You do not know a person, not truly, for years. Everyone is on their best behaviour at first – you start to love how amazing they are, idealize them, and think that having them in your life will make YOU a better person, and you want to do the same for them. You want to drown in each other because your pheromones are off the charts and you want to surf that wave of serotonin every fucking day until you pass out, just to wake up and do it again.
When you start to feel like you are in withdrawal from not being around them, ask yourself if you’re in love with the person and all their faults, or in love with your image of them, or their POTENTIAL (ugh)! In the beginning, that’s all it can be. Love is based on reality. If your partner seems to have no negative side, you are deceiving yourself. Perfection is a fantasy.
Never give up the things you love doing in order to be with someone new. This is fucking terrifying for them.Why would you give up your dreams and passions just to hang out and fuck someone you barely know all day? That can happen the majority of the time outside of everything else, but never make your relationship your ONLY reason for living. Being someone’s ONLY source of pleasure is completely awful, because then you feel pressured to live not only your life for you, but for them, too, and they will always depend on you to feel awesome.
Loving someone hard means allowing them to do what they need to do to be THEMSELVES. If you want to be with a writer (for a very good example) don’t expect to come first. Often, when people are intensely into something (which is very attractive), you will always come second, especially in the beginning. Is this bad? Not necessarily. If they feel loved enough to be able to live life the way they want and be who they are, they will respect and appreciate your relationship so much more. To try and hold someone back is the worst thing you can possibly do in a relationship – and the same goes for if someone is trying to do this for you. Even worse, if you find yourself being held back by someone, get out FAST. Sometimes it happens without you even realizing it! You will feel so repressed that you will explode, and probably not in a purely positive way (happened to me). Make sure you let your loved one be who they need to be, and make sure they let you do the same.
That being said, if you are being completely neglected, that person is not right for you, and you should not try to change them. Find someone more suitable. If you are putting in everything you’ve got, and they’re not, then it’s completely unbalanced. You might even be putting them off. If they are not matching you in enthusiasm, back off, or just give it up completely and find someone else.
Your sweetheart doesn’t need to know all your tiny weird habits, but declare anything big that might change their whole perception of you. This may very well scare someone off, but that means they are not right for you, and you have saved both of yourselves some time.
This was something I heard from an ex of mine, after we broke up – Love doesn’t just magically happen. It IS magical, but love grows. Infatuation can be instant, but like I said before, love must be cultivated, tended to, nurtured over time. You can’t just stick a seed in the ground and expect a fucking rose to be there the next day. It takes a lot of patience and coaxing, and it will develop IF everything is right. You can tell fairly quickly what is missing, and if it worth continuing. Some things just won’t grow, no matter how much you pour into the soil.
The typical “If you can’t love yourself, how can you love anyone else?” thing is annoyingly true. If you need someone else to validate your existence, you need to turn inward before getting involved with anyone, and make yourself into a person you are proud of. You have to think you are awesome, or you are going to settle for a lot of shit, including shit people. When you are full of love for yourself, confident, and know you are amazing, people notice, and they will flock to you. You will have your choice of amazing people to have in your life.
It seems that most people I encounter feel a nagging emptiness. They can’t put their finger on what it is, they only know that it needs to be filled. So, they go on searching for something that they think will fill the space.
Their life is spent seeking; buying new things, achieving goals, collecting titles and degrees, searching for “the one” that will complete them etc. There’s a belief that when they get enough “stuff”, they will feel full.
It’s so easy for us to believe that there’s something “out there” in the world that will fill the feeling of emptiness. You’ll find as you search, only more searching and a deepening need to find a new thing that will magically fulfill you, even though everything else before has fallen short.
One of the most commonplace and dangerous beliefs in our culture is that a relationship will provide the missing piece that will finally make us whole. TV and pop-culture shows us that the perfect partner is what we need to make us happy. The happy ending of every romantic comedy teaches us that, once we find that special one, everything in our life will be wonderful.
We just needed that puzzle piece, that other half, that soul mate to complete us. This is a commonly accepted delusion. The belief that a soul mate will make our life wonderful and will complete us is backwards.
You must be complete and feel whole, needing nothing outside of you to fulfill you before you can hope to have a fulfilling, healthy, truly loving relationship. When you know that there is nothing that you need someone to give you that you don’t already possess within, then you are ready for mature love.
Love, marriage, family and togetherness are extremely important aspects of life. As a matter of fact, we wouldn’t exist without them. They are a huge part of your well-being.
However, believing that your soul mate will come into your life and make things okay or that your whole life is a mess because your partner is misbehaving, is a problem. This kind of attitude makes that one relationship special above all others, and implies that you are not okay without it. This plants the seeds of failure before a potentially truly loving relationship is even given the chance to blossom.
If someone has the power to make you feel love, because this also means that you believe that they have the power to deprive you of love. Making someone the source of love in this way means that specific person is the one who has to give you love, or else you won’t have love.
He or she then becomes the object that you have to get love from and this sends a message to others, to yourself and to the universe at large that you lack love, that you aren’t worthy or capable of having it. Getting love from an outside source causes tremendous issues in your life and in your relationship because love is as much a need for humans as is food or water. If you believe that only that special person has the power to give it to you or take it away, you’ll do whatever you can to “get” the love from this other person.
Love is as much of human need as food and water. You will cry, beg or manipulate the other into giving it to you if you believe it will work. Just as you would scratch someone’s eyes out to get to water if you were dying of thirst. Herein lies relationship disintegration.
Relationships fail because partners feel that they aren’t getting love from their mate, or their mate isn’t meeting their needs. The truth is: your partner not meeting your needs is not what is causing the disintegration; feeling like you have needs that your partner can meet is actually the problem. Love cannot be gotten, only felt, given and expressed.
To deny your need for love is to deny your humanity. However, when the other person has to meet certain expectations and follow your rules in order for you to feel good, that isn’t love, it’s manipulation and control.
If the other person fails to give love to you in the way that you think they should, you feel that you have a “right” to be upset and then you have the right to punish them. You believe that you are then justified in withholding love from them or make them feel bad because they were not the partner you wanted them to be.
This belief that we have needs for love that have to be fulfilled only by specific people in specific ways, is pervasive in our culture. It’s the cause of all of our relationship issues. We are addicted to romantic relationships and placing the source of love outside of ourselves.
Then we develop all kinds of unhealthy patterns in a struggle to get the love. We will even allow ourselves to be abused, or we will become abusers. Some have even killed because they felt their mate deprived them of love.
We don’t see this struggling for what it is: a dysfunctional anti-love and anti-happiness condition. True love is unconditional, it loves regardless of the other person’s moods and actions. You can’t have love in an authentic and lasting way if you believe that you have to get love.
The key to lasting, authentic love is recognizing that you are the source of love and making it your job to bring that love to your relationship.
In other words, to know that you are whole must come first and from that fullness you can give without wanting to be given to in return. Whenever you feel a need for love, instead of seeking for it you can empower yourself and think loving thoughts, speak loving words and act in loving ways. In essence, you choose to recognize that you are the source of love for others.
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