We cherished the cheap romance novels like they were pure gold. We were not allowed to read them in boarding school, so we hid them from the eyes of the nuns. Our imagination run wild, we too would marry a prince one day, and all of us would live happily ever after.

We painted lovely pictures in our little minds how it all would be -how it would have to be. We would meet the perfect man, and we would live in the most beautiful home; our children would be little angels and our fantasy dog never had an accident.

I met my Romeo when I was 20, we married shortly afterward, and life decided to teach me a lesson.

I wasn’t a princess in a castle, I was a student in an apartment with flea market furniture. There was no dog, just a stray cat that demanded food in the middle of the night and we had to work two and three part-time jobs to survive. We lived on pizza and peanut butter sandwiches, and we learned to smell the milk before we drank it.

My Romeo had not an ounce of romance in his blood. There were passion and love, but romance. Nope, he didn’t know what that was. I, on the other hand, was full of it.

I surprised him with the most romantic candlelight dinner, and when he came home, he almost had a heart attack because he thought we had forgotten to pay the electricity. Later on, he complained that he couldn’t see his food.  I dragged him to picknicks where we ended up fighting ants and mosquitos.

Nothing worked the way it should have. My imagination and reality didn’t match, not even close. A good sense of humor helped us over the first hurdles. Today these hurdles are my most cherished memories.

Expectations! It’s funny how it works. We carry pictures in our head how we want things to be, and then we measure everything against it. Letting go of it is the key to happiness.

Life is a beautiful mess, full of surprises. I rather be surprised than disappointed.

Expectation