There are no hard and fast rules that everybody has to follow to make relationships work, but we have ten great tips you can ponder while you are cultivating your love relationships including being honest, learning to listen, and fighting fair
“Fine clothes and diamond rings, well it just don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got love.”- Dolly Parton
Bright Blessings,
I have not written on a personal level for a while and that’s because my focus is on writing about topics people want to read. As a psychic, however, there is one topic people ask me about most of all. Love. Love is usually the most important thing in people’s lives, and to be honest it is for me as well. There have been times in my life when I did not have anything but the people who I love, and while I had to work hard to get things that were important to me, love was enough to keep me going when I had nothing else.
A lot of reading clients and people who I know and love personally tell me the same thing. People who love you make your life better. People who love you will help you find a job when you don’t have one- thanks Chassie! People who love you will buy groceries for you and put a roof over your head when you are too sick to work- thank you Teddy! People who love you will call you out when you are being hard on yourself- thank you Brynden! People who love you will call you down when you are acting like a jerk- thanks Dad! The people who love us comfort us when we are struggling, celebrate our victories with us, and encourage us when we have lost hope. Sometimes, love is all we have and sometimes, it’s all we need.
I am nearly a half a century old, and in those years, I have learned some truths about love. Some truths about love hurt and others lighten the soul, but truth is truth and understanding these things helps us as we maneuver relationships. No two relationships are exactly the same, and each of us experiences love in different ways than everybody else, but there are some things people in healthy love relationships always do, and these things bring them and the people who they love closer together. My hope for you is that love may never hurt and that it will always make your life better than anything else. Read on to discover ten things that will help you as you travel on your journey through love.
Be Honest
“ Being honest may not get you a lot of friends, but it’ll always get you the right ones.”- John Lennon
Truth matters in relationships, maybe more than a lot of people realize. Honesty builds trust, and without trust, some people feel they cannot be in a relationship. An article published by soocial.com states that 20% of people admitted they lied to their significant other about their sexual history and about 75% Of people reported being honest most of the time. That means about 25% of people admitted they are dishonest quite a lot. A poll the article referenced stated that British people polled said that honesty was of top importance when they were seeking a new lover. Another study the article referenced found that over half the people participating were unable to make it through a ten-minute conversation without lying at all. 21 Honesty Statistics That Reveal Our True Colors 2023 - Soocial
What these statistics tell us is that human beings, unfortunately, can’t always be trusted to be honest. People feel uncomfortable in relationships with people who they don’t trust to be truthful with them. If you are going to be in a long-term relationship with a significant other, and you don’t feel you can trust them to be honest about finances, it might make you feel that your relationship is not stable. Being honest with your partner about where you are, how you spend money, and most especially your feelings will help build a bond. It will help to make you partners who are working toward the same goals in life and who work together as a team. Telling the truth about things, including your feelings will help make your relationship stronger and bring you closer together.
Listen
‘Most people only listen to respond, but that’s not listening.” – Lord Shadow
Being honest about things, including being honest enough to express how you feel is crucial, but listening to your partner is just as important. When you have been away from one another at work all day and you come together in the evening, if you glue yourself to the TV screen, ignoring your partner all night long, they are going to feel like you don’t listen to them. If they try to express their feelings about something that hurt them, but you say that they are being “too sensitive” and you tell them to “get over it”, they are not going to feel like you listen to them. If you shoot down their idea for a vacation, telling them your idea is better and you don’t want to hear what they have to say, your partner won’t feel like you are listening to them.
Being listened to and having your feelings valued and validated by your partner is very important. Being able to open up to one another will help build emotional intimacy and some couples can’t work things out if they don’t feel their partner listens to them. Your significant other is often the person who is closer to you than anybody else in your life and that relationship is oftentimes the most important one you have. Being able to tell them everything that is in your heart and on your mind will bring you closer together. So, really listen to your lover. Your entire relationship can depend on it. Rad about spiritual love here: What is the Spiritual Meaning of Love?
Put Love First
“ Love is putting someone else’s needs before yours.”- Olaf
Let’s face it. There are a lot of important things in life. Career and money are top priorities for a lot of people. Hobbies and things we love doing are too. The things that shape our personal identities and our sense of self-worth, too, are top priority. When it comes down to it, though, a lot of people say love is the most important thing in their lives. It is certainly a deciding factor in why most people get married today. The Pew Research Center reported 90% of people surveyed said love is an important reason to get married and 87% said they wanted to marry for lifelong commitment. 81% of people in the study also said they wanted to marry for companionship. Love and Marriage | Pew Research Center
Marriage and romantic relationships are not the only loving relationships we have, though. We have our close friends and family members who we love, and a lot of people include their pets as family. If you love them, they need to be your top priority. Jobs, money and other material things, and experiences come and go, but the people you love cannot be replaced. If you focus so much on other things that you ignore your relationships and the feelings of the people who are in your life, they will think you don’t care about sharing life with them. There will come a day when you need people and things won’t fulfill a need that your people can. Put the people you love first in all things you do.
