You meet someone, discover a connection, navigate the occasional misunderstanding and, if everything goes according to plan, eventually settle down.

Sounds about right. At least, that’s what growing up led me to believe.

Nobody mentioned that the real challenge wasn’t necessarily finding someone to love, but understanding what loving another person actually required.

Which brings me to a rather uncomfortable observation.

I think we’re remarkably good at falling in love. I’m just not entirely convinced we’re equally good at staying in it.

And before anyone mistakes this for relationship advice, I should probably mention that I’ve never been married.

So, naturally, I am exceptionally qualified to discuss the subject.

Jokes aside, I’ve always thought love was beautiful. Marriage, too. But the older I get, the more I question how much of our understanding of romance revolves around finding someone, as though everything that follows will somehow take care of itself.

Marriage isn’t beautiful simply because two people get married. It’s beautiful when two people understand what they’re choosing.

And admittedly, it took me a rather long time to arrive at that conclusion.

I’ve loved, made mistakes, forgiven, walked away and experienced what it feels like when someone chooses to leave. Somewhere along the way, I began recognising how differently people understand affection, commitment and what it means to build a life together.

At this point, I occasionally wonder whether divine intervention has been involved.

Perhaps the gods have been reviewing my romantic decisions and collectively decided that certain applications should not proceed beyond the preliminary assessment.

I imagine Sivan observing in silence, Murugan questioning my selection criteria and Pillaiyar quietly removing yet another obstacle I had mistaken for a potential husband.

An impressive amount of celestial administrative work, really.

But beyond the humour, those experiences have made me reconsider something fundamental.

I no longer think love is simply a feeling. I think it’s a choice.

And no, I don’t mean that romantic feelings are unimportant. They’re wonderful. But they’re also terribly unreliable. We evolve, grow tired, become frustrated, change our minds and occasionally behave like absolute idiots.

I sometimes think emotions have an expiry date unless we’re willing to renew them.

Through effort, consistency, consideration, communication and a considerable amount of forgiveness.

Not the kind of forgiveness that excuses betrayal or repeated disrespect. I mean the ordinary forgiveness that comes with recognising that the person we love is just as imperfect as we are.

After all, romantic relationships place two people in an unusually intimate position. Our partners often encounter versions of us that the rest of the world rarely sees.

The exhausted version. The insecure version. The unreasonable version who has had a terrible day and is now disproportionately annoyed by the sound of someone chewing.

And we encounter those versions of them, too.

It’s rather fascinating when you think about it. We spend the early stages of dating presenting our most agreeable selves, only to discover that the real relationship involves two people who are occasionally anything but agreeable.

Perhaps that’s why the ability to acknowledge mistakes and repair hurt matters more than maintaining the illusion of being a perfect partner.

But this raises another question.

If sustaining love requires so much more than affection, what makes us believe we’ve found someone compatible in the first place?

Chemistry? Familiarity? Shared values? Or the deeply reassuring discovery that someone else also thinks pineapple belongs on pizza?

To put my degree to good use, I turned to psychology.

We’ve all heard that opposites attract. The quiet person falls for the extrovert. The organised person falls for someone whose entire life operates on vibes and last-minute decisions.

Wonderful cinema. Questionable household management.

Research, however, suggests that romantic partners are often more similar than we assume, particularly in their attitudes, backgrounds and certain behaviours. Psychologists describe this pattern as assortative mating.

Of course, similarity doesn’t guarantee compatibility. Nor does it mean two people must share identical personalities or interests.

And chemistry, I’ve realised, is an entirely different matter.

Sometimes, conversation with someone feels almost effortless. There’s shared humour, familiarity and an immediate sense of connection. Everything feels exciting, almost cinematic.

Other times, a connection develops so quietly that it barely announces itself. Ordinary conversations, remembered details and a curiosity that gradually becomes familiarity.

