Read this if you're engaged. What the heck! Read it even if you aren't

I don’t usually think of such stuff (I mean, I do, but not aloud), but today we’re going to swing it (forgive the pun) and see where this goes. This one is about love. Any moron like me who can write so much as two sentences that makes the slightest sense hopes to write on the topic of love some day. Chetan Bhagat too vouched for this in an interview when Two States was released. And you thought I was lying about the moron part?

At my previous work place, I was one of the youngest people in the team. Most of my team mates were in their mid and late twenties. To us lads who were fresh out of college, we didn’t really connect with the old-timers. Every once in a while an engagement or a wedding invite would land up on my desk. Sometimes, it would be an e-mail invite. To know what that meant, read this post that I wrote to let the world know how exactly I felt about e-mail invites (that aren’t at least followed up with a phone call). If you happen to be one of them who sent me an e-mail invite at anytime, don’t feel embarrassed about it. I wasn’t referring to you. I’m only taking it out on the others who send such stuff.

So, further to a somewhat lengthy title and introduction, here’s what appeared to be happening to people once they got engaged. They fell in love. Only recently, my friend and I were having a talk about this: the whole premise of falling in love after being engaged. (It’s funny how guys can have very chickish conversations and live in complete denial about it.) Love-after-engagement must be a different experience compared to getting engaged after falling in love. In the second scenario, when two people fall in love (in the traditional sense), the situation is still vulnerable. It is love that is based on the assumption that things might work out as planned, but with a relatively less degree of surety. You and she are still rowing a boat with an oar that may go one direction now and another direction later. You may or may not make it to the shore. Things may or may not work out. In the love-after-engagement situation, two people (who in most cases haven’t met before) are thrust into a ferry with an engine. Their chances of making it to the shore are far greater than the people in the boat with the oar.

Any couple that is engaged has a vision of what their married life would look like. They’re thinking beyond planning the next sneak-away trip to the sea-shore or the hills that their parents won't know about. As time rolls by, this vision crystallizes and strengthens to a point where the two partners overlook any immediate flaws in the other that might potentially lead to any kind of a disruptive misunderstanding at that stage. (I borrow this concept from Dr. Scott M. Peck’s legendary book The Road Less Traveled. The second chapter on Love is probably the best 100 pages anyone has written about on this topic.)

To wrap it all up, falling in love the way we know it is certainly an adventure in its own end: a story with several opening ends where anything could happen, or anything could go wrong as Murphians like to say it. One of these endings could be getting engaged. But from what I see, the story of love that develops after getting engaged is bound to be more mature and softer simply because it grows between two people who know they can’t turn any which way from here.

My apologies for the analytical and serious undertone this write-up contains. I wish I could have given a Wodehousian touch of humor to this theme. But that would mean I’ll have to be in love with a girl to do so. Only then can you make fun of it, right? See, they weren’t entirely wrong when they said that a person is like a tea-bag; his true color comes out only when he’s put in hot water.

Love being analogous to the hot water, in case you didn’t catch up to that joke.