which remains currently also the template, the archetype, the entire yardstick against which love is measured, understood or held closely. But just like any young mind, growing up, I think one would always find me sitting right below the television for hours inhaling these movies and TV shows that taught me that maybe not love, but the expression of love looked a certain way. And a very interesting entry point of maybe romantic love was maybe introduced to us through media, beyond the parental affection, into a child’s mind. So maybe try to understand and trace back where it all really started from. What do you think you originally saw or were exposed to that made you understand what relationships could look like?

 

Noor

I was just thinking in terms of, you know, the movies, shows, books, the narratives, we hear about love, I feel like all of those narratives have been written by men. And all my life I’ve thought that, you know, love is primarily a topic that women contemplate about with more intensity and vigor than anybody else. But even then, the theories of love have been written by men, and I would like to quote bell hooks. She says that “men theorize about love, but women are more often love’s practitioners” (snap, snap, snap snap).

 

Gaytri

I love bell hooks. Yeah, I feel like she’s one of the greatest writers ever. Yeah, for me, I guess if I have to like, really go back and like see where it all began, I guess maybe this is just my perception. But I feel like for all of us, we are types of love. They all formulate at the very beginning, you know, in our families. It’s the way we see it, the way we experience it in our homes that we find out what we miss or what we want and we make that our love language, sort of. So for me in my family, like there was not a lot of affection or love between my parents. And I was an only child for a very long time till I was about nine. So for those formative years, that was just a lack of affection, right? And that kind of translated into me having my love language as words of affirmation and touch, you know, that is something that I developed because that is the way I wanted affection. That was something that was missing in me. But also I find myself performing a lot of acts of service because that’s how I saw love being shown to me by my parents. That’s how I ended up doing it. Like if you look at things in a cultural perspective, say in the South Asian context, right? You see so many posts and so many people talking about how Asian parents always just cut up fruit and give them to you, which is something that I have experienced, like when my dad came back to live with us, I would be studying and he would just come and bring me fruit. I would not talk to him at all, the entire day. Like we would not have conversations at all, but he would try and show his love to me by just making me food.

 

Pallack

Right… Don’t you think that in a lot of ways that’s how we’ve come to imbibe these practices? It’s interesting that you said that this is how you’ve experienced it in your formative years and it makes me curious how our parents, our respective parents have come to understand and practice the expression of love through their experiences, perhaps their formative years. How perhaps even their parents offered love in the form of acts of service. Having to check with you for having to call you. These are all forms of communication, but with the hint of love in the name of protection, in the name of care, in the name of support. These expressions are very, very misunderstood or misrepresented. So perhaps you all try to understand what it is that makes us express the way that we do. Because when I like to think of what it is that could be my love language, I completely align with words of affirmation and touch. But very interestingly it’s also because that’s the only form of love I’ve witnessed, not the form of love if you understand. So it’s interesting that means that we could have that same alignment even though we’ve experienced it by growing up. So maybe Noor could help us understand what it is that she is expressed when it comes to love language.

 

Noor

I think for me, I’ve always thought of love language as spending quality time together. Not not even quality time, just spending time together, being physically present together and listening to each other talk. Yeah, I do not expect them to do anything for me or nor do I do anything for them. But what I would do is make the person feel held and as I said before, just be present.

 

Gaytri

I think that’s a great way to build a lot of love and harmony in your relationships. I think it brings a lot of comfort to just be sitting with somebody for a while. (Yeah) Like at times I don’t want to talk. I just want to be held. And I think that’s not the first.

 

Pallack

How can you feel loved and held at the same time? What kind of experiences make you feel loved and held at the same time?

 

Gaytri

I think it’s when, if I’m feeling down, I think just somebody just being there telling me it’s going to be okay and they have my back. I think that really makes me feel very comforted and very loved because it’s just really nice when somebody is just there, you know?

 

Noor

What about you, Pallack?

 

Pallack

So I would like to think that a large portion of how I understand love would be these borrowed ideas from these very, very skewed narratives like we were discussing, that love needs to be grand and love needs to be very quantifiable. On the outside, it should be seen, it should be visible. But I’ve also come to that when it’s time to maintain and nurture relationships, whether they’re romantic, platonic, even as dynamic with our caregivers or somebody that we are providing care to, that love can be very, very. It can be as simple as a “How are you?’ And it can be as simple as just here to let you know that if you need anything, I’m going to be present through it. I think sometimes the idea of love or how we feel about it can make us feel very strict about how we experience it with ourselves as well. So if we’re trying to offer our support, love and a lot of unconditionality, even by our own bodies or by our own selves, if it is not something that we can be, that we can measure and quantify, it may not often feel enough and so a lot of our talk about love, about “self-love” is also extremely, extremely nuanced because we don’t know how to hold enough space for our own bodies, for our own mind, because we’ve never really understood how to explore it with those around us. So I think the first part that I really do, what I think of love and care is, even with this, is to be gentle. I think it’s a beautiful step in the rule. Understanding the case that is what the outcome is, the approach will uniformly be gentle and that is a rather bigger implication of support than what the words actually mean, thank you. The other smaller element, but a very integral one, is to simply understand that when I think of communication so communicating the right gestures I feel so often if all of you agree, we used to learn this a lot which is you know, “It was not my intention to say this” or “It was not my intention to deliver this”. I think it’s very integral to understand that we all come from different walks of life and so we carry a different size of baggage and we feel the weight of this baggage very differently. And have spent 100% of our life relying on our core beliefs to sustain us. So when we think of partnership, whether it’s in any form of dynamic to blend into someone else’s way of being can be very complex and critical. The only thing that I think we may want to reflect on is the biases that we carry before we hold others accountable for their role. And so we may want to constantly offer curiosity. I think curiosity is the only form of love that I’m trying to explore currently. Curiosity before consensus, and I think when we think of healthy love as well, healthy relationships, supportive love, it could look very different to each of us. And so maybe we just start by developing the practice, maybe the language to value our needs and then revise the needs of the relationship. Any thoughts?

