We all know how to lose weight and practice good health but it’s no guarantee we’re good at doing it, and the same goes for love and relationships!
People often say that love should be easy. It’s true, but it also isn’t… sorry to sound contradictory, but life is full of contradictions. So, in this issue, we’re going to dive into making love easy.
Basically, we make love easy in two simple ways:
- By respecting ourself and knowing what we want
- And by not dating idiots!
See! Easy!
But just like losing weight is easy, (eat less, exercise more), so many of us struggle with APPLYING these basic principles.
So, let’s take a whistlestop tour touching on the whole shebang a little deeper…
Your relationship: a source of joy, comfort and strength
Love is certainly so much easier if you have the right person, with shared values, and you share similar visions and you’re working towards the same goals and are in a good ‘relationship dance’ with each other. But life still happens!
People get sick, or tired. Houses need work. Bins need to be put out. Work sometimes takes precedence and steals some of life’s joy. Kids are brilliant – but annoying. Sometimes they’re ill, which is all-consuming. And sometimes we’re below par. Hormones surge and plummet.
Bills come in. Toast gets burnt. (I hate burnt toast!) And butternut squash gets left in the oven. (I’m not actually sure if squash is a big issue for many people, but I keep finding I leave a baking tray in the oven by accident during roast dinners!)
So, on reflection, I think when people say “love should be easy” they mean that it shouldn’t be full of unnecessary drama. Of soggy pillows and snotty ugly crying, and 2am texts. Of anxiety and worry about whether the other person actually really does love us, or is, in fact, actually pretending.
Because if they really love us, they would have done A, B,C…. goes the whirring thought machine. (And it’s worth being aware that it’s often our expectations of how our relationships should look that cause us the most problems of all!)
No matter how ‘evolved’ we are, and how much ‘work’ we’ve done on ourselves, (and I don’t mean Botox, darling), we’re still only ever one flawed human being building a life with another flawed human being. No one person can meet all our needs.
But the JOY and the FUN (please NEVER EVER FORGET THE FUN!) and the peace and grounded-ness of a healthy relationship mean that it’s ‘easy’ in the sense that you have a co-pilot, you’re doing life together, hand in hand. So, there may be sighs and frustrations, and occasional grumbles. But, essentially love is easy. And rather wonderful.
Truth is, Love is destined to be a bit of a PITA and NOT EASY IN THE SLIGHTEST if your man is not committed to you. And whether that is marriage or something similar, if you don’t have this, then your insecurities (and perhaps internal resentments, or dissatisfactions) will often poison what you have. (And even marriage doesn’t always equate with commitment, because people marry for multiple reasons). Which is why, in future newsletters, and in my classes, we take a deep dive into COMMITMENT. Because Commitment, The Big C! , is the key that unlocks the beautiful LOVE IS EASY garden, so you can grow the beautiful blooming flowers (ahem) of joy and jubilation…
The quintessential happy ever-after
We’re so often served up an alluring image of romance from Hollywood. After a few ups and downs and Will they? Won’t they? moments, they float off into the sunset. Motifs like birds, lapping waves and confetti showers signal the Happy Ending. And we’re gazing at the screen, outward sigh of relief that the story has come full circle. Even just watching the end of a rom com, there’s a sense of arrival at completeness, and bliss. Of course, you don’t need a therapist to tell you that you need to feel complete and whole as your own self. (But at the same time it’s also completely true that MOST of us are wired to seek a companion and to enjoy love and intimacy and deep connection).
Change the beginning, not the ending
A wise but annoying friend once told me, “your picker is off”.
I didn’t know what a picker was. It sounds kind of rude. But she was referring to my man radar. I picked idiots. To wildly paraphrase my life: I got engaged to a man because I fell in love with his country. (I confess, I flew two gargantuan boxes full of my stuff to his country. Then we finished.)
And then I married a man because I felt sorry for him, because he’d had an incredibly traumatic life. And then I had therapy and some coaching, and felt like I had arrived at a point where I was an absolute expert on myself and life and love and dating. BUT then I dated a man who it turned out had no intention of building anything worthwhile with me.
(Believe me, it’s written here in a few sentences but there’s enough drama to fill a book… (and I imagine it would be a thriller, might I add!).
Those topsy turvy days are long behind me, and I’m now happily married to a caring and thoughtful and wonderful man – and we bring out the best in each other, which is how it should be. But I haven’t forgotten the trials of my past!
If I’m honest, when I delved into my relationship patterns, I discovered that I actually created quite a lot of drama. I also nearly always had some huge ‘buffer’ against the vulnerability involved in being truly intimate. I was frightened of intimacy. Whether the buffer was culture, language, geography – you can bet I always subconsciously found one! Knowledge is power – and understanding this pattern (and the stories and beliefs that it came from) helped me create new healthier stories and beliefs that empowered me to step up and be my whole true self and find a man I could co-create a beautiful long-lasting relationship with.
I read so many books, and completed so many courses. But the most impactful advice anyone ever gave me can be summed up in this simple phrase: “Change the beginning, not the ending”.
Whether you’re in a relationship or not, it’s always worth reflecting on this.
If you’re not in a relationship, consider carefully before ‘falling’ in love.
- Are you repeating your pattern? Does it feel a little too familiar?
- Are you going helter-skelter way too fast? And are you getting tied up in them, and losing sight of you?
- Does it feel healthy and good? (And remember, your internal sat nav may be off, if you haven’t yet cultivated strong self esteem and self-worth).
If you are in a relationship, each new day represents a new start. And, it’s worth remembering that we can sometimes be quite selfish. We can focus on the value we want our partner to provide, rather than the value that we provide to them.
Cultivating an attitude of abundance – and of gratitude for everything our partner already does – helps to counter this tendency. We all want to give more when we feel appreciated (and, if you remember my post about appreciation, men are DEEPLY motivated by appreciation – I’ve posted the link below in case you want to have a look).
Have a love/dating question for me?
Send it through, and I’ll try to answer it in a future issue. Or reach out and we can work together directly.
