Star Crossed Lovers - Parsi Times

Love is the only fundamental principle of existence and the highest religion in the world. Everyone needs love and no one can live without it. It’s like oxygen. But then, love is also difficult at times and we can’t enjoy only the parts we like. With love comes the potential for hurt, rejection and unhappiness. Youngsters confuse love with sex but sex by itself is not love! It’s a mere expression of desire. Confusing sex for love is like picking a flower rather than planting one. Sex within marriage is a completely different ball game which is enjoyable till the end of life. It is an appreciation of the experience of unity and a marriage without sex is like a soup without salt.

Love is one big Karmic-soup which we all want to have. Marriage is a Karmic union. You are married to a particular person because of Karma, but the beauty of Karma is that it can be changed. In marriage counselling, I always tell couples that a bad marriage can be turned around. Instead of trying to get your spouse to love you more, you be more loving and see the magic! However, sometimes, despite your best efforts, love is doomed. Over centuries, we’ve heard of love stories becoming tragedies – Jesal-Toral, Romeo-Juliet, Heer-Ranjha, Soni-Mahival, Shah Jehan and Mumtaz Mahal or Princess Diana… truth is you can’t escape Karma. Even when you’re a Princess who has it all, yet nothing, because life minus love is one big zero!

When it comes to star-crossed lovers, few have chronicled as beautifully as William Shakespeare the consequences of tragedy of those who have, in Othello’s words, “loved not wisely but too well.” Othello becomes so blinded by his fear, anger and jealously that he creates bad Karma on a grand scale. It comes back to him and costs him everything he cherished. True enough, in anger we often hurt the ones we love most and thus hurt ourselves in the process. Passionately in love with his wife Desdemona, Othello was consumed with her but his evil advisor convinced him that she was unfaithful to him with another man – Cassio. Convinced of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness, Othello kills her by smothering her with a pillow on their marital bed. Later, when he realizes she was pure, innocent and loved him, it’s too late since bad Karma was already done. To make it worse, Othello stabs himself.

In Shakespeare’s famous Karmic love story – Romeo and Juliet are born to two feuding families, the Montagues and the Capulets. Their forbidden love ends in the death of both lovers, who had each braved their family’s mutual hatred of one another to marry on the sly. Romeo, having killed a Capulet is banished. To stay together, a priest agrees to arrange a meeting between Romeo and Juliet at the church late one night. The priest arranges for a potion for Juliet which will only give her an appearance of being dead. Romeo, unaware of the plan, arrives at the church and thinks Juliet is dead. In despair, he kills himself. When Juliet awakens and sees her lover dead, she too kills herself. The play depicts complicated-Karma.

While Shakespearean tragedies demonstrate Karmic results of twisted love, giving up politics and the Royal Crown for love is the real-life story of Edward VIII .Upon his father’s death in 1936, Edward was crowned King of England, but being in love with a twice-divorced American woman, commoner Wallis Simpson, the Church of England, of which Edward was the head, refused him permission to marry Wallis and the British Parliament also refused to give her a title. Rather than create a constitutional crisis, Edward gave up the throne – the first English monarch to do so voluntarily! In the name of love, Edward VIII abdicated, what Winston Churchill called, the “greatest throne in world history.” Although Wallis tried to dissuade him from the move, he was determined to live his life with her. They married in 1937 and lived the rest of their lives in exile. On his death, Wallis commented, “He might have been a great King, the people loved him.”

So you see, love is totally Karmic. It may be heaven or hell, full of laughter or tears, happy or unhappy but ultimately, we have to pay back through divine intervention since Karma is the Universal method of cosmic balances!