I blame the Tamil movies….
I remember the exact moment it happened. Picture the scene… I’m watching a movie on Saturday night with my mum and dad, and 2 sisters. The hero in the movie isn’t incredibly famous, but to this day I remember the story line, and the love and sadness I felt for the guy who doesn’t get the girl. The year – 1996. The movie – Poove Unakkaga. The hero – Vijay. I was 13-years-old, and that brought about a lifelong love of Vijay, even when he acted in some more questionable movies (Puli and Beast come immediately to mind).
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What that movie started for me though (apart from an unhealthy obsession with Vijay), was this idea that love at first sight was not only a thing but that it was something to aspire to. I’d imagine sitting in a car and looking over at the passenger in the car next to us (this became the driver as I became older by the way), and he would quickly and irrevocably fall in love with me, and I him.
Now at the ripe age of 41, I would love to believe in love at first sight, but now being a bit more cynical now than I was at 13, I now know that it’s more likely the guy in the bus who would make googly eyes at me, and that love at first sight is much more likely to be lust at first sight. Now this is not to say that the guy in the bus isn’t entitled to his love story, but as TLC said, ‘I don’t want no scrub’.
Love isn’t just about the butterflies. The older we get, the more we understand that butterflies, whilst great, eventually gives way to indigestion if we don’t sort them out. Marriage, families, children, work, loss and just the mundane reality of living side by side with someone means that love needs to be based on more than the butterflies. In fact, it needs to start off as a caterpillar before blooming into a butterfly, so that when the inevitable happens, and you disagree on who is taking the bin out on a rainy Thursday night, you remember all the reasons you fell in love in the first place.
However, for the likes of Mani Ratnam and Gautham Menon, a movie based on slow burning love isn’t going to give them the same box office hits as Alai Payuthey and Minnale. Which I understand (reluctantly) at my age, but when I was 13 years old, this kind of mature thinking was not something I was aware of.
Where has that led me now? I’m not going to lie. I spent my teenage years believing that love at first sight was going to save me from the life that I was living. When I got married at 19, I realised that my Vijay wasn’t coming for me. And when I applied for divorce last year at the age of 40, I decided that whilst Madhavan could tell Shalini that he loved her after seeing her on the train on the opposite platform, I wasn’t willing to look for someone on public transport.
