The Foundation for Building Any Healthy Relationship

“I found a love in the way you loved me.”

This statement is one of the many that lay on the borderline between good and bad, white and black. It’s an overcast sky, because it can lead to either a steady and sustaining rain, or a bright day afterward.

Love—and I mean real love—is one of the most challenging things to understand and sustain in this world. It takes years of hard work to fully understand the concept in a way that you can find something that will last a lifetime.

Surviving in the World Tip #8—Loving Yourself

To build a relationship, whether it is platonic, romantic, or with yourself, you need to find a way to love yourself.

I Found a Love of You in the Way You Loved Me

This reiteration of the statement above is the side of the story that leads to dark and rainy days.

One of the biggest fallacies of love is that it is supposed to make you happy, make you secure, make you feel like you are living your life. The unrealized portion of this is that in reality, love is not magic.

I won’t deny that it can make the world seem like a vibrant color palette, but it takes a lot to make that last.

To build love, you have to start on a strong foundation that can endure the trials and tribulations that it brings. If your foundation lacks self-love, then everything else will crumble with it.

The hard truth that you have to accept is that love does not do any of those magical things that so many portray. Yes, it brings it out into the spotlight, but it is ultimately those who are in love that makes it magical.

You can’t expect someone else to build you up, and make you a better person. As an intelligent being on this Earth, if you are aware of your faults, it is entirely up to you to fix them. Though you don't have to be alone through the process, you are responsible to begin it.

From a place of no self-love, if you love someone because of the way they love you, it is pertinent to understand that you do not love them. Expecting someone to fix you is a genuinely toxic habit to form within a relationship.

Yes, they can be the arms you climb into at the end of a long day, the ears that you vent to in the moments of stress, and the soundboard that you can bounce off of with life’s most difficult questions. However, it will never fix you.

Unless it is your self-love, love will never fill the holes of insecurity. Love will never patch the falling pains of jealousy. Love will never make the streams of happiness rush.

Expecting someone to fix you with their love is perhaps one of the most selfish things one can do, because you are responsible for yourself. It will ultimately drain them, and cause them to be too tired to love themselves. Moreover, from there, everything will begin to crumble.

I Found a Love of Me in the Way You Loved Me

This revision of the previous statement makes all the world's difference. Though still in the sense of ambiguity, this can prove to be a cornerstone of a truly loving relationship.

Every single human being on this Earth is unique, and equipped with their own set of quirks and faults. When in a relationship of unconditional love, you have to be able to love those qualities in the person you are loving. No one is perfect, and that’s an indisputable fact.

Though I previously said that love is not magical, and cannot fix the problems within yourself, it does have some potential to help someone find a passion within themselves.

If you expect love to fix your problems, it never will. With that said, if you see someone love the worst parts of you through even the darkest of times, it can undeniably help you learn to love yourself.

This is apart of the growth that is necessary for a long term relationship. Through weeks, months, and years, there will be things that come up, which show the flaws of your character.

The thing is, if you have someone there who can love you through those developing and evolving flaws, it makes it easier to embrace them.

Love Takes Effort

To make a relationship last, you need to put much effort into yourself, and the problems that arise throughout time. If you are struggling in the depths of the night, you must be able to climb yourself out of it before you give yourself away.

Insecurity, lack of trust, and excessive jealousy are synonymous with each other. As a problem that is quite common in relationships, too many people believe they should be commonplace within relationships. As significant others, and people of this society, we need to know that this is a trait that is not incorporated into healthy relationships.

We need to be able to find trust in our partners and ourselves; otherwise, there will be several unnecessary arguments that can damage the connection two people share. As people in an exclusive relationship, you both must be able to build trust between each other. If you’re unable to, then with that should arise a question of the relationship.

Insecurity goes side by side with a lack of trust in creating unhealthy jealousy. If someone is with you, chances are it’s because they want to be with you. Unless showing otherwise, there has to be that understanding.

With a robust negative outlook comes a strong negative outcome.