This becomes especially visible when love collides with systems. With religion. With traditions. With rules written long before these two people ever met. People are often told something that sounds perfectly reasonable on the surface: if you want to build a family, you must share the same faith. The same religion. The same spiritual foundation. whatever else! Then there will be fewer conflicts. Then children will grow up correctly. Then the household will remain stable. On paper it sounds logical... and it sounds very pleasing to your mind too!
Yet almost nobody pauses to ask a simple question: what exactly is faith?
We tend to treat faith as something sacred and immovable, almost like a stone monument that should never be examined too closely. But if we look carefully, faith in practice turns out to be something far more human. Faith is a collection of thoughts, ideas, and words that a person chooses to trust. It is a system of beliefs through which someone explains the world to themselves. What that tells me is that your faith is not coming from your heart, it is coming from your Ego mind... It is very sad.... Some people believe that God exists. Others believe that God manifests through a particular religion. Some believe that rituals bring a person closer to God. Others believe that love must look a certain way, or that marriage must follow a specific structure.
God, like love, lives somewhere deeper than language. Both arise in the same quiet place inside the human heart, a place that does not obey logic very well or at all. The mind tries to explain it, categorize it, measure it against rules and doctrines, but something essential always slips through those attempts. Real faith rarely arrives as a carefully constructed argument. It arrives as a knowing.
You simply know.
Faith does not always behave rationally. Love certainly does not. Both can move through a person with a force that ignores calculations, traditions, and systems built to organize human behavior. Every institution in the world can tell you what you should believe, whom you should love, what boundaries you should never cross. And yet sometimes the heart refuses to cooperate.... Sometimes every voice around you repeats the same instruction: you must not love this person. You must walk away. You must erase it, undo it, unlove them.
But love does not work that way.
You cannot command the heart the way you command a machine. When something real takes root there, it does not disappear simply because a rule says it should. Sometimes faith and love both ask the same quiet question of a human being: will you trust what you know inside, even when the world around you insists that you should not?
All of these things around faith are thoughts, ideas and narratives that a person accepts as truth. Sometimes people believe them because they grew up inside a particular culture. Sometimes because their parents taught them that way. Sometimes because their community reinforces the same language. Sometimes because the mind finds comfort in a world where explanations already exist. In that sense, faith is the architecture of belief: a structure of words and meanings through which a person interprets life.
This is why when people say that a family must share one faith, what they often mean in reality is not a shared spiritual experience but a shared system of beliefs. This topic on Faith I will try to uncover in some other blogs... anyway... For 99%, faith is a shared system of beliefs, the same answers to the same questions. The same explanations of how the world works. Yet life reveals something curious. Even within the same religion, people often believe entirely different things. Two people may attend the same church or synagogue, read the same sacred book, recite the same prayers... and still live in completely different inner worlds.
Faith is not just the text. It is how a person interprets that text. Sometimes two people from different religions understand each other far more deeply than two people from the same one. The reason has little to do with doctrine and much more to do with consciousness, honesty, and the ability to see reality, to see real you, rather than simply repeat formulas. And this is where real life begins.
The first two or three years of a relationship often unfold inside a kind of hormonal fog. Passion. Attraction. Chemistry. During this time people barely notice differences. Their brains are focused elsewhere. But over time that intensity softens, and something else begins to surface: what a person actually believes. Not what they said at the beginning. Not what they promised. But how their inner world is truly structured.
Very often this is when couples begin to fight, not about love, but about beliefs, about religion, about traditions, about what they were taught to see as right. And this is where many marriages begin to fracture.
Which brings us back to the deeper question: what is love?
Some geneticists argue that what we call romantic love lasts roughly three months. My therapist 9 years ago certainly believed in THAT! After that the hormonal surge fades and the brain begins to return to equilibrium. That is when the real test begins, because many people confuse love with physiology: testosterone, estrogen, and neurochemical fireworks in the brain.
Others confuse love with ego. They say: IF you love me, you MUST do everything the way I want. That is not love. That is self-love disguised as love. Ultimatums has nothing to do with the actual love. Many people use the word love when they really mean possession. I want this person. I want them to belong to me. I want them to live in a way that suits me. Yet a simple question remains: what does the other person want?
This is where the test becomes brutally simple. Imagine the person you love says: I no longer love you the way I used to or the way I thought I could... I am leaving. I want to be with someone else. If you are able to accept that and allow them to go, something close to love might exist there. If your instinct is revenge, destruction, humiliation, or punishment, then what is speaking is not love but wounded ownership.
Jealousy in its extreme form is often nothing more than a distorted expression of possession. Either you belong to me, or I will destroy you (or that other person). Stories of revenge, betrayal, and violence committed in the name of love fill history and news headlines. Yet the word love is often used to describe impulses that resemble domination far more than devotion.