Know When It’s Not Love
“ You know that tingly little feeling you get when you like someone? That’s common sense leaving your body.”- Anonymous
Sometimes, you meet somebody, and you feel like you have an immediate connection. You spend all the time together you possibly can, and you enjoy having a lot of fun with each other. You experience extreme excitement whenever you see them or think about them, and it seems like they are the most perfect person who has ever been born. The sex is the best sex you have ever had before in your life, and you decide that this individual is the one who you want to spend your life with. As time goes on, though, boredom sets in, and you are not ecstatically joyous every time you see this person. Things you had not noticed before like how loudly they brush their teeth starts to drive you crazy, and one day you feel like you can’t stand them at all. You tell them you don’t love them anymore, and you hope you never see them again.
But was it really love? In situations like this, chances are it was either infatuation or lust that brought you together, and focusing on having fun made you want to be around them often. If you aren’t there for one another when tragedy strikes or something like the shape of their feet or how much they weigh makes you dump them, you did not love them for who they are as a person, you were fascinated with an idealized image of them. Chances are, the person you thought they were never existed, and you were highly disappointed with them.
If you and your partner struggle with living day to day life with one another, and you don’t get along unless you are doing something that is a lot of fun like vacations, major festival events, or having a lot of hot sex, it might not be love. If you have been together five years, and you no longer love the mother of your child because her body changed after pregnancy, chances are you never loved her in the first place. If you don’t feel love for your husband because he does not make as much money as you had expected him to, you might have loved the idea of being rich instead of being married to him. Love is not a temporary feeling you have when everything seems perfect, but it is a feeling that never goes away, and love is for life. Be very mindful of your own feelings in your relationships because sometimes, it’s not love. Read about manifesting love: How to Manifest Love
Let Them Go
“ If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don’t, they never were.”- Khalil Gibran
One thing to keep in mind no matter who you are involved with, be it a family member, friend, or significant other is that no matter how long you have been in a relationship, it is important to respect people’s right to choose. That includes their right to choose to walk away from a relationship. Not all relationships are meant to last forever. Not all people have what it takes to make each other happy for life. When this happens, no matter how badly it hurts, accept it, and let the relationship go. Relationships are not life sentences we should be trapped in if we don’t want to be.
Sometimes, we rush into relationships when we are excited about new love, and years down the road, things change. Sometimes people change and they no longer participate in life with you the way they used to. Sometimes, trust is broken, and other times, you realize you committed to a toxic relationship, and you want out so you can have a healthy life. Sometimes, nobody did anything wrong, and the relationship was just meant to last a short time. When things like this happen, loving yourself and the person you are in a relationship with means you can only do one thing. Accept that the relationship is over and be supportive of the fact you both need to move on.
Stay Open
“ When we open to love, we become love.” – Tara Brach
No matter what goes wrong in relationships, it is important to keep your heart open to people. That doesn’t mean you will accept a relationship with anybody who asks you to, and it doesn’t mean you will take people back who have hurt you. It just means that you will keep your heart open, and give love, in general, a chance. Everybody is hurt sometimes, and it is the people who we love and trust most who have the most power to hurt us. Just know that no matter how badly you have been hurt, not everybody is a hurtful individual. There are a lot of good people in the world who are waiting for somebody just like you to come into their lives and love them.
If you decide “all men are pigs” or “all women are cheats”, or something like that, you will close yourself off from people and sink into bitterness. Not everybody who says they love you does, and it is difficult to judge sometimes who is lying when they say they love you. Some people come into your life, offering love, but instead use you for things they want like money, sex, or emotional support, and they have no intention of reciprocating. Don’t let people like that close your heart and isolate you from all the wonderful people and all the love there is waiting for you. Move on from the pain, taking some time to heal, and then open your heart to other, more deserving people. Read about how to say I love you: When Should I Tell Him I Love Him?
Love Completely
“ Live beautifully. Dream passionately. Love completely.” - Anonymous
If you are going to go to all the trouble of being in a relationship with somebody who you say you love, then give all the love that you can to them. Don’t hold back love, keeping score and only giving as much as you feel they give. Give them all the love you have got. Some people want to divide everything including their time together in their relationship 50/50, but rationing your love in this way will only serve to deplete your relationship. When you love, love completely.
