Don’t Grow Together ❤️ Stay Children Together ❤️
- Madhukar Dama
- 2 hours ago
- 4 min read
Instead of Finding Someone to Grow With Together – Find Someone to Remain Children Together ❤️
We are told, almost from the beginning of adulthood, that relationships must be about growth. We are asked to “find someone to grow with” — someone with whom we will climb the ladders of career, build wealth, raise children, buy houses, and face responsibilities. The language of relationships has been colonized by the language of progress and achievement.
But there is another way to see love and companionship: not as a joint business plan, not as a contract for stability, but as a sanctuary where both can remain children.
To remain a child is not to be immature or irresponsible. It is to preserve wonder in a world that constantly demands cynicism. It is to laugh freely at small things, to play without shame, to make mistakes without carrying them as lifelong burdens. Children do not measure time in calendars and paychecks. They live in moments. To remain children together is to share that ability — to find joy in the ordinary, to treat each other not as projects but as playmates in the grand playground of existence.
Growing together often means bending under expectations: acquiring, achieving, proving. Remaining children together means protecting each other from the suffocating seriousness of the world. When one forgets how to laugh, the other reminds. When one becomes too heavy with “adulthood,” the other lightens. Such a bond is not about constructing towers but about keeping alive the spark that makes towers unnecessary.
A partnership that remains childlike is not without depth. In fact, it may be the deepest form of intimacy. For what is trust if not the ability to be utterly yourself, stripped of pretenses? And who teaches us that better than children, who speak and play without masks?
So, perhaps we should stop searching for someone to “grow with” in the conventional sense. Instead, search for the one with whom you can remain young in spirit, playful in heart, and alive in curiosity. Growth will come anyway — bodies age, time passes, responsibilities arrive. But the magic is to remain children through it all.
In the end, maybe the true measure of love is not how much we have built together, but how much of our innocence we have managed to save from being destroyed by the world.
remain children together
they keep saying:
find someone to grow with.
like life is a damn factory
and you need a co-worker
to run the assembly line.
growing together—
that’s the slogan.
buying a house,
raising kids,
paying off loans,
climbing careers.
everyone smiles in those photographs
with fake teeth,
but the eyes are tired,
too tired to see anything
beyond the next EMI.
---
listen.
growth will happen anyway.
bodies stretch,
wrinkles show,
time drags you by the throat
whether you want it or not.
you don’t need a partner for that.
nature already does the job.
what you need—
is someone to remain children with.
---
childhood is not
irresponsibility.
it’s freedom.
remember?
the stupid jokes that went on for hours,
the made-up games,
the world of cardboard castles
and bottle-cap treasures.
the serious men told you
to put away those toys,
learn something useful.
so you did.
you learned how to wear a tie,
how to sit through meetings,
how to swallow your rage,
how to nod politely at death.
but somewhere in you
the child still waits,
and he’s suffocating.
---
to remain children together means
to find someone
who lets that child breathe again.
the one who can
laugh with you at nonsense,
poke fun at you without malice,
dance badly in the kitchen,
sing off-key in the car.
the one who can turn
a leaking ceiling into a joke,
a power cut into candlelight theater,
a failed plan into an adventure.
---
don’t mistake it.
remaining children together
doesn’t mean avoiding the storms.
it means meeting the storms
without losing your laughter.
raising a child?
fine—
but do it with mud on your hands,
with stories that make no sense,
with pillow fights at midnight.
paying bills?
fine—
but don’t forget to buy the cheap ice-cream
and eat it with sticky fingers
like two runaways.
facing sickness?
fine—
but bring the crayons to the hospital,
draw stupid faces on the charts,
make fun of the seriousness of doctors.
---
growth couples
will measure life in bank accounts.
child couples
will measure life in
the number of times they laughed
so hard they forgot who started it.
---
remain children together.
because the world will do
everything to steal it from you.
watch the others.
they start playful,
then slowly become
grey statues.
work, commute, television, sleep.
vacations like military campaigns.
smiles rehearsed for photographs.
they stop touching each other.
stop playing.
stop dreaming.
they grow.
they grow so well
they bury themselves alive.
---
you don’t want that.
you want the woman
who steals french fries off your plate
and grins like she got away with a crime.
you want the man
who still believes the night sky
is full of secret codes.
you want the one
who doesn’t shame you
for being foolish,
because they’re foolish too.
---
the child-couples age differently.
wrinkles come,
bones weaken,
but they still argue
about who can spit farther
into the river.
they still put stickers on each other’s faces
while waiting at the clinic.
they still run,
even if it’s only a few crooked steps.
they still say,
come on, let’s play.
---
and maybe that’s the secret—
love is not
how much you’ve grown together.
it’s how much of your childhood
you’ve managed to save
from the fire.
---
so forget the slogans.
forget the sermons.
forget the glossy magazines.
find someone
who will crawl with you on the floor,
kick stones on the sidewalk,
clap at thunder,
mock the gods,
laugh when you both fall,
and laugh harder when you can’t get up.
that’s the real victory.
to remain children together—
through the seasons,
through the years,
through the long dragging nights
and the brief shining days.
because in the end,
all of us will grow old.
that’s guaranteed.
but very few
will die still holding hands,
still giggling
like kids who never gave the world
permission
to turn them into statues.
---
remain children together.
or else
what’s the point of love at all?
---
