People live together for many reasons. Some do not believe in marriage ideologically. Some don’t feel ready to bring families, children and conventional domesticity into their relationships yet. Some are exploring what intimacy means to them. Some are creating a new kind of family of friendship, not rooted in sex. The idea that love and desire must have only one meaning (marriage-like) seeks to domesticate love, literally and metaphorically. It de-legitimises and invalidates a host of intimate behaviours and relationships. This push for uniformity, or homogenization, denies us the right to determine the meaning of our own emotions. When others get to define our emotional lives, they get to define us.

Conservatives wish to control love for very particular reasons. Love implies an expression of who you are as a person, not merely the symbol of a community. Liberal spaces too, often valourise relationships for their symbolic value, as opposing conservative forces through the choice of partner (when it is more a matter of rights than values). Both approaches treat conjugal union as conjugality for the Union—representing someone or other’s idea of the nation. The growing industry of sex positivity is sometimes also keen to prescribe progressive intimacies through formats: polyamory, kink, multi-orgasmic sexualness. This approach merely puts love in a uniform, an unwritten code of sorts.

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It is not relationship formats we must serve, no matter what their political claims. It is the ideas of freedom and tenderness that love suggests, and the right to our privacy that we must defend. Love is a place of fantasy, or new imaginations of being. It is a place of poetry, where ambiguity and metaphor strengthen our ability to trust the unspoken, to understand new connections, which may not have names. Love is also a place of confusion and blurry lines, and the commitment to working out their meanings mutually.

Politically speaking, it is not rules and laws that love helps us generate, as much as new imaginations of being and ethical frameworks. By thinking of care and negotiation, acceptance and healing, acknowledging mistakes and learning from them, of balancing responsibility to oneself with responsibility to others, as acts that make relationships loving, no matter what their form, we can embody a new politics of care, empathy and kindness in our social systems. Love is its own civil code.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com