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

by Jay Shetty

Your purpose has to come first for you, and your partner’s purpose has to come first for them. Then you come together with the positive energy and stability that come from pursuing your purposes.

But just as solitude helps us enter a relationship with self-knowledge, so knowing our purpose helps us sustain and grow a relationship holding on to our sense of purpose and supporting our partner’s efforts to do so too.

If you want to truly love someone and give them your best self, then you have to be your best self.

looking after ourselves, we prepare to look after others. As marriage and family therapist Kathleen Dahlen deVos told HuffPost, the happiest couples are those who can move past their initial obsession with each other to prioritize their own pursuits and goals.

couples need to maintain their individual identity within the relationship rather than let the relationship define them.

The partner without a purpose might become envious of the other’s progress, in which case both partners miss out on the joy, energy, and contentment that two people who are fueled by their purpose bring to each other.

We think starting means doing, but it actually begins with learning. Don’t skip or avoid the learning phase. The reason we say knowledge is power is that it can help you overcome any fear of the unexpected.

In order to learn, you have to commit time, and in order to commit time, your partner has to be on board.

Engage your partner in this process. If you don’t communicate with your partner about what you’re excited to pursue, they may wonder why you don’t want to spend time with them. If they sign on to this plan, they’ll understand and respect why you’re spending your time as you do.

We often pressure our partners to be as enthusiastic as we are about our passion. Or we wonder if they’re right for us because when we talk about our passion, they don’t have much to add to the conversation. Our partner doesn’t have to share our passions. Even if they do, that doesn’t guarantee success in a relationship.

This way your partner is still part of the process, and they don’t feel mystified or alienated as you proceed. You want your partner to feel loved and connected as you find ways to learn and develop your purpose. Just be sure to let them know when you’ll be experimenting so that they can decide how they want to schedule the time—perhaps they’ll be experimenting too.

Communication is always the key

In order to thrive, you have to ramp up your efforts, and pursuing your purpose may start to consume more of your time and energy. It’s vital that you share what you’re doing and what you need from your partner in this phase. Remember, you are taking care of your own needs so you can give to the people you love.

When you struggle, explain to your partner what you’re going through. If someone knows why you’re tired, distracted, or upset, they’ll be better able to support you in the ways we talked about in Rule 4.

Nobody is satisfied through another person’s dharma. If one pretends to share the other’s dharma, they won’t be able to use their true gifts. Dreams don’t have to be big; they just have to be yours.

I didn’t pressure her to choose a career goal or ask when her quest would end. When our partner is looking for their purpose, we support from the sidelines.

Your partner is your partner in love. You are each other’s guru—learning about yourselves and each other. But you don’t have to be mentors or business partners.

But if someone gives us their time because we demand it, we don’t get the best of them. Instead of pulling them away from their purpose, you can join them in their journey, whether they are learning and experimenting or putting their purpose into action.

We seek to understand instead of projecting our own desires and limitations onto them. If our partner doesn’t think we’ll understand, they won’t open up or tell us the truth.

Treat your partner with at least the same respect you would give a friend or colleague and offer them mindful responses that help them grow their purpose.

Be patient with them. Recognize and appreciate their worthy efforts, no matter what the results have been. The tone of this conversation should be supportive. Remind them that they can handle challenges, and that you are there to solve problems with them. You’re doing this together.

We complain when people are late, but we never thank them for being on time.

step toward fulfilling one’s purpose, but it often is. Instead of celebrating the obvious wins, watch your partner closely for efforts and successes that nobody else is positioned to notice. Recognizing them helps fuel your partner’s drive and satisfaction.

Below are four different strategies for how to manage two purposes: you can set your purposes aside temporarily to prioritize earning and spending time with the family while your children are young and the household has financial pressures, you can prioritize one person’s purpose, you can take turns prioritizing your purposes, or you can go all in on both partners’ purposes.

Use mornings and evenings to build your passion. Remember something that starts as a pastime can become part-time. And something part-time can become full-time.

Choose this scenario when one person’s purpose creates immediate and overwhelming demands on their time and energy, but make sure you mutually decide that their efforts will take precedence while the other partner manages the household.

