Love is ugly, deformed, cruel.

If you’re looking for niceties and some epiphanic piece of revealing life advice that will help you solve your love life, close this page and move on to the quotes section of Pinterest, or any number of those self-help websites that would do a much better job of it. This is not for you.

What this is, is a seemingly verbose piece of vehemence that is revealing, yes, if only in the way that it will remind you how much better off you are not subjecting yourself to the slow, extremely painful torture that is romantic love.

There is no one you can blame for your love life but yourself. You might curse at the vagaries of fate and the twists of chance that led you to the moment that you decided to “be in love”, but you were the one who chose the path you are presently on and so there there is no one else you can curse for your life. You are the master of your own misery, the creator of your own shitty existence.

Love happens and then everything goes down shit street.

Love lifts you up with a kind of joy that absolutely nothing else in this world can give. It also brings you down to crash so hard that parts of your body that you didn’t even know existed will start to physically ache.

It will teach you the intense pleasure of the smallest moments and the intense pain of the big ones.

It will make you want to bare yourself naked to your love, show him/her every part of yourself. Then it will remind you exactly why you shouldn’t. Exactly why you need to protect them from you.

It will tell you to drop your masks, your acts and then laugh when you collapse into yourself when you do, only so that you can then learn make more intricate ones and get better at holding them up.

Love doesn’t kill you, but it doesn’t let you live either. It’s like that dialogue from an old Bollywood movie, “Main usko liquid oxygen mein rakhoonga. Liquid use jeene nahi dega aur oxygen use marne nahi dega.”

It changes you, the person you are, the person you thought you were, the person you want to be. It constantly destroys and rebuilds you. Painfully, from the inside out.

It is the kind of maddening paradox that can allow you to be the best and worst person you have ever been all at the same time.

It is an addiction of the worst kind, that to a person, a feeling. Much harder to give up than any physical addiction.

Love is the worst illusion, leading you to believe in happy endings, making you hope. All it is doing is making it more difficult to wake up to reality, every single day.

It is all-consuming. It burns all it touches. All-powerful.

It cannot be expressed. It cannot be summarised. It cannot be explained. But it makes you want to try. It seeks release while negating all forms of release.

It brings out the base in you. The jealousy, hate and anger you can otherwise control. It whispers seductively in your ear and screams in your head.

Borrowing from one of my favourite musicians, love is like slow dancing in a burning room. Knowing the end is near, that everyone leaves, that people change and go away, but leaving you with no option but to stay.

Love is dirty, ugly, base.

Love is death.