Love Lessons
I 🤍love🤍 love.
It sparks feelings of breathtaking ecstasy. It allows us to passionately give and receive. It creates that beautiful emotional and physical synergy between ourselves and another person.
Love can truly make us feel like we’re floating on cloud nine. At the same time, a breakup, fight, or heartbreak is nothing short of emotionally taxing. My dad says that’s why people write so many songs about love. (True, right?)
With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, I thought I’d reflect on the lessons I’ve learned that have informed the mindset with which I approach love. I am (obviously) by no means an expert on relationship advice, I just hope that me sharing my thoughts gives you something to relate to or reflect on.
Let go — don’t force anything
Confession: I can be a control freak sometimes. I’ve always had to continually remind myself to not force anything, because whatever is meant to be will happen. Whether we’re going through a breakup, our crush doesn’t like us back, or if we have to amicably part ways with someone. I've found that for me, acceptance is the first step to move forward. Plus, Gwen always tells me that when we release the outcome, we make room for even more magical things to happen.
Be compassionate towards others
Cultivating compassion for our partner is important, because when we extend compassion to others, we also extend it to ourselves.
Let me explain: I strive to see the good in others and believe that people have good intentions. My point of view is that we’re all just doing our best, working on ourselves, and some of us are even healing from past trauma. If our partner is struggling and not showing up as their best self, we should give our utmost kindness and compassion to them. This doesn’t mean we’re excusing bad behavior or tolerating disrespect, we’re just giving people the benefit of the doubt, not making assumptions, and not taking things personally if someone is unkind. I hope that makes sense!
Know and communicate what you want
“What’s your definition of love?”
I overheard Gwen say this to her client one day and it resonated so strongly with me. In the same way that we need to cultivate compassion for others, we also need to ensure our needs are being met.
If someone’s not giving you what you need, maybe it’s time to open up about your desires. If someone only wants you for sex (and that’s not what you want), then perhaps reflect on if that relationship is still serving you. If your partner isn’t demonstrating respect, then we definitely need to have a conversation about that!
There are little tweaks we can make to improve our interpersonal communication and make those conversations more comfortable, like…
“I” statements instead of “you” statements (because the latter can sound accusatory)
Delivering feedback with a gratitude sandwich: gratitude, feedback, more gratitude
Simply being open to understanding the other person’s perspective: “Help me understand xyz”
Even if we say something we don’t mean or upset our partner, every mistake has within it a learning opportunity to better yourself as a person and partner (aka a growth mindset!) Bottom line — openly communicate, because we all deserve to feel empowered enough to communicate our desires and needs to our partner.
Self reflection
I’ve written about this before, but I’ll say it again: reflect on how your partner makes you feel. Do you feel empowered, respected, and valued? Or do you feel some negative emotions? Also, personally reflect on how you can keep bringing your best self to the relationship.
Love comes from within you
As some of you probably know, in high school, I was extremely insecure and struggled with an eating disorder. I felt so helpless and was disappointed that I was never the pretty girl in school. I felt so behind my beautiful friends who had boyfriends, when I still had never been asked on a date or to the prom (and was partially hospitalized at the time of senior prom, which only added to my despair.) Since external validation was the only way I measured my worth, my self love was nonexistent. I felt locked into that negative mindset that if I lost weight, I would finally get a boyfriend and be happy. But that self hatred only took me further away from that goal, and from my happiness.
When I began my self improvement and self love journey in college, things totally changed. I started to make the shift of loving myself and having that love emanate from me (in addition to putting on many lbs!). Here’s an entry from my journal where I reflected on that experience:
“I made the decision to have a sense of acceptance and love instead of judgment towards myself. When I made the decision to truly start loving myself, I started to experience those internal shifts of having more authentic happiness and self love, and external shifts like receiving more love from others, on a much deeper level.”
I hope my story can help illustrate the difference it makes when love first comes from within. To sum it up, our worth isn’t determined by whether or not we have a partner, the amount of attention we receive from others, or any other external measurement. It’s about how YOU feel inside and how you love yourself. As with all of the points in this post, this is something I’m continually working on. I wanted to save it for last because as we all know, the most important and everlasting relationship you’ll have is the one with yourself, so don’t forget to nurture it!
For both my gals and guys reading, you truly deserve the very best. I hope this post inspires you to be intentional and feel empowered in your love life, you deserve it!
