Getting to TRUE Love

Finding your YOU that leads to TWO

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There's A Reason

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A woman sits on a couch writing on her laptop, looking for dating advice.
When you reach out to me, there’s a reason - even if you don't know it yet.

Last Friday’s post generated a lot of valuable conversations! I want to thank each and every one of you for having the courage to speak up and say what it brought up for you. Now you have something more to work with that you didn't have before!

What did I mean about the difference between following someone else’s advice or particular rules, and making them one’s own? Why was there so much confusion about this vagueness, and why is it actually a very good thing?

Well, let me first back up.

When you reach out to me, there’s a reason. You know there’s something you need, and even though you don’t know what that is, you sense you’re close to an answer and just need that personal response to get it.Continue Reading

How Your 9 Year Old Self Ruined Your Love Life

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Young girl holding flowers looking at the sunset with hearts floating away.
She didn't know...

I'll be the first to agree that sometimes our "aha" moments come to us in the most unusual of places.

Like recently, when I was sitting in the audience at our local high school annual holiday concert.  Listening to the beautiful music being played and sung by these talented young students in the band, the choir, and the orchestra, I realized I had lived my own student years in all the wrong places.

Here in this place where the music touched my soul and made me feel like everything was all right in the world (and especially with me!) it all suddenly became so clear.

With a clarity I never had before, I realized exactly what happened during those formative years that now seem so long ago.

You see, without even knowing it, the words from my older, popular sister (who I secretly aspired to be like) had influenced where I went, where I didn't go, who I was friends with, and who I wasn't friends with.

Five years before me, when my older sister entered high school and had the option to choose band and choir or art and drama, I had overheard her and her friends referring to all the kids who took art and drama as cool and popular, while the ones taking band and choir were described as the opposite.

I never forgot their words.Continue Reading

Be Healthy

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Be healthy - a beautiful woman is feeling good physically, mentally and emotionally after exercising due to her healthy lifestyle that fits her personality.And know what that means for you.

OK, so we all know the importance of being healthy.

Of having a healthy lifestyle.

But beyond all the fancy clichés and trendy phrases, do we really understand what that means for us? Do we truly get what that actually looks like in real life?

Our real lives?

If we think of being healthy as being more of an attitude than a list of things we do, it helps us to understand the important role this step plays in getting to true love.

The key is that being healthy is about you, not about him.

It’s what we do for ourselves, to keep us feeling our best inside and out. With the motivation that it’s in taking care of ourselves like we deserve to be taken care of, that we remember each day that we are worthy, we are beautiful, we are deserving of only the best life has to offer.Continue Reading

He Was Never Really There

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We forget just how miserable we were far too much of the time. We forget how many of our own needs weren't being met. We forget all the waiting. We forget all the uncertainty. We forget all the times we felt like anything would have been better than what we were living. A beautiful woman is sad thinking about her recently ended relationship.It's always hard to let go of a dream. The dream of all the potential the relationship showed, the dream of all that could have been. We tend to have such a selective memory when we finally let him go or he lets us go. Either way, it's the same.

We remember all the wonderful times, the great things, that amazing potential he showed. And we start questioning ourselves and why we couldn't just have been this or that. Why we couldn't have been more understanding of him (as if we weren't already all too understanding!)

We wonder why we couldn't be content with less.

And then we start wondering if we're worth it. We forget just how miserable we were far too much of the time. We forget how many of our own needs weren't being met. We forget all the waiting. We forget all the uncertainty. We forget all the times we felt like anything would have been better than what we were living. We start on that slippery slope that has us second-guessing ourselves and leaves us spending all too much of our time and energy fantasizing about how to get him back and how different things would be this time around – if only we can convince him to give us another chance.

Stop right there, my beautiful friend. It's time to see this through your strong adult eyes instead of through the eyes of that little girl who's been trying to get that love she wants so badly. It's time to ask yourself some questions to see what was really there.

