Grief is the price you pay for love

The heartbreak paradox in subcontinental culture

Muzamil opens by naming the central tension that defines heartbreak in South Asia. “I feel like subcontinental cultures love is a very, very, very big thing,” he says. “I think that’s why it’s a bit confusing, say it’s also romanticized.” Films and dramas center almost entirely on love stories. Romance is the narrative that gets celebrated, amplified, repeated. Yet “when it happens our families say that this is all you can see, but actually love doesn’t happen,” Muzamil explains. “So it’s very weird. You get like a confused audience which then you can see and a lot of times they can’t reach that point, because they face a certain loss, they are not able to deal with it.”

Ali picks up this thread. Many people experience a breakup and get stuck there, he notes, then sabotage their next relationships by comparing every new person to an idealized version of the previous one. The pattern repeats because grief was never acknowledged as natural or valid.

When heartbreak arrives without warning

Muzamil walks through a scenario that feels immediate and urgent. A young person, still in school, gets a message: “I don’t think it’s working out.” The world collapses. “My life is dead here, you know, I’m never going to be happy again,” the person thinks. Now they spiral into a loss of self-worth, and eventually, they tolerate toxic relationships because “I deserve this.”

Ali responds with clarity drawn from his clinical work. “There’s a very high chance of you going in a spiral just because of self-worth,” he says. This is where grief becomes dangerous. Unprocessed, it becomes a shadow that reaches into every future relationship.

But Ali has a frame that changes everything. “A patient of mine put it really beautifully,” he says. “She said that grief is the price that you pay for love.” This reframe is not optimistic in the shallow sense. It is honest. If you loved, you will grieve. The two cannot be separated.

Why grief matters

Muzamil asks the harder question. “Your tears your sadness is proof of how much you cared,” Ali says. This matters because in cultures built on productivity and forward momentum, grief looks like failure. “If you didn’t care you’d probably be fine,” Ali adds. “So the only way to have absolutely nothing happen to you emotionally at the end of the relationship is if you can go back in time and get yourself to not care.”

Ali names what grief actually is. “Grief is sort of like an internal proof that I cared. He or she mattered to me, whoever that person may be.” And this, he insists, is not depressing. “It’s beautiful because I think that grief is an emotion, and it’s not essentially a bad emotion. It’s just an emotion, just like any other emotion.”

The long work of reimagining a life

Muzamil presses on the most painful cases: someone who spent six years planning a life with another person. Marriage, children, jobs, shared vision. All of that collapses in one moment. “I’m like, what, what, like the entire my entire life was a lie, how do I deal with it,” is the cry he hears.

Ali’s answer is patient. “There is no pill out there, there is no technique out there, there is no meditation out there that will make sure that the pain never comes. The only thing you have control over is how you’re going to deal with that pain.” And this is something “you’re constantly learning,” Ali says. Even philosophers and thinkers in their 60s, 70s, and 80s do not graduate from grief. Each loss is new. Each requires presence.

For someone rebuilding after six years, “one day at a time,” is not a cliche. It is the only honest pace. Ali pushes back against the productivity culture that demands rapid recovery. “Just take a few days. Just experience whatever it is that you need to experience.” There is no optimization of grief.

Reading C.S. Lewis

Toward the end, Ali shares a passage from C.S. Lewis’ “A Grief Observed,” written after his wife’s death. Lewis describes grief as a bomber circling, dropping its load each time overhead. “There is no time for grief,” Lewis writes, “only time in which grief does its work.” Ali reads this to ground Muzamil’s and the audience’s experience in something larger than individual pain. Loss is human. Grief is real. And bearing it with awareness is part of what it means to have loved at all.

Sitting with yourself

Muzamil ends by naming one skill he learned this year: slowing down. “When was the last time when you sat for only 5 minutes,” he asks the audience, “you weren’t waiting for anything.” Most people cannot remember. We shift from phone to laptop to distraction without pause. “Sitting with ourselves,” Muzamil says, is increasingly rare. Yet it is precisely in that silence, in that presence with your own grief, that healing begins. Not the kind that productivity promises. The kind that time and sitting and feeling make possible.