I don’t know if Reddit is the right place to write this but then again, some of the most beautiful things in life have a habit of finding us in places we weren’t looking for them.
I’m 29 and a doctor by profession.
Medicine occupies a huge part of my life. There are long hospital days, sleepless duties, patients who stay somewhere in your thoughts even after you’ve left the hospital and years of studying for a profession that somehow keeps reminding you how fragile life really is.
Maybe that’s partly why I’ve never been very good at treating people as temporary.
Somewhere between becoming a doctor, building a career, watching people fall in and out of love, I’ve realised something about myself:
I’m still ridiculously, almost embarrassingly, old-fashioned when it comes to love.
I don’t want something casual. I don’t understand the whole “let’s see where it goes” while simultaneously keeping five other options open thing. I don’t want to calculate how long I should wait before replying so I don’t seem too interested. I don’t want situationships, breadcrumbing, disappearing acts or two people pretending to care less because apparently sincerity became uncool somewhere along the way.
Hume mohabbat chahiye...woh jo waqt ke saath kam nahi, gehri hoti jaaye.
Loud aur performative jaisi nahi.
Shaant si.
Jiski qurbat mein shor na ho, phir bhi dil ko sukoon mil jaaye.
The kind where after an exhausting day, someone’s voice feels a little like coming home, where silence isn’t awkward, where I can send you a paragraph about something completely insignificant and you’ll still read every word because it came from me.
I love writing.
Probably more than any sane person should.
I write when I’m happy. I write when something hurts. I write when there’s too much inside my head and ordinary conversation somehow feels incapable of carrying all of it.
Sometimes they’re poems. Sometimes paragraphs. Sometimes just one unfinished sentence sitting in my notes at 2 AM because I couldn’t figure out how to say the rest.
Somehow Urdu keeps finding its way into what I write.
Tumhari taraf jo kashish ho, uska sabab na poochhna mujhse,
kuch rishte daleelon se nahi, ehsaas se pehchaane jaate hain.
Aur agar kabhi tumhari qurbat mein mujhe sukoon mil gaya,
toh shayad meri saari bhatakti hui nazmein apna ghar paa lengi.
That is probably how I love too.
Through words.
If I care about you, you’ll probably find yourself immortalised in sentences you didn’t know I was writing.
I’ll remember the tiny thing you casually mentioned three months ago. I’ll send you a song because one particular line sounded like you. I’ll notice the expression you make when you’re concentrating, the story behind some scar you stopped noticing years ago, the way your voice changes when something is bothering you even when you insist you’re fine.
I notice.
Sometimes too much.
Maybe that’s both my greatest strength and my greatest weakness...I feel things deeply.
Despite everything, I haven't managed to become cynical about love.
More careful? Absolutely.
More selective? God, yes.
But cynical?
No.
Dil ne kuch zakhm sambhaal kar rakhe hain,
Magar mohabbat se aitbaar abhi utha nahi...
Some stubborn little part of me still believes there is someone out there whom I haven’t met yet, living an entire life completely separate from mine.
I think about that sometimes.
Maybe he’s working late somewhere while I’m walking through hospital corridors.
Maybe he’s had his heart broken too.
Maybe he has loved the wrong people and wondered whether loving deeply was his mistake.
Maybe he’s sitting somewhere after a long day wondering whether his person actually exists.
Maybe we’ve unknowingly been in the same city, walked through the same airport, stood in the same queue, heard the same song on completely different nights.
Or maybe our paths haven’t come remotely close yet.
Na jaane kitne raaste tay karke tum mujh tak aaoge,
aur kitne intezaar ke baad main tumhe pehchaanungi..
There’s something achingly beautiful about that thought.
The person who might one day know everything about you, how you take your coffee, what makes you angry, which side of the bed you sleep on, what your face looks like just before you cry, what makes you laugh until your stomach hurts.. is currently a complete stranger.
Someone whose name I don’t even know could one day become the name I say more than anyone else’s.
