To me, love means sacrifice.
Whether it’s a parent.
Whether you’re in a relationship.
You need to be aware of how your actions cause the other person to feel.
It’s easy to live by yourself. It’s easy not to be a parent. It’s easy not to be a partner. When you live by yourself, you can be as selfish as you want to be.
It’s easy. Dial in the selfish and live it.
You can be as messy as you want, you can be as neat as you want. You can eat whatever you want and leave the TV on late at night. You can do literally whatever you want.
But when you’re in a relationship, you have to make sacrifices. If you’re messy and the other person is neat, it’s not fair to the other person to live in a messy place. A neat person will never live in a messy place. A messy person will appreciate somebody who’s neat because they’re constantly always cleaning up. But a messy person drives a neat person nuts. When you don’t change the ways you do things on your own and adapt them for the good of the relationship, it’s a very selfish act.
If you cause stress or anxiety in somebody, due to your actions, then you’re going to really put the relationship on a back burner.
You have to think about how your actions cause other people to feel and make sacrifices. When you make sacrifices, you’re making sacrifices for the good of the relationship, but you’re actually having a good relationship. You’re not in just a relationship with yourself anymore, and that’s the problem with a lot of people. A lot of people take their bad one-on-one habits and bring them into the relationship, and those habits cause stress and anxiety in the relationship. And if you cause stress and anxiety in a relationship, you’re putting undue pressure on the relationship, and it really comes down to, it’s because you are being selfish with who you are.
That’s what it comes down to, being selfish with who you are. Don’t be selfish. Don’t be self-centered, and realize in order to have a great relationship, you’re going to have to change certain things about you that only works when you’re alone. It’s pretty simple. So talk to your partner, listen to your partner, and when your partner says something to you, like man, this doesn’t work for me, can you be neater.
Or this doesn’t work for me, it’s causing stress and anxiety, and you continue to do that to that person, you’re losing — the other person feels like you don’t respect them at all. Sacrifice for love is not a big deal, it’s pretty easy. Take a look at your actions and see what they cause other people. And it’s like that in friendships, as well. And it’s like that in father/daughter, mother/daughter, father/son, mother/son. I mean, just the other day, I went to Universal Studios with my daughter.
We went on the Harry Potter ride, which is one of these twisty, turny things, with visual effects. Something that causes me, who suffers from motion sickness, to feel really nauseous.
My daughter wanted to go on it three times. Wasn’t going to say no, at all, I was going to deal with the nausea, going to deal with the after effects, which, by the way, was almost two hours straight of hiccups.
But I did that because it made her happy. And it was fun to bond and fun to do that. It was a fun memory. Not going to say no to things like that. I could deal with nausea. I can deal with all that stuff.
But yet I do things for the sake of having an amazing relationship.
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Originally published on David Wygant
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