​We need to talk about why we’re obsessed with tragic love stories.

It took me all this time to realize that every poet praises incomplete love. I am pretty sure that people always find beauty in incompleteness. Take the movie Titanic—its massive popularity exists only because of the incomplete love of Jack and Rose. If they had united in the end, it would have been just another romance movie; it would never hold the depth of the bitterest tragedy, the impact of which covered the rest of Rose's life.

​Consider Husnul Jamal and Badarul Muneer, the celebrated masterpiece of the poet Moyinkutty Vaidyar. Even though they unite later, people find the true beauty of the song in the painful poetry of their separation.

​What about Majnun? We know it literally means 'madman.' Even though he had a name, people refused to call him Qais. That is what the world loves to see: the beauty of a love so consuming that it pushes a man to the brink of death. The world never remembered the poet 'Qais ibn al-Mulawwah' as an ordinary man; instead of respecting him merely as a poet, they immortalized him as a madman.

​Look at Bhima and Hidimbi. Hidimbi was left alone in the forest. She was a Rakshasi, yet she loved Bhima with her entire heart, only for Bhima to be forced to leave her there, pregnant. Even though Bhima later married Draupadi, his thoughts always drifted back to Hidimbi, who raised Ghatotkacha alone and eventually sent him to his death in the Kurukshetra war. We see the same pattern in Shakuntala and Dushyanta—even though they reunite later, the core of the literary work dwells in the loneliness of Shakuntala and the agony of the curse.

​Finally, consider Ali and Fatima. People cherish their love story, but it reaches its emotional peak when Fatima dies. The 'Lion of Khaybar'—the man who ripped a massive iron door off its hinges—was suddenly found trembling, struggling to bear the weight of his beloved's coffin toward her resting place.

​I think these are enough to show that true love, in its highest literary and spiritual form, is never measured by its duration, but by its depth—and nothing uncovers that depth quite like tragedy.