Is true and everlasting love a myth? There is so much to make us believe this: heartbreaking stories of betrayal, unreturned love, dying love, selfish love, jealous love, and so on. We’ve witnessed it many times over how two people that appear perfectly happy and in love with each other can end things seemingly out of the blue after many years of a serious relationship stating that they have distanced themselves from one another, that they have fallen out of love with one another. I’m sure that many of us have observed that many people are physically close or share enormous intimacy without being involved with each other on a mental and emotional level. We’ve probably also seen people living in a relationship consisting of routine and rather rare love expressions almost “platonically” under the same roof. And we’ve surely heard many complain about how boring their relationship has become, how they have lost the spark and thrill of the initial phase.
Love changes things and love itself changes, too. It can never simply stay the emotional thrill it was in the beginning because after a while this, too, would become…boring. And love won’t ever be the fairy tale our culture has infiltrated our minds with. Because love endures in the mind and the mind only. Long after our body has aged or become unable to physically love, we feel love in our hearts and minds. This is the only place love can live eternally, and therefore its true home.
The same way we learn to develop our mind in school, at work etc., we can develop and grow our love by working on our positive emotions. In order to love and be worthy of loving eternally, we have to first find love – and there are indications that we have more than just one soul mate to fit us – and then earn love, as well as to commit ourselves to work on it unceasingly, without pause. This implies to free ourselves of all jealousy, expectations, selfishness, egocentricity or egotism. Expect nothing, give everything, and hope for the best.
Returning to the initial question – if true love really exists for the length of a lifetime – I’m happy to say – it does!
Let me tell you my grandparents’ love story. My grandfather Kosta met my 19 years old grandmother Ivanka – whom everyone called Ani – when he was 23 years old in a comsomol summer camp in 1950 communist Bulgaria, more specifically in the idyllic and secluded resort Yundola at the Western end of the Rhodope Mountains. Kosta was a favorite of many young women, but he only had eyes for Ani given that she was not only ravishingly beautiful, a so to speak Bulgarian (and much skinnier) version of Marilyn Monroe, but also had a very unique congeniality, spirit and goodness about her. And so it came about that it was her address only he asked for in the train back home. He wrote to her regularly for the duration of one year from his home town Burgas on the Black Sea coast where he worked as a drapery salesman. She lived in Kazanlak, Central Bulgaria, and worked as a hairdresser. In 1951, they finally met again, one full year after their first meeting in Yundola. Ani came to see him for a few days in Burgas, and it was then when Kosta’s close friend made him realize that “this girl was made for him”. A few months later, they got married and he moved to Kazanlak where they still live. Three children and 60 years of marriage later, they’re still in love, and they can’t stand to be apart. They simply adore one another and have loved each other through every pain and problem along the way – and there have been enough, given their relative modest standing in life. This is who they are today.
So how did they make it? What was the secret of their love? – I might as well tell you: there isn’t! There only is commitment to let love live in your mind and heart and work to keep it alive, not physically alive, but emotionally and spiritually. How? As already stated above: by expecting nothing, giving everything and…hoping for the best.
Love, always!
Shania Twain – Forever And For Always