  • Did he really care about what you wanted?
  • Did he want the same thing?
  • Did he say he wanted the same thing, but his actions showed otherwise?
  • Did you feel anxious when you were with him?
  • Did you feel like if you could just be content to go with the flow, it would have been turned out so much better?
  • Would he have been perfect if only he could commit?

We can be so understanding, so forgiving, and so willing to put someone else first without thinking about whether they even deserve that kind of response from us in the first place. Is he worth what you've been putting yourself through? Is he worth your beautiful you? We can get so caught up in whether he wants us, whether he loves us, whether he's going to commit to us, that we forget that this is so much more about us than him. It's not about what if, it's not about what could have been, it's not about if only, it's about what is.

And you, my beautiful friend, deserve nothing less than a real relationship based on reality; a reality of two people on the same page who want the same thing and are committed to making that happen regardless of any extenuating circumstances.

Because if you don't have that, what do you really have?

How Long Do I Wait For Commitment?

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Woman upset with boyfriend because he won't commit
What does waiting do for you?

You've read my post Why Won't He Commit? 7 Things You Can Do To Move Things Along. You've tried everything I've suggested, and now the only thing you're left wondering is how long do you wait to see if he comes around and gives you the kind of commitment that you're looking for? You're so not alone if this is where you're at. Of all the questions I'm asked, this is by far one of the most common.

The simple honest answer is you should never wait for someone to come around to commit to you! Honestly, if he isn't on that same page as you, open and in touch with himself enough to know what he wants and that he wants a committed relationship in the first place, before he met you, waiting around for him to come around to where he is finally ready for commitment to you is wasting your time.

He's not going to come around and commit to you because you're waiting for him. In fact, the very fact that he knows you're waiting for him, and willing to put your life on hold to wait to see if he does commit, lets him know that he's more important than you; that you value him more than you value yourself, and leaves him with no motivation to figure out what it is he's really looking for, why he's behaving like this with you, and what he would be losing when you finally give up on him and leave.Continue Reading

How To Know You're Getting Closer To A Real Relationship

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You start to learn that it really does matter that you know yourself well enough to know who it is you're really looking for. Your list changes to reflect the you you're discovering and learning to embrace in love. A man and woman are holding hands near the ocean.Don't doubt yourself on this journey. It doesn't matter where you've come from or what you've been through. It doesn't matter how many times you feel you've repeated the same mistakes or how many times you've attracted the same type of guy. None of that matters.

What matters is how each experience brings you closer to what you're really looking for. With every heartbreak, with every disappointment, you learn and you grow. You get to know yourself better and you get a clearer sense of what you're willing to put up with and what you're going to be picky about.

You learn to be more flexible in some areas and less in others. You learn what feels good and what feels awful. You stretch, you constrict, you ebb and you flow. You see things more clearly; the fog lifts just that much more.

You start to learn that it really does matter that you know yourself well enough to know who it is you're really looking for. Your list changes to reflect the you you're discovering and learning to embrace in love. You revise it to reflect what is most compatible with the real you and not some version of yourself that you thought was really you. You begin to understand why being emotionally available and having the ability to commit to a real relationship are the number one and two must-haves on your list.  You begin to see why how he treats you matters more than any item on your list.

You stop making excuses for anyone. You start rightly expecting him to pull his own weight and refuse to keep anyone around who brings you down. You stop expecting someone to complete you and make your life over and instead, you realize what you most want is someone who is a real person who you can have an honest, open, loving relationship with. You start living in reality instead of the fantasy that felt so familiar because you thought you needed to be rescued. You finally see that you don't need anyone to come and rescue you; you hold the key to your own happiness.

You stop beating around the bush and you start coming right out and saying what it is you're looking for. First to yourself, and then to him. You begin to really get that it's only by communicating honestly with any potential new guy that you can both find out quicker if you're on the same page or wasting your time. You stop pleasing. You stop placating. You stop being whatever someone else wants you to be. You stop living up to someone else's unrealistic expectations of you and start listening to that soft inner voice that knows you better than anyone else.

And this time, you actually believe it.

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