One of my favorite digital resources, Refinery 29, published a great Q&A last week featuring four New York City couples and how they keep the fire burning for one other. After reading this piece, I couldn’t help but be inspired to reflect on all the things I’ve learned about love and because of love thanks to my fantastic other half.
1. Love can be one of the easiest and the most difficult feelings to both express and to experience.
Love, as it turns out, is one of the easiest and the most difficult feelings to both express and to feel. For me, giving love is far, far easier than receiving. I’ve got a proclivity for being hard on myself, which makes accepting love from others fairly difficult. I have a I-don’t-think-I-deserve-this filter that I’m doing my best to annihilate. Love is a gift; love is something all beings deserve and have a right to experience.
2. “Comparison is the thief of joy.” - Theodore Roosevelt
If you want to suck all the joy and happiness out of yourself and a relationship (or situation), compare yourself to something or someone else. I implore you, resist the urge to compare yourself to another beautiful woman, your relationship to another couple’s, or your own relationship to a different moment in time during the relationship. Just because another woman is beautiful doesn’t mean you’re not. Just because another couple appears happier than you doesn’t mean they are. Just because your relationship feels different now than a few months or a few years ago doesn’t mean something is wrong. Instead, focus on the positive.
3. You can only be as happy with someone else as you are with yourself. You can only love someone else as deeply as you love yourself. You’ll only be as sexy as you feel.
It sounds so easy doesn’t it? For some, this is a real toughie, myself included. Being happy with yourself and loving yourself isn’t always easy. In my experience, perfectionists and women have a particularly difficult time with this. I still struggle with this on what seems to be a weekly basis. Here’s something that I should read more often:
“A powerful realization that has helped me is simply this: You’re already good enough, you already have more than enough, and you’re already perfect...if you learn to be content with who you are and where you are in life, it changes everything.”
Don’t underestimate the importance of your own happiness and well being. If everyone were more concerned with their own happiness the world would be a better place. If everyone put the same effort into being who they wanted to be as who they think their significant other wanted them to be, the world would be a much better place, too. I’ve learned that alone time away from your partner is key. So is engaging in activities and hobbies that you’re passionate about.
4. Sex does not (and should not) make or break a relationship.
In the beginning, there was sex. And it was good. A year or so later, there is still sex, it is still good but it is most certainly different (and remember: different does not mean better or worse). Sex will come and go in a relationship. There will be peaks and there will be valleys. Sometimes you’ll peak together (wink, wink) and sometimes you’ll be in different places. Work, roommates, differing sex drives, pets, kids, you name it, they all can come first (no pun intended) before sex.
It’s taken me the past three weeks to succumb to this truth. In my mind, men have the sex drive of a sports car. They’re ready to go whenever we are. This is a lie. They’re apparently human, too. (I know, I was shocked.) A lesson that has been really tough to swallow lately is a mix between numbers three and four: just because he doesn’t want to have sex with you all the time anymore doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you or doesn’t think you’re gorgeous. It just means he doesn’t want to, and you have to learn to be okay with that.
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