Beyond Butterflies: Embracing Imperfection on the Path to Love

Any relationship truly begins only after the curtain is raised.

Love has the freedom to take the stage only after you’ve come to terms with the idea that the person beside you will never embody perfection. It will make its appearance when you are truly willing to see their flaws in the clear light of day, to get acquainted with them, and to accept them.

You will function well together when you learn to coexist with each other’s imperfections. When you can fearlessly reveal your insecurities, imperfections, and complexes to each other, knowing that you will receive understanding and acceptance in return.

Falling in love is easy: it means blindness, madness, passion, butterflies in the stomach. In contrast, well, love demands more: it craves embracing reality, faithfulness, commitment, goodwill, and hard work. A lot of hard work.

We hope that then we will have the perfect relationship, the perfect love, and nothing will bring us down from the cloud of happiness.

The more we strive, the greater our fall will be from a dizzying height. There’s this cliché of fighting for a certain relationship. In fact, it’s also the subject of many soap operas and dramas, a somewhat toxic way of relating, don’t you think?

It’s actually about being dissatisfied with oneself and personal unhappiness that arises once we realize that we can’t change our lives in the blink of an eye… well, then the temptation to cast all frustrations onto the other person is high.

Fleeing from our own reality, forgetting that change begins from within and not from others. Then we will try to change the person next to us, all in the hope that one day, when they become “as they should be,” we will also obtain happiness.

When we manage to take a break, distance ourselves a bit from the stories in our own mind, we realize how illusory the hope to change someone else is, in order to fill our inner void of insecurity!

When emotions are balanced, we are naturally kind and polite to others. We look to the future with optimism and accept reality exactly as it is, without losing our enthusiasm. When our emotions are balanced, we are no longer preoccupied with false problems because we see them for what they are: false!

It’s okay to allow the person beside us to remain themselves. What good does it do to change them and transform them into the ideal of your dreams… when it’s clear that their vision is more colorful than mine?

If by some absurd chance that happens, the surprise may be that the person we fell in love with is missing.

No one will stay with us for long when our actions show them that there are parts of their being that we reject, that don’t make us happy, that we would like to see changed or improved.

That’s because we haven’t made peace within our own soul.

Because anger and hostility destroy our peace of mind, it is they that are our real enemy. Anger ruins our health; a compassionate attitude restores it. If it were basic human nature to be angry, there’d be no hope, but since it is our nature to be compassionate, there is.

Perhaps they will conform for a while, when dazzled by the beauty of the beginning, they will accept the idea that through the power of love, people can change.

In fact, we are not “wrong” or “right.” We are always ourselves. I think it’s rather our mental “game” that seeks to protect us from change because our subconscious interprets any change as a threat to our survival.

In a relationship, the partner is somehow our mirror. It’s very hard to look in a mirror. I think the priority is to be gentle with oneself. Slowly, the mirror will become a friend… otherwise, it will be perceived as an enemy.