I Didn't Know I Needed This: The New Rules for Flirting, Feeling, and Finding Yourself—An Unfiltered Relationship Manual with Candid Insights, Embrace the Chaos of Modern Dating

by Eli Rallo

You are an amalgamation of memories and hard days and great days and your favorite season and smell and that one linen dress.

Don’t run from the hard part, from the work in getting to know who you are. The hard part is your becoming.

Platonic love, especially when it comes to female friendship, is a currency akin to gold.

I’ve always been a nervous person. And my nervousness was planted, and grows, in a soil of perception.

You deserve for things to work out.

It is a beautiful thing to see someone as human and choose to love them exactly as they are.

There was a road somewhere on the map of my life that I’d never traveled, marked “believing you deserve something good.”

Once we accept that the good never exists without the bad, the bad starts to look less bad.

I wondered what it would be like to redefine success—to redefine failure.

Your dream life is going to knock softly on your door one day and wake you up from your sleep. You just have to be willing to open the door and invite it in.

We want slow motion when things are good, a pause button when they’re confusing, and a fast-forward when they suck.

I just wanted to finally live a life for me. A life I liked. A life I honored. A life I watered like a well-kept plant. Even if I had to lose love to do it. I wanted the feeling I started to discover—of choosing me.

Wow. What a gift then, to simply live.

When you start the work and you keep on with it, goodness begins to fall into your lap.

A love story could be just me recognizing my own worth, me taking control.

I am so blissfully content. Not happy, not sad, just content. Excited about tomorrow and a little sad about yesterday.

To love love is to love life.

I wish I’d known that I had to choose myself, I had to choose a path, I had to choose something, anything, instead of just waiting around for someone to choose me.

So screw everyone who hurt you first. You’ll forget them, because what you have is now. The losses will be your becoming. Eventually, all of it fades away, becomes the road in the rearview mirror as you start to drive toward something without having to ask for directions.

It is in the moments we stop pressuring ourselves to be loved that we become loved.