My very close friend has crashed a wall. Not literally, but has faced a reality. His wife has declared, after some time of pretending that everything is ok, that she is not satisfied with the life they share and she's living him. She didn’t show any will to change that or to make some effort to find solution to stay in that marriage they have started. When I have listened to his expression of the situation they are now facing, it seams to me that we are all not able to face the reality as it is. It is easier to believe in dreams, then to look at one another as we truly are. “We were so much in love, special. Sharing the life, emotions, hopes, fears as no men ever did. We are/were special. Our love was beyond everything. Now I’m lost…“

But, there is not such thing or relationship that is ideal. There is no ideal friend, no ideal husband, no ideal wife, no ideal lover… We have to face that fact. Starting from ourselves and the fact that we are not ideal. We are all different and in order to have “normal” marriage and/or any relationship we have to be open and ready for everything. We cannot live expecting that our relations won’t change, that they won’t face up’s and down’s, that we’ll always be in love and that we’ll always be pink. We change. Our love changes. Our partners change. We are here to accept the occurred changes, to deal with them, to make them “liveable”.

I’m very sad for I know what he’s feeling right now. And he’s there because he is facing now the reality that we are all alone. It may sound harsh and unrealistic, but in the end WE ARE ALL ALONE. And one can be happy and proud if we have some persons in our life who respect us unconditionally, who love us for who we really are and who would help us when we crash. But in the end, we are the ones who have to face our fears, hopes and disillusions by ourselves. It makes us grow, it makes us alive. I have learned two things in my life. The first one is that I will always be able to lean only to myself and the second is that I cannot and should not expect to receive same as I’m giving. The mistake we all make is the expectorations we develop for someone we care for, someone we love.

“But I have given him/her everything. I loved him/her unconditionally. I risked everything for him/her. Etc”

In the end we all find ourselves counting what have WE done for someone. The key is not expecting to receive same or equivalent back. That is the key of our serenity. Because we will never (or at least in most of the cases) receive the same amount of love, effort, emotions, reactions or what so ever as we give. And we shouldn’t feel bad about it. We should find pleasure and happiness in giving. Even if in the end we lose someone we love, we should feel blessed because we were given the opportunity to love and to care and to protect and to make other person feel good, and loved and cherished and worthy because we were there to give ourselves. Then we can be peaceful and capable to life our lives with smiles on our faces.

I’m not saying here that we should be robots and never face fears, disappointments, hopes and dreams, but I only want to say that we have to be real in our expectations.

One falls in love. Passionately. Burns literally for that other person. Willing to give him/her her whole life… And that’s fantastic about life. That gives us the opportunity to feel such emotions, such impulses. But that is not for eternity. It will not last forever. In the end “being in love” is only chemical reaction induced by our hormones, mental impulses and some other physical movements in our body. But that, as everything else in our lives at some point passes, changes.

We all eager for love, for someone to love us. That is human nature. We all want to be adored, cherished, loved. But we mustn’t be exclusive about love. We cannot give all our hopes in one particular men/women. Because when we live, we encounter many people around us, we meet them, we respect them, we love them. And we should all turn around and see that love is all around us, in our child, in our parents, in our cousin, in our friend, in our co-worker, in our neighbour, in our dog/cat, in the bird, in the sea, in the wind, in music… All around us. And marriage. Marriage is something else. Of course the love is the key that has gotten two persons to think about marriage at the first place, but marriage is about living together when that love changes. It’s about giving ourselves without feeling angry of the percentage we are receiving back, it’s about friendship, it’s about patience, it’s about sharing the life, bad moments, good moments, despair, hopes, it’s about growing old together without feeling compulsory that we will always be madly in love with each other.

Before we love someone, we should all firstly love ourselves. And as far marriage is concerned, we should have certain percentage of life experience before we enter one, that will teach us that things are never ideal and that we should always firstly look into ourselves to find the strength to fight and accept the life ahead us.

Love will always guide us. Love is all around us. We are love.