love yourself

What No One Ever Tells You About Real Love

Close up of man and woman holding hands in the sunset. — It's the part about real love they left out.

I wasn’t real.

They, on the other hand, might have been. But I would never know.

Because until I was able to get real, nothing was real. What I came face to face with was the reality that I didn’t know how to be real. I was too busy trying to be perfect.

Trying to figure out what it was they wanted me to be and then being that. Trying to prove my worthiness, my perfectness, my "perfect girlfriend-ness".

That’s all I knew. And that’s what I thought mattered.

I knew I wanted someone to choose me, to make me feel like something. To give a life to fit into. To give me a world to fit into and a role to play. To give me the instruction sheet on how to do a relationship.

Just tell me what you want me to be and I’ll be it. Continue Reading

What I Want You To Remember This Holiday Season

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Beautiful woman outdoors in frosty winter park with snowflakes. — If you only remember one thing, make it this.

There's a reason I’m here, doing what I do.

To remind you of what you can’t see from where you are now. To remind you of your power. To remind you of your beauty.

To remind you that the only reason you can’t see what I can see is because you haven’t come to the part yet where you prove yourself wrong.

Because without proof, you can’t believe it. Without proof, it’s the hardest thing to believe what you can’t yet see.

So my message to you today as we go about celebrating the holidays in whatever way you celebrate, is to stop believing what you’ve been believing about yourself every time another holiday season comes around.Continue Reading

Confused, Hopeless and Ready to Give Up

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A beautiful woman sits on a bench, looking discouraged, wondering if it will ever work out. — I’m getting to the point where I feel like I might as well give up.

One of our beautiful readers, Abbie, writes to tell us about the confusion she's feeling with all the different dating advice out there.

Here's her email:

Dear Jane,

I’m so confused.

There are so many rules out there, I’m having a hard time figuring out what I need to listen to and what I don’t.

I keep working on myself, reading up on what I need to do, but I’m getting to the point where I feel like I might as well give up on ever finding someone because for all the work I do on myself, it never seems to be enough!

Then I end up feeling like there’s something wrong with me because nothing ever works out like it’s supposed to.

Can you help me?

-AbbieContinue Reading

Self Blame: It’s Holding You Back

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Self Blame written on silhouette of a person's head. — Self blame: It's holding you back more than you realize.

You’ve got your list. You know what you want this year.

Love.

Someone special to share your life with. And everything else. But nothing quite compares to love.

And finding him. Finally.

Right?

Ok, so there’s something we have to settle first. Something that’s been holding you back more than you realize, more than any of us realize.Continue Reading

It's the Opposite of What We Think

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Beautiful young woman with long hair lying on the grass — What if you could look at it another way?

We look around and we see so much of what our culture calls strength among our friends, our colleagues, our role models, almost everyone it seems. They let things roll off them, they don’t take everything so personally, they walk away without looking back.

They make everything look so much easier than the way it feels to us.

The way it feels to us.

It’s this part of us that gets the least amount of validation from the world around us and the people who are the least like us. In a world where success is evaluated by the measurable things that have nothing to do with our hearts, it’s no wonder we can feel so wrong, so misplaced, so counter to what we feel so otherwise pressured to be.Continue Reading

The Truth About Just How Ready You Have to Be

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Love your self paper bubbles with clip hanging on the line against purple background. — Yes, love yourself - but what does that really look like?

We all know the importance of self-love. We’ve heard it so many times, we’ve got it memorized.

You have to love yourself first because someone else can love you.

But what does that really mean?

Does it mean we have to be alone until we get this right? That there’s no hope for us to attract that special someone in our life until we’ve reached a certain level of self-love and emotional, relational health?

That’s just about enough to cause us to give up completely.

Why bother when it seems like we’ll never get there? Why try when everyone else must already be there since they’re meeting him and we’re still so far behind? And while we’re at it, why hope at all when we just keep meeting the same type of men over and over and over again?

Except that this isn’t the whole story.Continue Reading