The concept of a buffet has always fascinated me more than the actual experience. In theory, it’s indulgent. Hedonistic. The freedom! The options! But in practice, you’re just standing there with a cold plate, awkwardly spooning lasagna next to sushi next to sad biryani, pretending this isn’t a terrible idea.

Love, unfortunately, works the same way. Especially if you grew up watching Shah Rukh Khan dramatically redefine monogamy in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai — where pyaar ek hi baar hota hai...until it happens again with your dead wife’s best friend. So, what is it, really? One soulmate and a shared mortgage? Or romantic communism with Google Calendar links? 
 
 

At first, you go with the monogamy story. You meet someone at 19. You fall in love the way people fall asleep: slowly, then all at once, and then with an awkward fart in the middle. You build a shared life. You get good at being a team. You split groceries and Google Drive folders. You’re the couple who shows up to weddings in coordinated outfits and sends joint Diwali texts. 
 

You know how they take their chai, and how to tell they’re annoyed just by the way they shut a cabinet. You weather fights, awkward family dinners, and existential Sundays. It’s not perfect, but it’s yours. Predictable, soft, worn-in.  
 

But slowly you start to feel like the B-plot in Vicky Cristina Barcelona — the couple that moves to Europe and still can’t figure out why they’re bored despite all the wine and sunlight. You’re happy, sure. You’re just not... alive. So you break up. Or you “take space.” Or you move to Goa and call it a new chapter. 
 

Then comes polyamory. The emotional equivalent of upgrading from MS Paint to Photoshop without a manual. Suddenly, love has layers, transparency, new rules — or no rules, which is its own form of terror. 
 

At first, it’s exhilarating. You’re free. You’re evolved. You’re doing love with subtitles. You download Feeld. You drop phrases like “emotional bandwidth” and “compersion,” pretending you didn’t just Google them five minutes ago. You’ve read two think pieces and now firmly believe love is abundant and hierarchical structures are colonial. You even host a dinner with your primary partner and your maybe partner. Someone brings banana bread. It’s all very modern. 
 

You feel powerful. Desirable. Like the main character in a horny indie film. 
 

Your partner kisses someone else? No big deal. You send a thumbs-up emoji and tell them to have fun — even though you’re crying into a sad shawarma while listening to Mitski. Because you’re evolved.
 

You learn to say things like “I love that for you!” when they gush about someone new. You start journaling. You set rules. You break them. You fight about “definitions,” “hierarchies,” and whether sharing Spotify accounts is a form of emotional exclusivity. You try to coordinate date nights but end up in what can only be described as calendar Jenga. Every weekend is a fresh episode of Whose Feelings Are We Processing Today? 
 

You learn that love is infinite — but time is not. You say things like, “Hey, can we do this later? I’m seeing my other partner tonight.” And then spiral about whether you’re the sympathetic Tuesday slot or the Friday night feature. 

 

You spend a lot of time in bar bathrooms, staring at yourself in the mirror, whispering things like “I’m not jealous, I’m just... surprised,” and “This is growth. This is good. I am fine. I wanted this” Your therapist gives you that face. Your friends give you that face. You give yourself that face. But you keep going. 
 

Because when it works, it really works. You kiss one person who feels like sunlight. You sleep over at another’s place and feel understood in a way that makes you cry into their pillow. You fall in like, in lust, in something resembling love — on a rotational basis. You build a patchwork quilt of affection. It’s chaotic, yes. But also kind of beautiful. 
 

Until one day, you’re at a café with your partner and their new person — who’s brought their own partner along. That makes four of you, casually passing fries, realising everyone at the table has slept with someone else at the table in some configuration. Someone suggests a group trip. You smile. You nod. You excuse yourself to the bathroom and have a quiet meltdown, wondering: who’s sharing a bed with whom? 
 

Every text sends a tiny cortisol spike. Every check-in feels like a performance review. You’re constantly renegotiating boundaries like it’s Brexit. Then it finally happens, you start to envy people in monogamous relationships. Not because you want to go back — but because God, it must be nice to only focus on one person at a time. To only navigate one set of friends. To never utter the sentence, “I need to reschedule our date night because my metamour’s (a partner of one's own partner) cat died and they need emotional support.

You start missing the clichés you once mocked. The joint Diwali texts. A shared Christmas party. Kissing your person at midnight on New Year’s Eve. You miss knowing how they like their chai, how they slam cabinet doors when they’re mad. You miss being mundane with someone.

But those moments get split. You ask your partner if they want to spend the holidays together, but they’re celebrating with someone else. You could do the same, technically. But the emotional whiplash of switching partners on days that are supposed to feel whole? In theory, it sounds like every guy’s dream. In practice, it’s draining. You realise there’s only so much of yourself to give.

And then it hits you:

Where is this going? What’s the endgame? Do I really want to keep bouncing back and forth like a tennis ball? Eventually, you become the person you used to judge — tired, jaded, fragile. Googling “is it regressive to want monogamy in 2025?” 

You don’t quite recognise yourself in the mirror anymore — not in a tragic way, just... unfamiliar. You’ve become someone with a dating spreadsheet, five active love languages, and zero idea what your actual needs are. You’ve spent so long being available, progressive, emotionally literate — that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to be wanted. Simply. Sharply. Unconditionally. 

So, you come back. You’re fine. You’re not fine. You’re whatever’s left after love got too big, too shared, too complicated to feel like yours anymore.

You start to feel isolated — not because your partner is toxic (you signed up for this, remember?) — but because you’re not supposed to feel this way. Not jealous. Not insecure. You were supposed to be “cool.”

You can’t turn to the friends you grew up with, the ones married with kids— they wouldn’t get this new-age dating drama you’ve gotten yourself into. So, you keep this part of your life to yourself. The politically correct ones understand non-monogamy, some even practice it, but none of them think you would. And you hate to admit it, but somewhere beneath all the language and learning, you’re still as sappy as Shah Rukh Khan in the '90s. And in that stillness, it lands: “I didn’t know I’d feel this lonely, even when loved by many."

You’re not in Vicky Cristina Barcelona anymore. You’re in Frances Ha. You’re stumbling through life, chasing intimacy and connection, trying to build something that’s just yours. You want to love big and loud, but you’re also just trying to pay rent and not dissolve into feelings soup.  
 

And then, quietly, painfully, it arrives: the truth. That maybe you’re not built for this. That no matter how many books you’ve read or how progressive you appear on Instagram, you're not a secure enough person for non-monogamy. And that hurts — not because someone failed you, but because it forces you to meet a version of yourself you’ve been avoiding.
 

Maybe that’s what love is. Not a fixed structure, not a binary between monogamy and polyamory, but a constant negotiation. A dance between your desires and your limits. The grass isn’t greener. It’s not even grass, half the time — it’s AstroTurf, or weeds, or just mud. And sometimes, you’re simply too tired to tend to any of it.  
 

So, you do what you always do. You love as best you can. You unlearn. Relearn. Laugh at how love, for all its books and discourse, is still mostly guesswork. You look at your cluttered Google Calendar — a kaleidoscope of names and colour-coded feelings — and exhale, softly.  
 

“Pyaar ek baar nahi hota.”

“But even Shah Rukh kept it to one heroine per film.”