It Begins with You: The 9 Hard Truths About Love That Will Change Your Life

by Jillian Turecki

We have to be able to distinguish between having tolerance for the imperfections we all come with and recognizing what is truly intolerable.

big lesson I’ve learned about love is that when our partner’s needs are more important than our own, we become a resentful martyr in our own relationship, and we can never do love in this state. When our needs are consistently more important than the other’s, we become selfish, and we are not loving when we are being selfish. Truly loving someone means that meeting the other’s needs is as important as meeting our own.

I knew rejection on a cellular level. In fact, after years of working with people, I’ve learned that rejection runs painfully deep for everyone. Someone basically says to us, “No, it’s not you. You’re not good enough for me. I don’t choose you. I don’t choose to build a life with you.” We then become obsessed with the fact that we weren’t chosen and convinced that we’re not good enough to be chosen. Thoughts of how we can prove our worth to the other person and win them over hijack our minds.

confused chemistry with emotional intimacy.

Do I actually like this person, or am I mostly preoccupied with getting them to like me?

When you stay connected to your inner circle, you reinforce the fact that you are already loved and that you have a life that is important to you. Loved ones see the beauty in you that you may be failing to see in yourself.

Focus on what’s important to you, be it work, a hobby, or another responsibility you have. The more you feel connected to what lights you up, the better.

Never forget this important fact: Everyone is on their best behavior in the beginning.

Here’s a truth I know for sure: You’re capable of having chemistry with various people.

Typically, in very unhealthy relationships, there’s an addictive cycle of fighting, followed by making up and regaining closeness, followed by more fighting. The relief from finding closeness again is so overwhelming that it keeps people engaged in the cycle. Because the goal of a relationship is emotional connection and closeness, the person with lowered self-worth can easily trick themselves into believing that those pockets of reconnection are enough to sustain the relationship.

the truth was that I didn’t love myself enough to believe I was worth being treated with basic respect. My need to be loved was far more powerful than my self-love.

Whenever our need for someone’s love is stronger than our self-love, we will abandon ourselves in the pursuit of their attention and validation. We’ll try to win their love even if it’s the wrong love; truthfully, in these cases it usually is the wrong love.

A critical step toward self-love is to be true to ourselves instead of exhausting ourselves by pretending to be someone we’re not.

“How do I stop attracting unavailable partners?” I always respond, “When you stop choosing them.”

to be human is to struggle with our value.

To love them is to honor everything they have overcome, to see their strengths, to accept their weaknesses, to care about their well-being, and to want the best for them. It also means that we can be angry at them sometimes, but we forgive and we still love them. It also means that when they struggle, we are there for them. It means when they are in pain, we listen.

It’s wrestling with the tension that exists between full self-acceptance and the drive to grow and evolve.

People think, When I love myself, I will be ready, and I’ll have the confidence, to climb the mountain in my life. But the truth is, we don’t climb the mountain once we love ourselves—we learn to love ourselves by courageously climbing it, even when we don’t necessarily feel prepared to.

Most of us are living our lives based on the “should” model: I should be doing this, I shouldn’t be doing that. We have so many rules about how we and others should live that we easily lose touch with what is truly meant for us. If you’re struggling to figure out how to be true to yourself, make a list of all the things that you gravitated toward

The greatest battle we face is the one with ourselves and more specifically, with the stories we tell ourselves about why we don’t deserve love or why we can’t climb the mountain.

Is it true? Can you absolutely know it’s true? How do you react and what happens when you believe that thought? Who would you be (and I would add, how would you feel ) without that thought?

Love me! Love me! to the people who never loved us, and as soon as someone does want to love us, we become the emotionally unavailable ones.

let’s work on your anxiety so you can not only receive his love, but you can actually be more loving toward him.”

Whenever we only focus on ourselves and our needs in a relationship, we become selfish, and selfishness destroys relationships. To love ourselves more completely, we have to show up in our relationships in a way that we’re proud of. We have to be “the right partner.” That doesn’t mean that we don’t make mistakes—we will. But when we do, we take responsibility and we course correct.

