A few days ago while nursing yet another heartache and discussing it at length with my mother, she turned to look me dead in the eye and ask, “How many times are you going to fall in love?”
Truth be told, I have asked myself this question too many times. Times when a person turned out to be exactly what I feared most, times when I had to pick pieces of my heart from the ground after another person walked all over it, times when I stood there crying in front of the mirror begging myself to be strong, times when I felt stuck in unhappy relationships and begged God to help me do the right thing.
How many times was I going to fall in love, really?
Have you ever felt that your whole life is a love story and you are the main character? I have had this all-consuming feeling of being in love ever since the tiniest flicker entered my life. I had a troubled childhood and most times, I was left alone to handle my own feelings; anytime I cried, I had to calm myself which gave me immense separation anxiety which eventually stemmed into my adulthood as a result of childhood trauma. My parents, like most parents of that particular generation, were grossly unprepared to handle themselves let alone a child and gifted me a lifetime's worth of trauma that I am still healing from. My separation anxiety got so bad that anytime my cousins left after their vacation, I used to cry myself sick because I couldn’t handle the separation and going back to my lonely routine. it's only natural that the same thing occurs in my relationships. Only now I hide my separation anxiety under my detached-don't-give-a-fuck exterior. As my trauma response, I am hyper-independent today but I cling to solitude and do not know how to handle being around people and sharing a space with them.
As I grew older, the entire point of my existence became about finding a mate and that resulted in me holding on to any crumb of affection and placing that person on a very high pedestal. This level of idolizing quickly paved the path to hating them when they made the slightest mistake and then starting the process of replacing them with another person to sit on that throne. I first fell in love with Hrithik Roshan. When it became clear that he was unattainable, I moved on to a boy from school. I was too shy to befriend anyone and we weren’t really friends at school so that ended quickly.
I moved to a new school and then fell in love with a guy (not from my new school) who showed me love in the most profound, unconditional way, and to this date we are close. He is now married with twins and once when I asked him why is it so hard for me to be in a healthy relationship, he took a deep breath and told me, “Well M, you are so easy to fall in love with. You are exactly what any guy wants- friendly, open-minded, educated, you listen, you are beautiful but then when they fall in love with someone who has everything they’ve ever wanted, things get too intense too quickly and they don’t know what to do with that. You continuously change- your moods, and your interests, and you bare all your cards too soon. They realize you are better than them and they have to continuously evolve to keep up with you. Most men don’t really like to be challenged by someone whom they perceive to be from the weaker gender.” His words pierced me on that winter night and more than that I was impacted by the fact that he actually gave it so much thought, much before I had ever asked him that question.
We lived in different countries at that time but everybody in our circle knew of us- his parents, my parents, our friends, and it kind of seemed fated that we would end up together, we would make it work. We wrote each other the most beautiful letters and called whenever we had enough money saved. He was the epitome of the right guy- loyal, loving, smart, great with numbers, caring, and his biggest trait- empathy. We didn’t end up together but after a love like that, it was hard for anybody to match up to him.
I fell in love again and again and each time, after every disappointment, I got up, dusted myself, and prepared to fall in love once again. It didn’t make sense to me honestly, this zeal to keep loving. A cousin once remarked, “I wish you had this same conviction towards your career!” I laughed at that time but I knew he was right. I didn’t have half of that conviction towards anything else in life but to be in love. I was addicted to nothing apart from the dopamine rush that being in love gave you. And it all only made sense to me just last week.
I stumbled upon Human Design from an astrology webinar that I have been attending and once I started reading up more on it, it all started to make sense. Each person on earth comes with their unique Incarnation Cross- something that defines their whole purpose on earth and mine happens to be the Right Angle Cross of the Vessel of Love (15/10 | 25/46). I embody love and it's funny because my chosen name also happens to mean- LOVE.
When you have a Right Angle Cross in your chart, it means the journey is personal to you and you have to go on it alone to align it with your correct path of destiny. And my journey is that of being an embodiment of love. It feels very blatant when we take into account only romantic love but truth be told, I have always chased love. Right from my deep affection towards animals which led me to almost quit any animal meat consumption (I am at the last leg of that process and should switch to a plant-based lifestyle any day now) to anytime my body goes rigid when I see someone toss trash out in public. If I see an elderly man beg, I will almost immediately cry (it probably reminds me of the love I had for my grandpa) and as a kid, I used to donate all my sweets to kids who weren’t very fortunate. My mother saw that altruistic side in me and thought I would end up as a social worker but things affect me too much and that's exactly why I quit studying Clinical Psychology- I knew I wouldn’t be able to practice.
