Hadassa Ben-Ari Strips Away the Filters, Shares Truths on Love

Israel’s schedule over the past two years has been hectic and painful, and honestly more interesting than my personal life. I started working on the book a few months after the war broke out, meaning I was in a relationship at the time. The book focuses on relationships because that’s my perspective on the world, I am a relational person; I live on water, food, oxygen, and love. The book doesn’t focus on the absence of a relationship. On the contrary, it focuses on all the moments within a healthy relationship, good and challenging, uplifting and painful, moments worth going through together. If I had written from a place of lack, trying to heal my own pain, I likely would have focused on the widows of fallen soldiers or the injured (and they are indeed heroines worthy of a book!) or perhaps on toxic love stories. Anyone who reads or listens to me understands that my art is about telling love stories.

Wow. I had to calm down from this question. I expected to be asked countless times why I only included good, ordinary, sweet love stories and not extreme or absurd ones that happen to no one. I didn’t zoom in on the less successful parts, the zoom is in the eye of the beholder. I actually zoomed in and out on all parts of a relationship. The reason is that on social media and in show business, the focus is on the Hollywood-worthy moments, the beautiful, camera-ready highlights. We’re surrounded by stories and reels of shining, happy moments, and we aren’t exposed - or willing -to show ourselves in vulnerable, messy moments. We are used to seeing images in color and motion that leave an impression: incredibly emotional moments and really awful ones. A photo under the chuppah, a photo over a grave. But what about all the “dead” or mundane moments that create a single moving moment in a relationship? That’s the story I chose to tell.

There’s no dramatic answer, it’s mostly legal, to protect the heroines, the publisher, and myself from potential lawsuits. Things happen in the world, anyone can tell the story from their perspective. A fallen soldier’s family doesn’t always see eye to eye with the widow. Her children might wake up one day and say something different.