October 8, 2026
Love Does Not Die Only from Betrayal
Love rarely disappears in a single day. It is easier for us to think that relationships fall apart because of something big: betrayal, lies, infidelity, a cruel act. But sometimes love dies much more quietly. Nothing happens that could be told to others as the reason. It is simply that, day after day, one person feels they are allowed less and less to be themselves next to the other.
First they are asked to change a little. Then to react correctly. To feel correctly. To speak correctly. To love exactly the way the other imagines love should be. And gradually there is no longer a living person beside us, but an endless list of our expectations of them. The strangest thing is that we can keep calling this love, while in fact we are trying more and more to gain power over the other.
We often forget a simple thing: no one is obliged to love us. No one is obliged to choose us, to open their soul to us, to worry about us, to wait for us to come home, to forgive our weaknesses and to stay beside us in hard times. So when a person does this freely, what we have before us is not a debt that can be demanded, but a gift that can be lost.
Mishlei says: “Hatred stirreth up strifes: but love covereth all sins” (10:12). These words are easy to turn into a dangerous idea — that love must put up with everything. But love does not require us to endure humiliation, violence or constant betrayal. To “cover” does not mean to call evil good. Rather, it is about the ability not to turn every human weakness into a verdict on the whole person. Because if only the flawless may be loved, there will be no one for us to love.
The ego works differently. It notices what it was not given much faster than what it receives every day. You can be there for someone a hundred times and fail to come once — and the ego will remember exactly that one time. You can hear many kind words and still carry one unfortunate phrase inside for years. You can receive love every day and still think first of all about what is missing from it.
This is how one of the saddest human habits arises: we begin to demand proofs of love from someone close instead of noticing the love itself. It seems to us that if they really loved us, they would guess, understand without words, act exactly as we would. But another person is not our extension. They have a different character, a different fear, a different story, a different way of showing feelings. Sometimes they love us in a language quite different from the one in which we are used to waiting for love.
Love begins to grow up when we stop constantly asking, “Why aren’t you the way I need you to be?” — and for the first time genuinely wonder, “And who are you?”
Perhaps closeness is not born when two people finally become perfect for each other. It appears when the other’s imperfection no longer takes us by surprise. We see their weaknesses, they see ours. We know where we irritate each other, where we don’t understand each other, where we will never be the same — and still we try to handle with care what has been entrusted to us.
Because another person’s heart is a very strange gift. It cannot be received once and put on a shelf like a thing that now belongs to us. It remains free even when it loves us.
And perhaps one of the greatest mistakes is to take the presence of someone who loves us for granted. We get used to the voice that asks how our day went. To the person we can write to in the middle of the night. To the hand we can find beside us. To the one who knows our weaknesses and still looks at us with warmth. All of this seems ordinary right up until the day it disappears.
Then it suddenly becomes clear how much love was hidden in the things we never said thank you for.
That is why love must not only be sought. We must learn to notice it while it is near. And sometimes, instead of asking yet again what we were not given, simply look at the person in front of us and think: how much they have already given me by once opening their heart — and never closing it since.