This Incarnation Cross is made of 4 gates that consist of the 4 Vessels of Love.
Love of the Spirit (Gate 25)
Love of the Self (Gate 10)
Love of the Flesh (Gate 46)
Love of Humanity (Gate 15)
Love of the Spirit is what we call the vast, all-encompassing, larger-than-life unconditional love, which makes my heart always open to receive and unendingly pour out love for those I consider special. This also makes me very very susceptible to heartbreaks (and the drama that follows). I love people too much and that trickles down to my friendships and other relationships too. I have always been sensitive and an empath and I pretend to have a hard exterior to not allow every emotion to hit me.
Love of the Self is the love we have for ourselves that we can also expand to others. Like the saying, you can't pour from an empty cup therefore, only those who have enough love for the self really can love others. A friend once commented that you are a bit of a narcissist and while that statement made me gasp, he went on to justify that I love myself too much and I turned to reply, “since when did that become a bad thing?” Geet couldn’t have spoken truer words in Jab We Met when she smugly claimed, “Main apni favourite hoon!”
Love of the Flesh is the helpful self-love that helps me heal from these heartbreaks. I have never once been able to smoothly transition out of an ending, it's always painful. Be it ending a relationship, friendship, or even quitting a job. And this love of the flesh is the step I take; known to the world as self-care and this helps me bounce back. There’s a recurring joke between my mother and me- anytime she finds me applying nail paint or going out to get my nails done, she sees it as a step to my healing. And if I apply nail paint before going on a date, she exclaims, “again?!” Love of the Flesh also includes movement of the body and I have always loved to be active, I danced my way through school. I love playing sports and these too are forms of self-love.
Love of Humanity, I thought most of it was because of my Aquarius ascendant and Libra moon that I have always been very vocal about equality, justice, and socialism. I will go to war to fight for justice for the LGBTQIA+ community, have always abhorred racism, casteism, and colorism. I do not understand hyper patriotism and right-wing thoughts, or the need for wars. Would love to help spread education, eradicate poverty, end poor treatment of animals, save marine life (sharks and whales), uphold gender equality- basically anything that gives me a chance to rebel.
The fact that there was a real explanation for how many times am I going to fall in love, brought me to tears. I sat and cried for a little while after researching all these brand new human design concepts that my chart reflected. I am also a Manifesting Generator. I wish I had known this my whole entire life or I wish somebody sat me down in the past and told me, “Hey Mehr, you know what you are going to fall in love, too many times and your heart is going to hurt way too many times. You will care too much and you will love too deeply. That might overwhelm a lot of people leading you to more hurt but it's going to be okay because that’s exactly what your purpose is going to be in this lifetime.”
And although nobody told me those exact words, the Universe always has a way of placing things you need in your path right when you need them. And currently, while healing through the pain of losing a person whom I had a lot of feelings for all while going through a massive re-alignment of my life, this is what I needed to learn. It’s okay to love and it's okay to let go. In the words of Liz Gilbert in Eat Pray Love (rather Richard from Texas), my favorite author of all time, “Big deal! So you fell in love with someone. So miss him, send him some love and light every time you think of him and then drop it.” Because it serves no good to be holding onto ruins just because it’s familiar and falling in love again requires some amount of valor and faith which can feel scary when we can barely see what’s ahead of us.
You see astrology, human design, spirituality, religion, yoga, meditation, and occult sciences, they all are a great way to help us understand our life path and shift perspectives to bring us closer to our whole truth and the life we aspire to lead. And that’s the casual magic of our lives that the divinity is always so close to us, throwing us a little reassurance each time we need it. Sometimes in the form of angel numbers, spirit guides, a quotation from a book we are reading, a person we needed to meet, an educational course we needed to take, a trip we needed to make, and sometimes a love story waiting to happen, you vs the world.
Are you choosing love today? Because "I think you have the capacity someday to love the whole world."- Richard from Texas.
XO,
M
P.S. I often write to help ease my thoughts in the night and then publish the first draft almost immediately without allowing it to sit and brew so I can change my mind. I return to edit my writing almost a week after so you will find a bunch of grammatical errors and typos- please bear with them.
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