Every love story – whether whispered between best friends, sparked in momentary glances, or in the fire of rivalry – begins with the same quiet truth: before love, there is always friendship.
Before any love story begins, there is a beautiful moment, an unassuming instant when two people shift closer, often without even realizing it. Whether it’s the effortless warmth of childhood best friends, the quiet enchantment between strangers in a lecture hall, or even the summer tension of rivals turned lovers; every romance begins with companionship. Love, no matter how it arrives, whether gentle or chaotic, always begins with the sacred recognition of another soul; the realization of something beautifully familiar with someone new.
That’s exactly why we say: pyaar dosti hai.
It’s a sweet sentiment woven into South Asian cinema and nostalgia. Pyaar dosti hai. The core meaning of love is friendship. This phrase, popularized by the film Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, is more than just a Bollywood cliche; it’s a truth we all come to slowly understand as we step into university, where love, in all its tender forms, begins to bloom around us. University is such a strange and impressionable space, where we’re still learning to let go of the versions of us as teenagers while simultaneously trying to shape ourselves into the adults we think we’re supposed to become. It’s here, in the brief and quiet moments between classes, in the stolen moments between endless projects and assignments that we first experience the kind of love that isn’t simply felt, but built. We often romanticize the grand gestures, the cinematic love, like the first tender kiss tucked away in the bookshelves of the library, but so much of love in university is hidden in the everyday; the unspoken moments of tenderness that stem from something deeper than attraction: familiarity, care, friendship. The late night texts that start with a simple “are you home safe?” and lead into random conversations about everything and nothing. The shared silence in study rooms, where companionship is the only thing keeping you from spiraling into great over all the midterms, or the way you start to remember someone’s coffee order before they even have the chance to say it out loud. It’s these sweet and intimate moments where you begin to just know.
Love at this stage in life is so raw and innocent and awkward. It’s built on the foundation of friendship an discovery because for many of us, this is the first time we are learning what it truly means to love beyond the over-romanticized versions we grew up imagining. It’s the first time we fall in love with people not only because they make our hearts race, but because they make our lives fuller and softer. They make us fall in love with ourselves, they make us feel glowy, and they see us as people before anything else. Yet, sometimes, love remains suspended in friendship, existing in the quiet understanding between two people who know they could be something more but are too afraid of what might be lost in translation. Other times, it takes the leap, stumbling through the confusion of feelings before settling into something real. There’s also the heartbreaks, the growing pains of realizing that not all love, no matter how deeply rooted in friendship, is meant to last forever. But even in endings, there is something profoundly beautiful about knowing that love, in any form, has the power to shape us.
Love in university is a unique form of education itself. We learn that attraction alone is not enough, and that compatibility is built, not just found. It means realizing that sometimes love looks like someone pushing you to finish your essay at 2 AM because they know your potential. It’s the understanding that the best love stories are not just about grand moments, but the millions of small moments, ones that prove genuine moments of love everyday. Moments that may not seem grand to the world, but mean everything to the people who share them. We learn that at the end of the day, love is not easy, but a beautiful and meaningful choice we make everyday.
Some of these relationships will withstand time, growing with us as we move into the next phases of our lives. Others will remain as memories, little pockets of warmth we return to on the lonelier days. But perhaps that is what makes love at this stage so important. It is an introduction, a first draft, a raw and unpolished version of something we will keep refining for the rest of our lives. It teaches us how to care, how to choose, how to be chosen. Sometimes through heartbreak, and sometimes softly, we learn to choose wisely. But I’ve been told that once you choose wisely, we should let ourselves fall in love blindly. Yet sometimes, university is fleeting, and so are many of the connections we make within it. But the friendships that evolve into love, and the love that leaves behind the foundation of an unshakeable friendship, teach us the most important lesson of all, that love is not just about romance, but about presence, about choosing someone – again and again – in the little ways that matter.
Perhaps that is what pyaar dosti hai truly means. Not that love is always friendship, but that the best kinds of love begin there. maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.