I’ve overcome ______. I survived ______. I am resilient because ______. I weathered ______. I pulled through ______. I am strong because ______. I am powerful because ______.

As James was able to overcome his fear of disappointing her, they were able to have these conversations more often. For Michelle, she really needed to be able to express disappointment without him freaking out.

As psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm wrote in The Art of Loving, “Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says: ‘I need you because I love you.’”

Loving, fulfilling relationships are determined by two things: whom we choose to love and how we choose to show

Inside all of us is a child who desperately yearns to be loved by a partner the way a parent would ideally love us: unconditionally. Romantic love always comes with conditions. We can’t be consistently moody, stressed-out, and uncommunicative, and expect someone to just love us anyway.

The truth is, we are responsible for how we show up in our relationships. We must never stop pursuing the things that light us up and give our lives meaning just because we’re in a relationship. And here’s the harder part for most of us: we have to bring that light home to our partner instead of spreading it just to friends, coworkers, or strangers. When we consistently give the best part of ourselves to everyone but our partners, we slowly destroy the relationship.

We cannot improve our love lives if we do not acknowledge and confront the saboteur that lives inside of us. Everyone has an inner saboteur, and it’s usually the teenager (or younger child) part of ourselves, who is always looking for ways to self-protect from hurt. Because the immature and wounded part of ourselves is always desperately searching for safety, it will destroy anything that stands in the way of finding it. Our inner saboteur has the purest of intentions: to protect us from hurt.

Self-awareness is noticing, Oh, I’m doing that thing where I’m silently punishing—and then realizing, I don’t want to be that person. The person I want to be in a relationship is not going to do that.

The space between trigger and reaction has been studied and taught for centuries by yogic masters, Buddhist monks, and psychologists. The pause is when we learn to use our breath and regulate our nervous systems so that we can choose with greater intention our response to something, rather than being controlled by our initial emotional reactions.

The ego says, I must win this fight. I’m right. My needs are more important than yours. I have to protect myself. How has your ego gotten in the way of your former relationships or your current relationship?

How has your need to be validated and loved gotten in the way of you giving validation and love to a partner?

I see where my fear is; I see where my ego is; I’m choosing to behave differently. And when I fail—because I will—I just course correct.

As much as “winning” someone’s love has been romanticized in film and literature, love is not something that we win.

When someone you love can’t love you back, you have to let them go. Whether it’s your partner, your spouse, the father or mother of your child, or just your fuck buddy, you’ve got to let them go. Period.

Stop wasting your life investing in someone who isn’t invested in you.

One of my most important missions is to help people stop chasing those who do not want to be chased. In other words, to accept when someone hasn’t chosen them and to choose themselves—their sanity, peace, and dignity—instead. To avoid, at all costs, the “situationship.”

When we choose to remain connected to someone who can never reciprocate our love, we severely interfere with not only our well-being but our future.

To walk away from the person you care about who cannot meet your needs is one of the bravest acts you can do.

I know that moving on from unrequited love is one of the most treacherous mountains to climb. I also know that when someone wants to leave, you have to let them leave and trust that your destiny is no longer tied to this person.

The truth is this: A relationship is meant to make us happier, not happy. To better the quality of our lives, not rescue us from our lives. To magnify positive emotion, not protect us from negative emotion. There’s no question that the love and companionship of a partner should make your road a little easier to walk. But no one can walk your path but you.

I saw a woman who was conditioned to believe that she needed to be saved from the monotony of her life by the love of a man. I saw a woman who had depth and an inner strength that she wasn’t aware of yet.

Your relationship with your parent doesn’t have to be a troubled one for it to have had an impact on your romantic relationships. You could be very close with the person or people who raised you and still need to heal wounds that are interfering with your love life.

We need to break up with our parents as the leaders of our belief systems in order to save or even improve our relationship with them. Most of us are moving through life like the walking wounded, unconsciously controlled by the need to seek our parents’