When we’re young and searching for a partner, we often don’t know what we should be looking for. We may believe we know what qualities we want in a partner, but we haven’t had the life experience necessary to really know.
We may believe that attraction, chemistry, and shared interests will make for a good relationship. We may believe that love, or the all-consuming infatuation we believe to be love, is all we need to make a relationship work.
We may believe, as we stare into our lover’s eyes, that we are finally complete. We may believe, as we are held in a warm embrace, that this love will never fade. We may believe as long as we are with this person, the shared love will weather any storm.
But we have yet to know what our adult lives will be like. We have yet to learn what really matters.
We have much of ourselves yet to discover. And until we know the person who is staring back at us in the mirror, we will not know what we need from someone else.
This isn’t to say relationships from youth can’t work out. I know high school and college sweethearts who are still happy together many years later. But this happens when people grow together. Many people grow apart.
Or they don’t grow at all.
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The best way to attract a good partner is to become the kind of partner you want to have. This doesn’t mean you need your partner to be a carbon copy of yourself. But it means the qualities you may be looking for in a partner, like kindness, integrity, and openness, are qualities you embody.
For a relationship to be healthy, it needs to have a foundation of trust and safety. If you want a partner who can provide you with this foundation, you need to be a partner who can provide someone else with this foundation.
On top of that foundation, there needs to be two people who each have a strong sense of self. There needs to be two whole people who complement each other, not two empty people who try to complete each other.
If you go into a relationship as an empty vessel expecting to be filled, you will attract another empty vessel who is expecting to be filled. The relationship will feel good at first as you are each filled with an illusion of love. But as the realities of life creep in, the illusion will fade.
Like a house of cards, fragile and empty on the inside, it will not take much of a disturbance for it all to crumble. If the relationship doesn’t end, it will become unhappy and possibly volatile.
A hollow person cannot create real, stable love. A hollow person will not know the kind of person they want to be with because they do not know what lies undiscovered inside of themselves.
The love they seek will be a love meant to give them a sense of self-worth. But self-worth is always an inside job. Self-worth is a by-product of knowing and loving all the parts of yourself.
When you love everything about yourself, you stop hiding, and you allow yourself to be seen at your core. It is then you are open to receiving real love from the right person. The right person is the one who sees all of you, accepts all of you, and loves all of you.
The right person may not like all of you, but accepting is different from liking. And although the right person may suggest changes to improve the relationship, they will never try to change the core of who you are.
But you have to be willing to show them the core of who you are. And it all starts with knowing yourself.
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Knowing yourself means knowing your likes and dislikes. It means knowing your values. It means knowing what gives you a sense of purpose. It means knowing what lights you up.
But light would not exist without darkness. Our darkness is part of what makes us human. We often disown the darks parts of ourselves into our shadow self, hoping that if we push those parts away, they will cease to exist.
Instead what happens is those parts of ourselves wreak havoc on our lives, as they manifest in destructive and maladaptive coping mechanisms.
The shadow will not go away. The shadow yearns to be integrated. It is by integrating our shadows and casting light on the dark parts of ourselves that we become whole.
This is part of knowing ourselves. This is the part of knowing ourselves that people run away from.
But if we refuse to do the work of casting light onto our darkness, we will attract people into our lives who do it for us. Those people will trigger us continuously. If we end a relationship with one of those people we will find another one just like them.
Perhaps on the surface, they will seem different. Initially, we will believe we have finally found true love. But the new love story will follow the same path as the others have before.
We are the only ones who can break the cycle. And we can use all of the wrong relationships to lead us to the right one.
We will never be fully healed. We will always have triggers. But when you know yourself, you know how to take responsibility for all the parts of yourself.
When you don’t know yourself, you will blame your partner for things that are really yours to take responsibility for.
There will still be conflict in a relationship between two people who each know themselves. But there will be personal responsibility and therefore freedom.
When you truly know yourself, you are able to take responsibility for the things in a relationship that are yours, and you can let go of the rest. The right partner will do the same. This is freedom.
The right relationship will make you feel free.
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In the right relationship, you are showing your true self in every way, and therefore you are attracting someone who is a match for your true self.
You can’t show what you don’t know. And you can’t find what you don’t know you’re looking for.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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