8 Rules of Love: How to Find It, Keep It, and Let It Go

by Jay Shetty

Dreams don’t have to be big; they just have to be yours.

When you’re a part of each other’s growth, you don’t grow apart from each other.

In the Bhagavad Gita, we see Arjuna pause and ask for Krishna’s wisdom in the middle of a conflict. Think about that! He stops in the middle of a battlefield to talk to God. If Arjuna can manage to shift his attention away from the battle in this very tense moment—the most difficult of conflicts—then we too can learn to pause and bring awareness to the daily skirmishes and the all-out wars we confront in our relationships.

I’m right and you’re right. You’re wrong and so am I. These are both win-win scenarios.

If you can’t apologize genuinely at the outset, save it for later.

When we take a neutral role, we remind ourselves that the problem isn’t our partner.

“Look, I’m fighting for the wrong thing right now. I’m sorry about this. I want to have this conversation, but I need ten minutes. I’m not going anywhere. Let me take some time to understand this or cool down, and then let’s have a proper discussion.”

You existed before this relationship, and you will outlast it.

Acknowledge the pain, but understand where it resides and what has broken. What you created with your partner is being dismantled, but you are not being dismantled. Your life is not falling apart. You are not over.

“Everything we love goes. So to be able to grieve that loss, to let go, to have that grief be absolutely full, is the only way to have our heart be full and open. If we’re not open to losing, we’re not open to loving.”

We’ve been devalued, but only by them. This is why we have to set our own worth and find someone who values us for who we are.

Love means noticing that everyone is worthy of love and treating them with the respect and dignity their humanity automatically makes them deserve.

When you think this way, love stretches its arms wider and wider. If a parent loves their children, they love the other children who surround them at school because they care about the community their own children experience. And if you care about the community, then you care about the school itself. And if you care about the school, then you care about the ground where it sits. This is why, if you love your kids, you should want to better their world and the world at large. Loving those around us teaches us to love each living entity, and loving everyone teaches us to love the world around us—the place they call home.

We don’t accept abuse, but we understand that a person causes pain because they’re in pain.

Don’t compromise your values, and don’t accept abuse, but stretch your capacity to give love.

We feel inhibited from loving our colleagues because of the formality of a professional environment. Love in the work world looks different. It’s not deep. It’s often not emotional. You may not share a level of trust that allows you to be very personal or vulnerable. In fact, connecting on a personal level may not be appropriate or suitable to your work culture. We overcome this by finding ways to inject appreciation and warmth into an office environment.

We think of love as reciprocal, but sannyasis love without reciprocation.

We serve in goodness when we don’t want recognition or an outcome—we just want to show pure love.

the greatest way to experience love is to give it.

You can seek love your whole life and never find it, or you can give love your whole life and experience joy.