Thoughts on love

My thoughts on love...

Hi sweethearts! Since I’ve been doing a couple of weddings lately and this made me reflect on love a lot, I thought I’d share with you my thoughts about love. They might seem extreme or different, but that’s exactly why I’m sharing them with you.

First of all a small disclaimer: I do am single but I’ve had a pretty long relationship before so I think that I’m still able to tell you guys something about it. We’ve broken up over half a year ago, as you might know yet but we’ve been together for over 7 years. And actually, I learned most from the break up.

I’d like to start with a quote that I liked a lot: “Falling in love is easy but staying in love is very special.”. This is so true. Once you start dating everything seems super perfect and you can’t think of a lot of wrong things in the other person. To me, this was not the fact. I’ve tried to stay realistic because I didn’t want to get hurt by realising that this person was NOT perfect. In fact, no one is perfect… In my opinion, before you start dating, you really need to know that person super well, so that you know their bad habits and behaviors before you start dating. This will help you to get closer because you know about the things that will stand in between you both. This will help you to work on that.

But on the other hand: love isn’t everything. I think friendship is. Loving someone starts first with great friendship. I believe that you don’t have to hope for love. Love will come eventually. And if you don’t have someone to love, then just love your friends. I think that we all need a true best friend. Not exactly a lover. Friends can give you enough love, or sometimes even more than lovers do and here’s why: mostly we love our true friends unconditionally and we love our lovers WITH conditions because we all want them to be the perfect person. When you accept the flaws of a person, you’ll notice that a LOT of stress will floath away.

I always thought that we were able to love someone else, while not even loving ourselves first. I still believe that this is the fact, BUT we can’t love someone totally and fully without loving ourselves first. With selflove, we accept ourselves fully so that we don’t need someone else to help us with that. Now, knowing that I do like myself better, I know that in the future I’ll be able to love stronger, deeper, more intense. It will be a good thing that I’ll have more to give I think.

Then a hard one: don’t believe in soulmates. I repeat: DO NOT. They don’t exist, I’m sorry. Here’s why believing this will help you through life J haha! When you don’t believe in soulmates, you don’t feel the pressure to have to love that person forever and ever. Plus, it will help you accept the not-so-good-sides of that person. Doesn’t a soulmate have to be like your missing piece, that perfect thing that you can’t live without? Well, then keep on searching, because with this in mind, no one will ever be good enough for you. I prefer to call a lover a best friend. I do believe in strong, deep friendship and that you can love the other person for who he/she really is.

I also want to talk about happiness because people always don’t seem to understand that you don’t need someone else to be happy. Happiness comes from within. Not from someone else. You have to work on your own happiness and you can’t rely on someone else for that. It might be hard to understand but you don’t really need the other person for YOUR happiness. I alays thought that my boyfriend would make me perfectly happy but in fact, this was not true. I wasn’t fully happy and he couldn’t help me with that. I had to work really hard on myself, without his help. I think that I was holding myself back by hoping that someday, he’d make me happy….

Before I start going on to the tips that I have, I’d like to finish this off with talking a bit about unconditional love. To me this actually means no conditions. So having no conditions, none… which is super hard . We always want something from one another but we are our own idividuals too. As I said a bit before: we need to work on ourselves first. We need on working on how we want to deal with things. Plus, we also need to work on only ourselves not on the other person. We have to invest in ourselves first, to become a better person. The other person also needs to work on him/herself. You don’t need to do that for him/her because this won’t work. It’s just not possible to actually change someone. I do believe in change, but in changing yourself. And also, in the relationship you have to give both the same amount of effort in the relationship. To work on things that are standing in between you both. You need to build YOURSELF up, instead of the other. I always wanted to have my OWN money. I don’t want to have the money from my other half. I’m my own person so I need to take care of myself also. Ofcourse, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t enjoy efforts that the other person takes just to spoil you a bit.

Now a couple of TIPS:

First of all, my favorit one: travel together. Because: DUH! Traveling together will give you enough time to talk about things. In our regular lives, sometimes we just don’t have enough time for that. Plus, taking the time just to enjoy the company of your true best friend is just great. Vacations will give you the time to find your way back to each other after some time.

Then, if you want to invest in a long relationship: have a common vision. With a vision I mean a vision about your life, work and maybe workethics even and last but most important: your lifestyle. If both of your lifestyles don’t match,the relationship will get a lot harder. It will give a lot of reasons to fight about and ofcourse, you don’t want to have much reasons to fight about.

What I also think that’s important about a good, strong relationship is the passion. I think that you have to feel passionate about the other person. That you need a certain drive… Plus also, the physical aspect of passion. Be passionate with each other, explore each other and find out what you both want in a relationship, besides the spiritual part.

Also important here: inspire each other. I’m a person who needs a lot of being inspired by others, so that I can work on myself because I want to be like that person. And if I can look up to someone, I’ll do everything to become more like that person. This would mean that I’m actually working on myself to become a better person.

Another important one that I use a lot at work (when I’m not Steph the hairstylist) but Steph, the professional extra-care-teacher: talk also about the good things. I feel so bad that I never did that, I took it all for granted. I felt like it was just normal for him to be normal, if you know what I mean… And then I felt like I always was complaining about literally everyting and that I didn’t have enough time or patience to talk about those good things too.

In relationships you can not depend on material stuff. Depend on beautiful memories. Memories will last forever and are so much more important. Doing things that are fun to do together is what I mean. Make memories together. it's so fun to think back about lovely things you've done together.

Now we’re at the end of this blogpost with my last and final tip. Talk openly about EVERYTHING, but in the right way. This is an important nuance. You need to communicate right. I’m not going to talk about how to communicate right, this is something for you guys to work on yourselves. To find out by you and only YOU.

So, was I able to explain my vision here? Was it helpful?

Thank you so much for reading this post. It’s a post that’s really dear to my heart and I’ve opened up a lot again but I’m doing this all for you guys. I’m not doing it for myself.

X Steph