BENGALURU: Every now and then, when their relationship is on shaky ground and things are rocky, people come around to family elders, colleagues, counsellors or other people they trust to try and save their relationship. The arguments to save the relationship can stretch anywhere from how one or the other person is dependent on it, or the innocent victim to circumstances brought upon the relationship by scheming outsiders, or there being children or dogs or others who are dependent on the relationship and need it to be solid.
Sometimes, the arguments to save the relationship are also just because the relationship itself has come to symbolise something for a larger community, especially in vulnerable groups where few such relationships last, every relationship seems so precious that even if the people in the relationship are reluctant to work on it, others around them may feel threatened by any threats to the relationship and want to protect it at all costs. This happens especially when the relationship is seen as a model relationship for others like the people in it, and they have been set up across the board for people in the general society as role models for others to look up to, aspire to be like and even imitate to enjoy a similar kind of space.
Thing is, when we build up a relationship as its own entity, we often overlook that there are real flesh and blood people in it, and it is their emotional space, their experiences, their visions for their own futures and their agency that is caught up in all the brouhaha. When we are trying to “save” the relationship, the question needs to be whether we are working on it for the people in it because they want to work on it, or because the relationship itself has become an entity, and is somehow now almost bigger than the persons involved in it, just because the names of the people in the relationship got mashed up into a single word like Brangelina or Virushka, or hyphenated into a name by itself.
When that happens, we often forget the people in the relationship altogether. People outside the relationship then even get upset and angry at the individuals who walked away from the relationship. Sometimes, celebrities who ended their relationships get accosted by the general public screaming, “How could you do this?” when they are really thinking, “How could you do this to me?” as if the end of the celebrity’s relationship was a personal attack, even when they put out statements like, “Please respect our privacy while we go through this conscientious separation”.
If we can pause and ask ourselves if we seriously value something over people, then we might back off and say that, of course, the people matter more than the relationship. The individual person matters. Each individual matters — not what they made together, no matter how nice it made us feel or how much hope it gave us that we too could be hyphenated or mashed with another.