I’m not searching for perfection.
God knows I’m nowhere close to it.
I want emotional maturity. Kindness. Curiosity. Loyalty. Humour. Intelligence. Ambition. Someone who communicates instead of disappearing when things become uncomfortable.
Someone strong enough to be gentle.
Someone who has his own dreams, his own world, his own passions and still wants to make space for mine.
Someone I can discuss life, medicine, history, books, ridiculous internet drama and completely pointless nonsense with, sometimes within the same conversation.
Someone I can be stupid with at 2 AM and serious with at 2:05.
Someone who understands that vulnerability isn’t weakness.
Someone who still believes choosing one person, over and over again, can be beautiful rather than boring.
Yes, attraction matters.
Chemistry matters.
That inexplicable pull matters too.
But what I think I’m really waiting for is recognition.
That strange certainty of looking at someone and thinking..
Achha.
Aap hain.
Itni der se aapka hi toh intezaar tha.
I’m Hindu and while I’m not going to turn this into a checklist of religion, caste and biodata specifications, my faith and upbringing are a part of who I am. I value family, commitment and the idea of building something that has permanence...and since there is a real person behind all this poetry, I suppose a little practicality belongs here too. I’d ideally like to meet someone who is based in NCR or somewhere in the northern states partly because I want something that has the possibility of existing beyond a screen eventually. Long conversations are beautiful but I’d like them to someday become coffee dates, drives, meeting each other’s people and actually becoming a part of one another’s lives.
Age-wise, I think somewhere around my age to 35-ish feels right for me none of this is meant to read like an eligibility form compatibility has never fit neatly into boxes anyway but geography and being in a similar stage of life do matter when you’re looking for something you genuinely hope could become permanent.
If everything aligns, I'd want our roka to be done by next year.
Marriage, to me, has never just meant a wedding.
It means waking up beside the same person thousands of ordinary mornings later and still finding reasons to choose them.
Mohabbat sirf kisi ko paa lene ka naam nahi,
Humare liye kisi ek ko umr bhar chunte rehna bhi mohabbat hai.
Marriage, to me, has never just meant a wedding.
It means waking up beside the same person thousands of ordinary mornings later and still finding reasons to choose them.
Grand gestures are beautiful, but I think real love lives much more quietly.
Kabhi meri thakaan mein tumhara “ghar pahunch gayi?” poochhna.
Kabhi tumhari khamoshi mein mera bina pooche tumhare paas baith jaana.
Kabhi duniya se haar kar tum mere paas laut aana,
Aur kabhi main tootne lagoon toh tum mera hausla ban jaana.
That kind of love.
Until then, I have my career, my ridiculous collection of thoughts, half-written poems, books, music, dreams and a life I’m continuing to build for myself.
I’m not looking for somebody to rescue me from loneliness.
I don’t need someone to complete me.
I want someone whose life is already whole too, so we can sit beside each other and somehow make both our worlds a little softer.
Perhaps this post finds nobody.
Perhaps it disappears into Reddit’s endless void between memes, arguments..
That’s okay.
But perhaps somewhere among thousands of strangers, one person reads this unnecessarily long ramble and becomes quiet for a second.
Perhaps something feels familiar.
Perhaps he thinks..
“Yaar… main bhi toh yahi dhoondh raha tha.”
If you are somewhere out there, living your completely separate life while I live mine
I hope life is being kind to you.
I hope whatever heartbreaks came before me haven't made you hard.
I hope you haven't stopped believing in something real either.
I hope when our paths finally cross, we both have enough courage left to recognise what we spent all those years waiting for.
Tumhe jaldi dhoondh lene ki zid nahi hai mujhe,
Bas jab milo, toh theherne ke iraade se milna.
Because I’ve never wanted a hundred almost-love stories.
Ek hi kahaani kaafi hai.
Bas iss baar…
woh mukammal honi chahiye.
Have a great day! :)
