By Tushar Vishal (BMS’25)

I used to believe love was limitless. That if you truly cared about someone, you should give yourself to them without hesitation, no walls, no restrictions, no second thoughts. You should love like an open road, stretching far beyond what the eye could see, without worrying where it might lead.
But in the lure of the journey, I forgot that the signs are dangerous, and love without limits is even more so! And I won’t blame the roads. The journey is so beautiful at first that you become boundless, giving without question, embracing without caution. Love, after all, is supposed to break barriers, to be free of the constraints the world tries to impose on it. And yet, somewhere in the chaos of boundless love, I found myself lost. The more I gave, the less of me I seemed to have.

Love has no boundaries, and it must not. But loving someone should have one.
Have you ever wondered why a herdsman never unties their herd unless they have a fence? How foolish would a cattleman be if he had no fence and let his herd roam free?
As a child, I used to ask the stupidest of stupid questions. Why do we have fences? Why do we use locks? Why do gates exist if we always have to pass through them? My father, always patient, answered each one of them calmly. But one question was never truly answered. How high must a fence be? And will I ever be able to climb the one I have created for myself?
Love is often painted as something infinite, something that knows no borders. But when it comes to loving someone or something, should there not be a limit? A pause, a line, a gentle whisper reminding us that even the ocean has a shore!

I learned this the hard way. In the name of attachment, I overlooked small things like personal space, emotional capacity, and my own needs, as if they had never mattered to me before. Love felt like an ocean with no shore, and the waves eroded parts of me I did not even realize I was losing. And I was not alone in this. We have all seen love become something it was never meant to be. Remember the friend who loses themselves in a relationship? That one friend who gives endlessly in a friendship, hoping to be enough.
I tried climbing the fence many times. I really did. I fell, I cried, I hurt myself, and I gave up. Fences were too high for a child to climb. Until one day, my feet were no longer on the ground but in the air. My father had lifted me, pushing me forward.

Love should be vast, but it should not consume. Loving someone deeply does not mean dissolving into them. It means standing beside them, whole and secure in your own existence. I realized that boundaries are not walls; they are the architecture that holds love up. They allow us to love without resentment, to give without depleting ourselves, to stay without feeling trapped. Boundaries are the reason love can last without suffocating. Unless I had swum, how would I have known where my parts had been eroded? How would I have ever seen the shore?

The law of attachment says that if you truly love something, let it go. The more emotions are invested, the stronger the attachment and the deeper the attachment, the greater the pain of loss. We romanticize the idea of love being all-consuming. But love should feel like air, not a weight pressing down on your chest. It should be a choice, not an obligation.
Love has no boundaries, they say. But I say that loving one should have them. Not to limit love, but to protect it, to let it breathe. To make sure it remains what it was always meant to be, a place where you can be yourself, fully and freely.
And in that space, love flourishes. Not as a force that overwhelms, but as one that endures.