It's Casual

A few days back a friend of mine showed me a picture of a girl and without much thinking I instantly asked him “girlfriend??” and just as I was about to feel the dumbest person on earth, he gave an even dumber reply. He said it was “casual”.

Attraction

So almost all my friends have been in casual relationships and I am pretty sure none of them was in their senses while doing so. I mean being with someone because you were simply attracted to them doesn’t make any sense to me at least. Has time become so worthless for everyone that they just want to waste theirs on someone else? Or is the time they already have for themselves not enough that they want others’ time and attention as well.

I think the whole idea is to generalize every special aspect of life. Be it a relationship or even a feeling. Earlier a relationship meant two people being connected. This connection could be in any form be it a friendly connection, spiritual connection, platonic connection or anything that wasn’t necessarily romantic. But what did we do? We just reduced the meaning of such a precious word into something that involved being with someone under peer pressure.

Peer Pressure

The root, or even a push, that makes people get into casual relationships is peer pressure. Before you disagree let me tell you broadly about peer pressure. However the word might sound, peer pressure does not necessarily mean a bunch of your peers targeting and forcing you to do something that they are doing. In fact, peer pressure is actually the pressure that we put on ourselves by watching and getting influenced by the actions of our peers. It has got nothing to do with people directly coming to you and making you do things that they want you to.

Observing the Self

The problem is we always want someone else to make us happy. It won’t be wrong to say that we fail miserably at appreciating ourselves or at fulfilling our wishes or even just making ourselves happy. We want someone else to come out of the blue and do good things, probably nice things for us. We are constantly seeking someone else’s confirmation for our bloody own thing. We want others to call us good-looking, smart, or by any other compliment. We want them to take care of us when we literally leave ourselves to die in the name of being helpless. We think it's about us, but in actuality, it's all about them. About their love, their care, their attention, their compliments, their time, and everything that belongs to them but should be ours apparently. How can we expect someone else to notice us if we never paid attention to ourselves in the first place? How can we expect someone else to give their time when we never invested even a second on ourselves? It's like we have a mirror right in front of us but we want someone else to tell us how we look.

The more casual it sounds, the sadder is its reality. In an age when we hardly get time to breathe, when we’re extremely busy with our work, our craft, and most importantly when we can’t even make time our damned self, why do we think it is important for us to get into something merely out of a fickle attraction or just for fun which not only wastes our time but also with which comes all sorts of mental problems, heartbreaks, heartaches, etc.

 

Making Peace with Oneself

If others were so powerful in solving our problems, mental health wouldn’t have become such a huge problem as it has now. At the end of the day, you have to fight your own battle. No beast would fight for you neither will any beauty free you from any curse.

I'm not against people being with each other nor am I a promoter of loneliness. In fact, I do strongly believe in the power of love. But this is clearly not about love. It has got nothing to do with seeking or giving love. It is just about two people foolishly trying to escape from their problems and thereby creating more of those problems. All I want to say is if we focused more on things that need our attention rather than asking someone else for constant appreciation we would have more relationships having clarity and lesser casual or complicated ones.

“You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.”

― Abraham Lincoln

Note: Illustrations are made by the blogger.