Real love, when it appears, tends to carry an uncomfortable companion: freedom. You want the other person to be well and happy, even if their well-being does not include you, even when they didn't choose to be with you, even when they chose something else for themselves. Very few people can do that.
This raises another complicated question. What happens when two people feel a profound connection yet come from different worlds? Many turn to religious authorities for guidance... rabbis, Catholic priests, pastors, imams....
And here something important happens that people rarely discuss openly. Many of these figures exist inside institutional systems. Systems have rules. Systems have doctrines. Systems have boundaries. A rabbi who speaks too freely may lose his community. A priest who questions doctrine too openly may lose his position.
So very often they repeat the language expected from them. They are not dishonest. They are malicious. It is that way, because the institutions require certain answers. This dynamic is not unique to religion... it exists in politics, corporations, and academia. Systems reward stability and predictability. Systems like people who march in formation. It is its own egregor! There is no faith... I will explain later in another blog.
Life does not march. Life is messy.
Which is why throughout history there have always been individuals who stand somewhat outside the system like rabbis, priests, teachers, mystics who are not bound by institutional structures and therefore speak more freely. They exist, though they are rare. One example was Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, a musician with a guitar who brought hundreds of thousands of people closer to spirituality without fitting the mold of a conventional synagogue rabbi. Figures like this appear in every generation, though independence always carries a price. Meanwhile a lot of spiritual leaders are doing more harm to people, "saving" them... but in reality, they are harming them with their "advices" which are not faith based, but rather "rule and dogma" based.
And then there is another romantic idea people like to discuss: the myth of the single soulmate. According to this story, God divides one soul into two halves and sends them into the world so they can find each other. It is a beautiful image.
Yet if we look at the Bible itself, the story becomes far more complex. The biblical world was openly polygamous. Abraham had multiple wives. Jacob had four. Moses had two. King David had eighteen. Solomon had three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines. These were not rare exceptions; they were normal structures in the ancient world.
Sacred texts emerged in a specific historical context... an era of constant warfare in which enormous numbers of men died in battle, forcing societies to develop different family structures simply to survive. It was a different world.
Ethics evolve. Human consciousness evolves.
Today societies operate under very different moral expectations. That is why simple formulas about love, one perfect half, one predetermined partner, one universally correct form of relationship, often collapse when confronted with real life. But hey! marketers created Valentine's Day! and the romantic comedies of "highschool sweethearts forever and ever"... Life is different then any story... Truth will be revealed.
Human beings are not perfectly matched halves of a sphere. More often they resemble fragments of a broken vase. Sometimes two fragments align in a miraculous way. Sometimes a person experiences several profound loves over the course of a lifetime. Sometimes one partner dies and years later another appears. Life refuses to obey neat stories. Perhaps honesty requires admitting that reality is more complicated than our myths. Because when love truly appears, it almost never fits neatly inside prewritten rules.
And that is precisely why systems struggle to control it.
I understand now why so many traditions begin with the same ritual: the cutting of hair. In the military, in monasteries, in initiation rites across different cultures, people shave their heads. On the surface it looks practical, almost mundane. But symbolically it marks a threshold. A life before. A life after. Something old being left behind so that something new can begin. Hair has always carried meaning. In many traditions it is seen as an extension of the nervous system, a kind of living memory. It grows with us, holds traces of time, of experience, of who we used to be. When it is cut or shaved, the gesture quietly declares that the past no longer defines the present. It is a physical way of saying goodbye to an older version of yourself. I used to think these rituals were only symbolic. Now I understand they are also deeply personal. And sometimes the most meaningful initiations are not public ceremonies at all. They happen quietly, in private moments when a person decides that something in their life has reached its end. When a chapter that once felt sacred suddenly belongs to the past. Sometimes you perform a small ritual of your own. And it is intentional, and the meaning is unmistakable. You decide to get rid of something, that once carried memory, connections, and a promise you had once agreed to keep unchanged. And you chose to change it. A quiet line drawn between what was and what will no longer be.
And I find myself strangely relieved by the smallest acts of freedom.
There is a moment when you suddenly see the situation clearly. You realize that today you are not part of anyone’s plans, you are not a priority and you NEVER were. What lies ahead is simply another delay. Another “not yet.” and you see you are not part of anyone's plans in the next 2 months or years... Another promise that someday, perhaps after Easter, perhaps after the perfect walk, or some undefined moment when courage finally appears, something might happen.
Maybe later... Maybe when the circumstances are right... Maybe when the crayfish whistles on the mountain.... which is never! And at some point the absurdity of waiting becomes obvious. For me, that moment has arrived. It is time to move. I am my own priority...