Low Brow Love

The point I want to make is that most intellectuals either remain dissatisfied in love or become fickle, and that those that remain at just the basic levels of understanding, care and compromise in the relationship not only stay faithful and happy but also in the end are the real winners in the craziness of relationships where single absolute truths are rarely found.

Take a happy couple in which One has had an earlier love in a smart, whimsical but unworldly person. Now, ask that One with a broad smile, "Isn't everything just perfect?" Chances are an ideological junkie will not reflect your enthusiasm, at least not genuinely... and anyways the real thinkers would die before faking a smile. A simpler One would have learnt that what was lost was possibly not worth all the pining.

Take a literary couple. Each has maybe churned out real thought-foods on, say Tagore, apartheid, contemporary art, economics or mediterranean cooking. One goes and finds a paramour - forbidden love that grows sweeter and eventually essential. Ask One what's right. Chances are the free-spirited individualist who believes in each-to-his-own, would choose to stop doing what the 'society' thinks is right and would go with the soul's calling.

Intellectuals have a flair for debating on the very tenets and norms of society, a knack of proving right their choices not only to others but to themselves too. They contrast more starkly what they have with what they want. They grow to like their own minds and think they deserve keeping only such like around. Intellectuals brood on the past more and demand more from the future. Intellectuals walk out on committments more often.

It may not be a winning argument, and who am I to win an argument against the high-brows... When it comes to love, simple seems good enough.