Expert advice for every stage of your relationship
As the ‘month of love’ comes to an end, you might still be thinking about matters of the heart: where to find love, how to keep the passion alive, and what to do when your relationship ends. Want to know the secret to a powerful human connection? Read on to find out.
Where to find love
The first step is for you to meet the right people. If you’re an introvert, this is tricky but not impossible. Take some tips from Headspace on how to overcome social anxiety and some more advice from Nautilus on the anatomy of charisma.
Zen Habits also has some great suggestions on how to make friends, including the need to be positive, interested, calm, authentic, happy, and more. New York Magazine has more tips on how to make friends faster: don’t invest too much time engaging with the wrong people, get people to invest effort in you, bond over a shared activity, leverage fun shared experiences, and finish strong.
How to keep the passion alive
Once you’ve met the right person, how do you fall in love and stay in love? The New York Times offers nine ways to improve your love life, including skipping small talk, saying what you want from the relationship, and more. There’s even more to learn from Mark Manson, who received feedback from 1500 people offering all the relationship advice you’ll ever need: having realistic expectations, respecting your partner, embracing change, and learning to ride the waves.
Of course, it’s not always easy. All relationships, be they personal or professional, have their ups and downs. Headspace lays the ground rules of good arguments, Raptitude has a great guide on how to become less uptight in two minutes, and the Harvard Business Review offers four ways to control your emotions in tense moments: own the emotion, name the story, challenge the story, and find your primal story.
What to do when your relationship ends
Unfortunately, even though it’s important to fight for the things that matter, you can’t win every battle. Perhaps you’re dealing with a one-sided relationship and, even after talking about it openly, discover that the solution is to give each other person some space. Or perhaps one of you said something you regret and, as much as you want to forgive, don’t know what to do when sorry isn’t enough.
Whatever it is, there might come a point when it’s time to call it quits. Headspace has more great advice on how to have a clean break-up in the social media age, which involves disconnecting from you ex, resisting the temptation to stalk them online, and protecting your heart. There are also more tips on how to bounce back from a break-up: let yourself feel, focus on gratitude, and add a dose of mindfulness to your day.
Love, rinse, repeat
What’s the most important lesson to take from all this, other than the fact that meaningful relationships are hard work? It’s to make sure you’re spending time with the right people for the right reasons. Specifically, you need to be together out of want and not out of need. And even when you want to be together, remember that you’re an individual person with value of your own.
As Leo Babauta writes in Zen Habits, we need to stop wanting someone else to fulfill our lives: “The truth is that even those of us who have partners know that it’s not all honeymoon, and in fact a long-term relationship contains a lot of struggle. The fulfillment that we get in life ends up (mostly) not coming from the other person, but from ourselves.”
It all starts with you.
