Dasha Webb-Benjamin

Inspiring Commentator on the Human Condition

I need two things in my life to be truly happy: to write and to meet new people.

What about love? Surprisingly, I don’t need love to be happy. And as I discovered, how no one else can make me happy but me, love stopped being the main thing I kept chasing after. I could stop the chase and just enjoy life on my own. Also, love was right there, in me. No one could stop me from loving my family, my friends, anyone really.

The only reason I was still open to a relationship with a partner, was the simple thought that it would be fun sharing a life: exchanging ideas, sharing the experience of visiting new places, building a life together.

My grandma used to say:

“Vsako zlo je za nekaj dobro.”

It means, every bad thing that happens to you, is good for something. Perhaps you can’t see it right now, but in the future, you will see how true it was.

This is not some kind of profound truth. It’s a philosophy. It’s a choice how to deal with our experiences, especially the devastating ones. Fact is, her philosophy saved my life and with the book I made a choice to make sense of all that has ever happened to me.

Now I live in the middle of England, with the most wonderful husband, and I have become a step-mom. How did I end up here, in the middle of a joyful life? Sometimes I have to pinch myself to make sure it’s real.

But it is real. Just as real as my rocky journey was, starting in booming and deeply capitalist West Germany, then changing to a proudly communist Yugoslavia which was falling apart, only to rush back to Germany as a student and then at the first chance I got, to London where I’ve worked 12 long and interesting years.

But no matter how far from home I went, I carried my problems with me. No matter how many experiences I gathered, I stayed helpless in the face of the troubles when it comes to love.

Until one day… I changed it.

I changed it! It didn’t magically happen. No one was there to rescue me. I didn’t become wiser just because I was older. I wasn’t safer just because I knew more about the world.

As I finally held the key to understanding everything, especially everything when it comes to relationships, the question was, would that key fit and help others?

So far it did. I didn’t like certain facts about men and women, and I don’t expect you to like them either. But the key was to accept the differences between us. Instead of insisting for other people to do things OUR way, how about accepting that we simply do things differently and that’s ok?