Love bomb me, please

Between breadcrumbing, cushioning and situationships, the language of romance seems to be lost in translation. SAACHI GUPTA asks, where has the passion gone?

WHEN I WAS 14 years old, I received the most romantic gift of my life: a hardcover 1990 edition of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. It was grandly accompanied by a poster of a shirtless Taylor Lautner that would remain pinned to my cupboard until I turned 22, long after I stopped speaking to the girl who gifted it to me.

Looking back, my teens were spent in a hilariously impassioned and hormonal romance with my best friend. We'd stay up texting each other until 4am on school nights, fight loudly in class until we were both in tears, and call each other disgustingly affectionate pet names. Once, after a particularly bitter argument, I found a folded apology letter in my shoe after I'd returned from the science lab.

We were naive and uninhibited with no sense of selfpreservation or fear of scaring the other person off. Once, when she went off WhatsApp for a few hours, I wrote a poem titled 'I miss you', which she printed out and stuck on her bedroom wall. Being cheesy or overly affectionate didn't embarrass us. It was the kind of love that could only exist between two teenagers. Or so I thought.