BENGALURU: The initial period when you are falling in love can be quite heady. You are seeing someone, and they seem just perfect, you are both doing everything you imagined you would be doing, and all is swell in the world. You are floating through your day with a smile so big that nothing can shake it. Your time away from each other is spent dreaming up ways to spend time together, and it is so difficult to keep your hands away from your mobile to just check your messages, or look at their insta post or somehow just connect. It is such a beautiful and content place in the privacy of the cozy little world of just the two of you.
Love can be addictive like that. It takes a while, but eventually, you recognise that your worlds need to integrate, or maybe it is just that your friends pestering you to be introduced to your special someone, and you give in. You will probably do a whole lot of preparatory talk on both sides – talk about your new love to your friends and tell your lover about each of your friends, their quirks, interests, their weirdness and all that you can think of, before engineering a situation where both worlds can collide and you can do nothing more but stay back and watch how things unfold.
But what if a few of your friends don’t seem to be OK with your new love? In fact, some of them are a lot more than not OK – they seem to see a whole different person than what you see and love. Where you see a charming, goofy person, they see an intrusive, obtrusive person. Where you see a naive, guileless person, they see a self-absorbed, social climber. Where you see a spontaneous, affectionate person, they see an aggressive, irritating person who doesn’t respect boundaries.
Or vice versa: your new lover has strongly negative reactions to people you have known for years.
You may not even pick up that there are some hostilities in the air as everyone tries to play nice. They probably give each other a fair bit of time, and you start to relax when – Boom! Things hit the roof, and everything is in the open, and it becomes one versus the other. You might try to mediate, but nothing works.
What do you do under such circumstances? How do you choose between a new love and old friends? There are many break-ups because the new love can’t stand your old friends or vice-versa. Is it the headiness of your love that blinded you to your lover’s unsightly underbelly? Or, are your old friendships so stale that they can’t see this new bright light and seek to undermine it?
Short of extreme negative revelations, you just have to choose as you and only time can tell which love was more true.