Both can be meaningful. But I’ve started wondering whether we sometimes confuse emotional intensity with emotional intimacy.

Someone can make your heart race without necessarily making room for you in their life.

Relationship psychology also examines something called perceived partner responsiveness. It describes the experience of feeling understood, valued and cared for by another person, and research links it to greater intimacy and relationship satisfaction.

Perhaps we’ve been paying too much attention to how someone makes us feel and too little attention to how two people actually relate to each other.

After all, attraction can begin a relationship. It doesn’t necessarily tell us whether two people know how to sustain one.

And modern dating certainly hasn’t made this distinction any easier.

We have more ways to communicate than ever before, yet we’ve somehow developed an extraordinary talent for avoiding clarity.

People can spend months talking, meeting and behaving affectionately without necessarily understanding what their connection means to each other.

And when someone finally asks where things are going, there’s always the wonderfully convenient response:

“Let’s just go with the flow.”

Ah, yes. The flow.

Nobody knows where the river is heading, whether both passengers want the same destination or whether one person has quietly abandoned the boat.

But we shall flow.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with casual relationships when everyone understands what they’re participating in. The difficulty begins when expressions of affection exist without the responsibility to communicate honestly.

Perhaps that’s why we’ve become so fascinated with green flags, red flags and, apparently, entire green forests.

We’ve progressed from evaluating potential partners to classifying ecosystems.

But being a green forest doesn’t mean being emotionally perfect. It has far more to do with respect: the ability to recognise another person’s individuality, take accountability when mistakes happen and make a genuine effort to repair hurt.

Of course, forgiveness has limits. Cheating, coercion and repeated harm cannot be dismissed as ordinary imperfections, and nobody is obligated to reconcile simply because love once existed.

Perhaps the larger point is that love doesn’t eliminate our flaws. It asks us to take responsibility for how those flaws affect another person.

Interestingly, cinema has occasionally explored the quieter reality of love rather beautifully.

In OK Kanmani, beyond Adhi and Tara’s youthful romance, there’s the companionship between Ganapathy and Bhavani, an older married couple navigating the realities of ageing and Bhavani’s declining memory.

Their relationship is shaped by years of shared experiences, changing circumstances and continued care.

That kind of love rarely receives the same attention as dramatic confessions or grand romantic gestures. Perhaps because it’s rather difficult to capture decades of commitment in a five-minute song sequence.

Still, there’s something compelling about a relationship that continues evolving long after the novelty has faded.

It brings me back to the idea of happily ever after.

I’ve become less convinced that it means finding the mythical “right one” and expecting everything to fall into place.

Perhaps there is no perfect person waiting to resolve all our contradictions. Perhaps there are simply people who meet, connect, learn about each other and decide whether they’re willing to take on the ordinary responsibilities of sharing a life.

It sounds considerably less magical when described that way.

Almost like a job, actually.

Although I would argue that romantic relationships shouldn’t require performance appraisals, shifting expectations and quarterly reviews. We have enough of those in the workplace.

Human beings are rather strange creatures, aren’t we?

We spend so much of our lives trying to make sense of the world. We work, struggle, succeed, fail, survive disappointments and occasionally convince ourselves that we’ve finally figured things out.

And somewhere between all of that, we continue wondering about love.

What it means. Why we pursue it. Why we sometimes make such a spectacular mess of it.

And why, despite everything, we remain fascinated by the possibility of sharing our lives with another person.

Perhaps happily ever after was never supposed to mean that everything would remain wonderful forever. Perhaps it meant understanding that love would change, just as people do, and that its beauty lies not only in the feeling, but in the willingness to keep nurturing it.

I don’t know whether I’ll eventually get married. But I haven’t become cynical about love… yet.

Perhaps some fantasies are worth keeping. And perhaps growing older is about discovering that reality, with all its imperfections, can be beautiful in ways we never thought to imagine.

I still believe in love. I just don’t believe in it the same way I used to.