If you are in a relationship with somebody who says you are “too intense” or “too committed” or “too involved”, chances are that you love them, and they don’t love you. There is a difference between each person needing some time to themselves and then somebody who acts like it bothers them to be involved with you at all. In our relationships, we should be completely free to be who we are and people who we love should not be expected to hold back their affection from us. If you love somebody completely, and they hold back from you, it’s okay to move on and find somebody else. Not everybody will want to take love and not give love. If you love somebody, give them all the love you can give them, openly, freely, and completely.
Fight Fair
“ There should be no yelling in the home unless there is a fire.”- David O. McKay
Everybody fights with the people who they love at some point, even if the fights are over small things that resolve quickly. Some fights are over big things, though, and if you are in a relationship with somebody long enough, you will have something to disagree about coming up. The question is, how do you fight when you do fight with one another? Does an issue become something you battle one another over and you see each other as the enemy? Or is a fight something you discuss and come to an agreement on as a team?
If the issue at hand is seen as more important than the person who you love, your relationship might suffer if it survives at all. When you have a fight with somebody who you love, considering their feelings while you disagree on a topic is important. So don’t use name calling, and don’t bring up past hurts to use as weapons to try to weaken them to get your way. Is where to eat dinner, where to go on vacation, how to spend your bonus check, or proving you think you are right about something really worth doing or saying something upsetting to somebody who you love? If you get into a fight with somebody you love, always remember love comes first and everything else comes last. Fight fair with the people who you love. Read what the Minor Arcana says about love: Minor Arcana Cards for Love
Allow Yourselves Space
“ My husband said he needed more space, so I locked him outside.”- Roseanne
One thing not everybody who is in love thinks about is making sure they have enough time to themselves. That doesn’t mean you need to “get away from” your significant other, or that you can only stand to have time with your family in “small doses”. It just means that even when we love somebody, we are still individuals, and we don’t have to do everything together. No matter how much we love somebody or how close we feel to them, we all need things that belong to us that are separate from our relationship. Some people like meditation time alone or like to work out alone. Other people have hobbies they do on their own.
Besides having time to yourself without your closest loved ones, you need time with other people. Parents might love their kids more than anything else, but sometimes they need date night without the kids coming along. A woman might love her wife more than anybody else, but she still needs time to play softball with her teammates. You might be best friends, family, or a significant other with somebody, but you are still individuals. Allow yourself and your loved ones some healthy time apart from you sometimes, and when you come together again, you can talk about the good time you had.
Love Yourself
“ If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna’ love somebody else. “ - RuPaul
Some people insist that if you don’t love yourself, then you cannot love anybody else, but is that true? Self-love is very important, but some people have problems that are not their fault that compromise their ability to love themselves. Some people suffer trauma or abuse and struggle with self-love and some conditions like generalized anxiety disorder, depression, or psychotic disorders make it difficult for people to love themselves. Some people were programmed from childhood to have low self-esteem, and they struggle to love themselves or see their own value. That does not mean that they cannot love anybody else or that you are in any way failing. While you try to learn to love yourself, your love for other people is still pure and beautiful and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.
However, there is some truth in RuPaul’s words. If you are not at least trying to learn self-love, you may find yourself in relationships with people who don’t value you, and that is not in any way a good thing. You cannot make people love you, show them you are worth their time, or change to please them and if you care about yourself, you will not compromise yourself for relationships. Self-love will help you walk away from people who you meet that are selfish and it will help you find people to love who truly care about you. If you don’t have healthy self-love, you are at risk of settling for unhealthy relationships and being emotionally broken all your life. You deserve better, so love yourself and embrace relationships with people who love you as well.
No two relationships are exactly alike, but everyone who is in a relationship wants to be involved with somebody who truly loves them. If you are really in love with somebody, you may as well give it your all to make the relationship work out long-term. Relationships don’t work out with the wrong people, but there can be unnecessary difficulties with the right people if we are not trying to be loving and present. If you both share your true feelings and put each other first, your chances of a healthy relationship are much stronger. Allow yourself to completely love, be fair when you are having a disagreement, have healthy boundaries and time apart and love yourself as well as everyone else, and your relationships will have a better chance of success. May you be loved deeply by people who you love completely and may your relationships last for life. So Be It.
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About the Author: Lady Saoirse has studied magic and lore for most of her life but started walking her own Magical Path after being spiritually reborn in the desert. Today she is a High Priestess for The Temple of the Goddess, she is a psychic advisor and spiritual counselor, she shares her gifts as a Psychic and Content Writer for SpiritualBlossom, Mysticsense, and she writes for The Green Egg and PaganPages.Org emag.
