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

by Jay Shetty

get more comfortable in your own skin. You’re getting to know your preferences without leaning on someone else’s priorities and goals. You’re learning how to have a conversation with yourself.

The lens of loneliness makes us insecure and prone to bad decisions. The lens of solitude makes us open and curious. As such, solitude is the foundation on which we build our love.

Solitude is not a failure to love. It is the beginning of love.

You spend more time with yourself than anyone else in your lifetime.

If you don’t respect each other’s values, it’s harder to understand each other’s choices and decisions, which then can lead to confusion and conflict.

If you don’t have the same values, you don’t have to fight about them or defend them, but you need to know your own so you can respect yourself, and know theirs so you can respect them—and

Research shows that not only does high self-esteem create a more satisfying work life and better physical and psychological health, but it also predicts better and more satisfying romantic relationships.

When we’re alone we fully rely on ourselves, figure out what we care about, and learn who we are. We learn to navigate challenges on our own.

we don’t want to mold ourselves to someone else simply because we don’t know ourselves.

Solitude helps you recognize that there is a you before, a you during, and a you after every relationship, forging your own way even when you have company and love.

Self-control is the time and space you create between the moment when you’re attracted to something and the moment you react to it.

Instead of letting your senses lead the way, the gap that you create gives you the restraint to make sure the reaction is aligned with who you want to be.

We develop the self-control to pause and ask ourselves these questions, and the patience to take our time answering them. We learn the difference between what feels good and what feels nourishing.

We look to our partner, essentially saying, “I’m bored, entertain me. I’m tired, energize me. I’m angry, make me laugh. I’m frustrated, comfort me. I’m unhappy, cheer me up.”

We treat our partners like human Advil, looking to them for instant relief.

“The best thing for your nervous system is another human. The worst thing for your nervous system is another human.”

In solitude we practice giving ourselves what we need before we expect it from someone else.

People determine how to treat us in large part by observing how we treat ourselves. The way you speak about yourself affects how people will speak with you. The way you allow yourself to be spoken to reinforces what people think you deserve.

A relationship with someone else won’t cure your relationship with yourself.

You have the self-control to wait for someone you can be happy with and the patience to appreciate someone you’re already with.

You want to go on a journey with someone, not to make them your journey.

the very process of learning to understand and love yourself helps you understand the effort required to love someone else.

Perhaps the most important lesson solitude offers is helping us understand our own imperfection. This prepares us to love someone else, in all their beauty and imperfection.

You made a choice, and you have to live with the consequences of that choice.

We love others in response to the way we’ve been loved by others.

when we learn from the past, we heal it.

The more aware we are of our expectations and where they came from, the more we can communicate our needs and adapt to our partners.

Looking in the karma mirror helps us stop chasing others who might fulfill emotional needs from our childhoods and start fulfilling them ourselves.

Karma will bring you the same lesson through a different person again and again until you change.

Karma encourages you to reflect on the choice, the reason you made it, and what you should do differently next time.

We are enchanted by them, so we convince ourselves that they will stop in their tracks and suddenly give us their time and attention. We’re sure that once they finally focus on us, they’ll fall in love with us.

When someone is unavailable, they will generally stay that way.

When you parent your partner, it makes them behave like a child.

John and Julie Gottman on my podcast, John said that oxytocin can be the “hormone of bad judgment.”

If we look for the opulences in a partner, we are being sold a temporary bill of goods.

Only when we know someone intimately and deeply do we find the sweetness in them.

If we are attracted to someone for their ambition, that’s what we get—a person whose priority is ambition.

Sometimes we feel like none of the options before us are people we want to date. And then we have to ask ourselves, Why are these my options?

When we present ourselves, we are signaling the dynamic we want, how we expect to be treated, what we think we deserve.

It’s important to put out the version of yourself that you want someone to be attracted to, as opposed to the version of yourself that you think someone would be attracted to.

We don’t want to bring gaps to our relationships, expecting our partner to fill them. We want to fill our own gaps.

If we look to our partners to fill an emotional gap, this puts undue pressure on our partner. We are asking them to take responsibility for our happiness.

If you often tell yourself that you’re not good enough, you become not good enough.

“Love grows by practice, there’s no other way.”

You think you know their heart, but you just know their mind. Love takes time.

To discount the many forms of love is to miss many beautiful possibilities.

They found that higher rates of well-being were associated more with people who had deep conversations than those who made more small talk.

“Online dating sites can promote the overwhelming notion that there are endless choices in the world, leaving some of us to get stuck in a cycle of perpetual searching or what one [team of researchers] called ‘relationshopping.’

You simply won’t find someone who ticks every box on your checklist.

Dreams are an illusion. Reality is far more interesting.