The Weight of Love & Being Loved: A Cultural Reflection

There is an enduring irony in the way human beings express affection. The moment we adore something deeply, we begin to elevate it — we carve it out from the world of ordinary care and place it upon a pedestal. What begins as devotion slowly transforms into distance. The beloved becomes an idea, the idea becomes an idol, and the idol — eventually — becomes untouchable. It is a pattern that repeats across history and culture. We see it in how we treat our gods, how we speak of our heroes, how we imagine our nation, and even how we perceive women.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead once observed that “Every society honours its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”

The statement captures the paradox of reverence perfectly: what we cherish, we immobilise; what we revere, we refuse to engage with.

In India, this pattern assumes a particularly poignant shape. We claim to love abundance — of knowledge, of beauty, of devotion — and so we immortalise it. Temples rise from stone, festivals from song, and poetry from longing. Yet the moment we declare something sacred, we also exempt ourselves from the obligation of sustaining it. The shrine is built, and then forgotten. The art is worshipped and then neglected.

The woman is glorified and then silenced. We say she is a goddess, not to empower her, but to remind her of an unreachable ideal. Our culture’s obsession with divinity is not merely religious; it is psychological. It reflects a collective inability to coexist with imperfection. To love something in its fragility requires humility; to worship it in its perfection requires only distance.

This distance is visible in how we live. We build memorials but not maintenance plans. We quote poets but do not read their books. We teach our children to respect women, but fail to treat women with ordinary dignity. We adore motherhood yet expect mothers to bear solitude in silence. We sing of rivers as mothers and then poison them with waste.

Anthropologists studying ritual behaviour often note that sacralisation is both an act of creation and of control — it elevates the object beyond criticism, but it also isolates it from life. The sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote that societies create gods not to worship them but to mirror their own collective values. When those values decay, so do the gods.

The pedestal becomes a tomb.

In everyday life, this manifests as selective affection. We admire from afar what we do not wish to understand up close. A gentle woman becomes an emblem of virtue; a woman who asserts becomes a controversy. We name institutions after great men, but seldom live by their principles. We romanticise love as eternal, yet treat relationships as expendable.

Even within families, the ones who give the most are often celebrated symbolically and neglected practically. The grandmother whose rituals once held a household together is remembered only in anecdotes; her labour disappears into nostalgia. This is not ingratitude as much as it is a social habit — we have learned to replace care with commemoration.

The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s idea of the “social life of things” helps explain this pattern. Objects, he argued, gain meaning through circulation, use, and attachment — but once they are frozen as symbols, they cease to live socially. The same applies to people and ideas. When love becomes a slogan, it stops being a relationship. When reverence replaces attention, neglect follows.

In modern India’s temples, archives, and homes, this phenomenon plays out silently. We renovate structures, not relationships. We preserve idols, not memories. The sacred and the personal alike are trapped in the performance of respect, devoid of the intimacy that once gave them meaning.

The condition is emotional as much as cultural. Human beings seek to express love through elevation because it protects them from the vulnerability of presence. To place something on a pedestal is to declare it safe from failure — and therefore, safe from the friction of reality. But the act that was meant to honour ends up erasing.

Simone de Beauvoir once wrote that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” hinting at how societies manufacture ideals to keep real women in check.

We see the same dynamic in how we handle every object of affection — by idealising it, we neutralise it. The saint is remembered for miracles, not for doubt. The artist is remembered for greatness, not for struggle. The mother is remembered for sacrifice, not for exhaustion.

What we call reverence is often a refusal to share space with the living. The beloved, once placed on a pedestal, no longer belongs to the world of equals. She becomes a statue, admired yet motionless. The temple becomes a ruin, majestic yet deserted. The poem becomes a quote on a poster, divorced from its pain. The tragedy lies not in forgetfulness but in substitution — we replace care with ritual, intimacy with reverence, and love with mythology.

At ParibhaAsha, we work with memory — not as nostalgia, but as responsibility. Across our research, archives, and field conversations, we have observed a repeated human pattern: the moment something becomes valuable, we stop touching it. We protect it with reverence, surround it with rules, and then forget to sustain it. Whether it is a craft tradition, a temple, a text, or a person, we admire from a distance instead of engaging with care.

Heritage suffers the same fate that individuals do: once placed on a pedestal, it becomes an icon rather than a living presence. Our work exists to reverse that instinct. We do not want culture to be worshipped; we want it to be lived. We want people to sit with stories, touch the grain of stone, speak forgotten words aloud, and allow meaning to return to the everyday. Because love has weight — but only those who stay close are able to carry it.

True affection demands continuity, not celebration. To love something is to live with it, to protect it in its ordinariness, to hold it even when it falters. A society that only worships what is extraordinary loses its ability to nurture the ordinary. And in that loss lies the silent erosion of culture itself.

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz once described culture as “webs of significance we ourselves have spun.”

If those webs are woven only out of admiration and not of attention, they become fragile illusions. The task, then, is not to stop building pedestals, but to step down from them — to reclaim proximity, to replace worship with responsibility, and to learn that love, in its truest form, is not about elevation, but about endurance.