 

Noor

I really resonate with the idea of curiosity. I think for me also, I expect that in the space of a loving relationship, there should be space for experimentation and exploration and discovery. Like to reach outwards and to reach inwards as well to explore who you are and who the other person is. I think that’s the way I look at curiosity.

 

Gaytri

Adding to that, so Pallack mentioned two points – one about self-love and one about the curiosity. So I’ll talk about curiosity first. I think it is so important to continue to stay invested and interested in somebody’s life. I think that that is what keeps a relationship alive and healthy. And I mean it in the sense of all relationships, even in friendships. I feel like through books and movies, everybody tries to make love seem so effortless. But it is not. (Yeah, absolutely). It is not. It is a lot of work that you are constantly putting in. You are constantly choosing to be there for somebody you know. In your friendships, in your romantic relationships, in your professional relationships, in all sorts of relationships, every day you are choosing to be there for a particular person. And it takes a lot of effort, time, and energy to care for somebody (Right). And staying curious is extremely important. Now coming back to the self love point. So while you were talking about self love, I was just thinking about how when we talk about love and care, the first thought that comes to us is always about others. It is never internal. It is never ‘I love myself or I love taking care of myself. (I wish to build a relationship with myself.) Yeah, there. We oftentimes forget the most important person in our life, which is our own selves, especially when people are in love or they care about people. We oftentimes tend to forget about ourselves or we lose ourselves in our relationships. We get so consumed by the different forms of love and affection. And because it takes so much time and effort, right, we forget to put that sort of time and effort into building a relationship with our own selves as well. It is really important to connect with our own selves, to know what we want, to know what we like, to spend some time with ourselves as well. I think if we are not in sync with ourselves, it’s really difficult to have a healthy, loving relationship with others. So what do you guys think? What makes a relationship full of comfort or harmony?

 

Pallack

I completely agree. I think the word that I often use to explain is ‘effort’ because there are certain words that because we are down sometimes and maybe effort comes with a little bit of that weight, which is I think relationships and nurturing relationships as a result of a lot of skill and labour. Often people around me, just as I was mentioning before, would want to garner trust in communication by saying “My intention is to communicate this”, “My intention is to help you understand something”, but it is never followed enough or followed up with some language. And while I deeply agree, I do feel your intention is integral to what it is that you’re trying to achieve. It is also just as integral to develop a skill where our communication or communication style and our intent are also aligned. So I feel one cannot trump the existence of the other. It’s also important to consider that when I say skill based relationships, I don’t mean that in order to be in a relationship, in order to offer nurturing a relationship, one has to develop a certain amount of skill as a prerequisite. It comes with experiential learning. It comes with the diversity and the richness of many, many different relationships of our life. However, it is the consistency and the perseverance that helps me understand what can allow me to be more present for myself and those around me.

 

Noor

So for me, a relationship which has comfort and harmony… I think the first thing that should be there is honesty and authenticity from all the parties present in the relationship. Like just being true to each other I think really makes a difference. Another thing that I would think of could be empathy, really understanding each other because it’s really, really beautiful to be understood by somebody else and to understand somebody else. Another thing is respect. Definitely. I think no matter what their beliefs, actions or ideas are, it is important to always respect them.

 

Pallack

Thank you Noor, for that really insightful conversation. In therapy, this is something we often say, which is, relationships can break us, but relationships can also heal us. This is how we come to our conclusion today. With our ever-evolving relationships with relationships, it’s through this vicarious learning, some painful and some joyous experiences that we attempt to theorize our understanding of love and care. Where is it you get your ideas of love? Is it the same as it was growing up? What is or what can be your love language? How do you find a way to express them not just to those around you, but also yourself? These questions stay with us through the morning chai and the evening coffee.

 

Noor

To our listeners, thank you for joining us and listening in today. We really appreciate your support. If you liked this episode, please follow us on Instagram and Facebook @OneFutureCollective and @onefuture_india on Twitter. And keep an eye out for future episodes of “Explorations on Feminist Leadership by #OneFutureFellows2022”. Please leave your questions, comments or feedback for us on Anchor or in our DMs. We look forward to hearing your thoughts. Until next time, take care of yourself and we hope that we can explore more together.

 

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End of transcript

Resources mentioned by the hosts

1. All about Love by bell hooks: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17607