Love vs Fear

What is a more powerful emotion - Love or Fear? If I ask you this question, what will your answer be? Perhaps your answer would be ‘it depends’. And possibly that answer is not very far from the truth. Because it does ‘depend’ upon the context, the situation. But 'it depends' is a very simplistic answer. Let us try to understand and evaluate this more deeply with some examples.

Let’s say that you are an animal lover. One day, a street dog suddenly goes crazy and lunges towards you. At that instant, maybe it’s your fear that is the more dominant feeling than your love for dogs. And you either try to run away or fight the dog so that it doesn’t bite you or cause some physical damage. You possibly won’t even care if your actions cause any harm to the dog. Now take for example another situation in which you want to marry a girl whom your parents do not approve of. Situation has come to a point where you have to take a decision. You are afraid on one side that your parents will be heart-broken and feel so bad, and on the other side it’s your love for this girl. In such a situation, your love might take precedence and you might end up deciding that you will break your parent’s hearts but not go of your lady love. So in this case, its love that wins over fear. Or is it? If you analyze the situation more deeply, you might realize that it’s not a battle between between love and fear. It is actually a battle between two fears - the fear of losing your parent’s love vs the fear of losing the love of your life. It’s a comparative battle between two fears. So if we go in-depth into the situations that we encounter in our day to day life, we will realize that it is actually fear that is the more dominant and compulsive emotion than love. 

Another wonderful example would be regarding our love for God. Do we really love him, or we fear about the consequences if we don’t love him? I am sure you have encountered your mother or your grandmother fasting on the day of some religious event at home. At times, they might be really unwell (running a high fever, or having a severe headache or something else), but still they insist that they will fast. Is it really love, or is it the fear that ‘what will happen if I don’t fast?’ Let’s say you love your wife very very much and you gift her a bouquet of roses on Valentines Day every year no matter what. You have been doing this for the last 15 years. But this year you are extremely unwell and can’t even get out of bed on Valentine’s Day. Do you think your wife will not understand and still expect you to go out and get those roses for her? Yes, she might feel bad that she did not get the roses this time, but would she be angry with you or try to cause you any harm because you could not get her those roses. Similarly, if you love God and are not able to maybe perform puja one year by fasting the whole day, would He be angry. Certainly He will not be. But then we do not love God, or maybe to put it more precisely, we do not love God as much as we fear him.

Let’s take another situation. A husband/boyfriend walks into a pub in Mumbai on a weekday on his way from office. He is alone and wants to have a couple of drinks before going home. He sees this extremely beautiful lady next to him at the counter. She smiles at him and she looks like she is very ‘approachable’. Now this guy is our average guy (likes girls and likes to talk about and with them, is an occasionally flirt, curses his neighbor who has this awesome wife, slows down his bike when he sees a hot female on the footpath, has known Sunny Leone for a long long time, much before she entered Bollywood etc. etc.). So what does he do? He does nothing. He loves his wife/girlfriend too much to indulge in anything like this. Now let’s geographically shift this same scenario, let’s say to a Bangkok, or a Brisbane, or Manila, or London. This guy is on an official trip for a week and the same situation happens. What does he do? Possibly here he will approach this girl. So where does his love go? Or was it fear that was stopping him from approaching the female in Mumbai. Fear that someone might see him, fear that she might somehow turn out to be known to his wife/gf, fear of doing something in a familiar city, fear of a hundred other things. But in Bangkok, he is what we call in Hindi as Khula Saand. If his love for his partner was more than fear, then his actions would remain same irrespective of where he is. But if his actions differ based on the location, then its fear that is actually dictating what he ends up doing.

Now let’s talk about the professional world. The two most popular trends that you see today are MBA and entrepreneurship (TVF Pitchers says ‘when engineers get bored of their 9 to 5 jobs, they either go for an MBA or start a startup). What is it all about? Do people really want to learn about marketing, finance, HR, etc. or they fear that with just a bachelor’s degree, they are going to get stuck in their careers. Are the entrepreneurs really in love with their ‘new’ idea, or they fear getting lost in the crowd of salaried professionals. They fear that if they don’t take the plunge now, they might not be able to take the plunge later in their lives. Basically, is it the fear of professional obsolescence that is driving them or is it the love for something?

Let’s take a diversion and talk about family life. You will see many married couples becoming parents in their late 20s or early 30s. Is it because they really love kids, or is it because of something else - fear of not able to conceive (concepts like ‘a female should have her first child before she is 30’ has been floating around for quite some time. I am not saying that there is no medical basis to it, but just trying to say that it’s again some kind of fear that is driving the decision and not love for something), fear of having to answer to parents, relatives, neighbours, other same-age friends who have become parents, the list is just unending.

I have possibly generalized quite a bit. Of course, there are individuals whose actions are driven purely by love - animal lovers who don’t care about their personal safety before helping stray dogs, committed lovers who do nothing outside their relationships no matter how much the opportunities and provocations, parents for whom kids are a product of their love and affection and not some compulsion, entrepreneurs who really believe in their ideas and feel that they can bring about a change, religious people who really love God (Ramkrishna Paramhans, Mirabai, history is filled with many such exemplary people), creative people (artists, musicians, writers etc.) who really love their craft and don’t think about the consequences while pursuing their dreams, so on and so forth. The best example that I can think of is of a Jawan in the army guarding our borders. He knows that there is someone out there whose next bullet might rip through his heart, but still he goes ahead. Yes, he is afraid of death like any other human being, but his love and complete devotion for his country far exceeds that fear and he is ready to give up his life (the greatest sacrifice that anyone can possibly do) for his country. I am sure there will be innumerable such situations that will establish the supremacy of love over fear. 

All I am actually trying to say out here is that when we carefully analyse most of the situations in our life and the decisions that we take, we will realize that more often than not that those decisions were dictated by, or taken under the influence of by some kind of (conscious/subconscious) fear more than some kind of love.