But even if they are more financially successful or further along in their career path, their purpose is not more important. Period.

Purpose comes first, but this doesn’t mean you should forget what comes next. You need to figure out how to follow your purpose without neglecting other parts of your life.

Meanwhile, if you’re the one who put your purpose aside, it’s normal to have a number of emotions arise. You might feel competitive with or envious of your partner, you might feel frustrated about your own purpose, you might feel self-doubt. These feelings are normal, and they are tempered by knowing your own purpose. If you don’t have time for it right now, look for ways to stay connected to it and keep your passion for it alive.

Most of the time when we end up working on someone else’s purpose, it’s because we don’t know what ours is or we don’t know where to start. But it’s never too late.

We must have stability to have a good relationship.

According to Petriglieri, couples who invest themselves in each other then become invested in each other’s successes and failures. The desire to see each other succeed then comes more naturally, and the compromises you have to make won’t breed resentment.

But in this plan, as with the others, you’ll have to make sacrifices. You’ll have less time together, so you’ll have to make your time meaningful. It’s important to keep communicating—not about how busy each of you is, but how much you care about what you’re doing.

When you’re a part of each other’s growth, you don’t grow apart from each other. You can celebrate the successes together and be there together for disappointments.

But to sustain a conflict-free existence means floating on the surface, where everything looks pretty but we never achieve deep knowledge of each other.

Those who avoid fighting may be calm on the outside, but often they are upset inside. They’re afraid to talk about difficult feelings because they or their partner might get angry. They hide how they feel to avoid stirring up trouble. Keeping the peace often comes at the expense of honesty and understanding.

YAALLAH GW BABGET tp udah dikurangin!!!

And the converse is also true: Love built on honesty and understanding is deep and fulfilling, but not necessarily peaceful.

If we deal with disagreements as they arise, then we have a better chance to resolve issues before we say things we don’t mean and end up feeling worse, without having resolved anything.

What if we approached a fight as a team? The specter of disagreement builds like a wave in the ocean. As it approaches, it grows taller and more daunting. But instead of turning away from the wave to pretend you don’t see it, the two of you face it as it looms over you. Can you keep your heads above water, or will it crash on top of you? The key is understanding that your partner is not the wave. The wave is the issue about which you disagree.

Why would I want to crush my wife? Why do I want to defeat the person I’ve chosen to spend my life with? My wife is not my opponent—I love her. I don’t want her to lose. I don’t want to lose either.

Importante!!

Every time one of you loses, you both lose. Every time the problem loses, you both win.

One of the biggest factors in a long-lasting relationship is knowing how to fight.

when partners can express anger to each other in healthy ways, they build certain qualities and abilities. The qualities—such as compassion, empathy, and patience—help you understand the challenge. The abilities—like communication, listening, and understanding—help you solve equal or greater challenges in the future.

Wow been working on this wth him!

There are three kinds of arguments, and these are shaped by three “energies of being” described by the Bhagavad Gita. I introduced them in Think Like a Monk (and mentioned them briefly in Rule 2): ignorance (tamas), passion and impulsivity (rajas), and goodness (sattva).

A pointless argument arises in the energy of ignorance. It’s a thoughtless outburst. You literally don’t know what the point is.

Power arguments emerge in the energy of passion. We just want to win for the sake of winning. That is the point of the argument, more than addressing the actual issue at hand.

In productive arguments, which take place in the energy of goodness, we see the conflict as a hurdle we want to overcome together, and we’re open to recognizing each other’s side of the story. We want to understand. We know why we’re having the argument, and we see resolving it as a healthy step in our relationship.

In order for a couple to win together, you must be acting out of love and the desire to be a team with your partner. Remember: If you’re operating out of fear and ignorance, there’s no goal. If you’re operating out of passion, then your ego is leading the argument.

If you come to an argument convinced that you are right and your partner is wrong, your tone and your words will make that inflexibility obvious to your partner.

Your conviction that you are right usually doesn’t change your partner’s mind. Instead, it tells your partner that you don’t care how they feel or what they think.

Your ego might feel good for a while, but it won’t stop the problem from coming up again, and your relationship won’t benefit from the resolution. Ego makes you lose even if you win.