There are few things I love more than my dog, Blue, but my husband falls into that category. After 11 years together, I can still say, we fall more in love every year. What’s the secret sauce to a great relationship?
A lot of relationships are doomed from date number 1. There was a theory I read about not long before I met my husband that said the first 30 min of your first date will be a great predictor of your future relationship. I met my husband at a music event which was taking place in an eclectic leather bar/Mexican restaurant. Yeah, seriously, I’m not kidding….. It was the days of MySpace, and everyone wanted to have that perfect profile pic to show off how cool their life is each week. I had my camera with me and snapped a picture of this shy boy that hid from my lens by covering his face with his hat. After that I challenged him to run around the party and take the silliest pictures we could for our profile pics. He agreed, and the rest is long, sometimes rocky road in the beginning, that led to many years of laughs and love.
We’re still silly and don’t take life too seriously. We can find the good in things and laugh about the challenges. We decided early on that we define our somewhat non-traditional relationship on our own terms. I’d already been through one marriage; he didn’t have a stable family structure to imitate. We lived over 2 hrs away from each other, we are 12yrs apart in age, and oh, I had a child. So it was a bit of an uphill battle in the beginning. I think back on how each of us tried to push the other one away, but something kept bringing us back to each other. It could have easily become just another relationship where one person is trying to save another, but somehow he inspired me to change myself. I saw that to make the relationship work, I needed to be my best self. I was driven to improve myself, so that our life together would be improved. Don’t worry, he did a lot of self improvement as well!!
I ask people all the time if their partner inspires them to be a better person. Are you trying to change them, or yourself? Do you love them more that they love you? Is the relationship equal? Can you trust each other? Are you willing to be vulnerable and show them your flaws? At the end of the day, can you go to bed knowing that you are better because you are together? If you lost everything, would you still be fulfilled knowing that you have each other?
In the end, if you don’t love yourself, then no one is going to be able to love you back. You have to love yourself to be open to a true, fulfilling, equal love from someone else. A relationship with one partner loving the other far more than the other is going to be imbalanced and full of challenges. And one of the number one things people look for in a partner is confidence! When you love yourself, you have self confidence. So when you find that partner that really inspires you to grow in love with yourself as well as with them, then you know you have a keeper. It might sound selfish to love yourself first, but that’s really the way it’s got to work if you want it to last.
So if you’re still looking for that perfect someone, start loving yourself- every flaw, every achievement, every quirk, and every possibility of getting better every day. Once you have that confidence, you are going to attract someone of that same vibration, and you will be less likely to choose the one that doesn’t inspire you to be better. And if your first date is awful, maybe you consider that before you agree to a second one!
So love the one you’re with… all the time… YOURSELF!! Good vibes attract a good tribe!
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