Betrayal Is Not the Only Thing That Kills Love

Love rarely disappears in a single day. It is easier for us to believe that relationships fall apart because of something momentous: betrayal, lies, infidelity, an act of cruelty. But sometimes love dies far more quietly. Nothing happens that we could point to when explaining the reason to others. One person simply feels, day after day, that being with the other leaves them less and less room to be themselves.

At first, they are asked to change a little. Then to react the right way. To feel the right way. To speak the right way. To love exactly as the other person imagines love should be. And gradually, the person beside us is no longer a living human being, but an endless list of our expectations of them. The strangest thing is that we can keep calling this love, even as we increasingly try to gain power over the other person.

We often forget something simple: no one is obliged to love us. No one is obliged to choose us, open their soul to us, worry about us, wait for our return, forgive our weaknesses, or stay beside us through difficult times. So when someone does these things freely, what we have before us is not a duty we can demand, but a gift we can lose.

Mishlei, the Book of Proverbs, says: “Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses” (10:12). These words can easily be turned into the dangerous idea that love must endure everything. But love does not require us to endure humiliation, violence, or repeated betrayal. To “cover” does not mean to call evil good. Rather, it means being able to avoid turning every human weakness into a verdict on the whole person. Because if we can love only those who never make mistakes, there will be no one for us to love.

The ego works differently. It notices what it has not been 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 that one occasion. You can hear countless kind words, yet carry a single ill-chosen phrase inside you for years. You can receive love every day and still think first of what that love lacks.

This is how one of our saddest human habits develops: we begin demanding proof of love from someone close to us instead of noticing the love itself. We think that if they truly love us, they should work it out, understand without words, and act exactly as we would. But another person is not an extension of ourselves. They have a different temperament, different fears, a different history, a different way of expressing their feelings. Sometimes they love us in a language entirely different from the one in which we have learned to expect love.

Love begins to mature when we stop constantly asking, “Why aren’t you the way I need you to be?” and, for the first time, become truly interested in asking, “What are you like?”

Perhaps intimacy is never born at the moment when two people finally become perfect for each other. It appears when the other person’s imperfections stop taking us by surprise. We see their weaknesses; they see ours. We know where we irritate each other, where we fail to understand each other, where we will never be alike—and still we try to handle what has been entrusted to us with care.

Because another person’s heart is a very peculiar gift. We cannot receive it once and put it on a shelf like an object that now belongs to us. It remains free even when it loves us.

And perhaps one of our 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 message in the middle of the night. To the hand we can reach for beside us. To someone who knows our weaknesses and still looks at us with warmth. All of this seems ordinary right up until the day it disappears.

Then we suddenly understand how much love was hidden in the things we never gave thanks for.

That is why we must do more than look for love. We must learn to notice it while it is still beside us. And sometimes, instead of asking yet again what we have not been given enough of, we can simply look at the person opposite us and think: how much they have already given me by opening their heart to me once, and keeping it open all this time.