Don’t lose your fire
Relationships are hard. They’re difficult because it’s a constant unspoken battle between yourself and your loved one. How can I make myself and my partner happy when we both want different things? When we’re both very different people? Relationships are built on trust and compromise but at the same time, loving and being true to yourself is imperative.
You spend your life growing and shaping yourself into the best version of you. The version that makes you confident, happy and proud of who you are. However, it’s so easy when you’re in love with someone to compromise what you have worked towards to make a situation work. To make them happy. It’s easy to agree with everything they say to avoid an argument and to avoid putting your relationship in jeopardy. But while you keep the flame burning within the relationship, your fire is slowly dying out, withering away until you don’t recognise the person you have become.
When I was younger I changed everything for my first love. I changed my religion, morals and life goals to try and keep the passion in our relationship burning. I felt that I had to win him over. I felt like he wouldn’t like or respect me if I was me. So I changed. I moulded myself into his ‘perfect girlfriend’ and that couldn’t have been further away from my true self. My mum said my fire had gone out and she didn’t recognise who her own daughter was.
So, how do we keep our fire?
The most important thing (which has taken me such a long time to get my head around and is still a working progress) is to love yourself before you love someone else. Loving yourself is the hard part, to get to this point you need to know yourself. You need to know what picks you up and what drags you down. You need to know who to trust and who will stay by your side when things go wrong. You need to know your worth. Through this will come respect and love for yourself because you know what you deserve. Your fire will not waver and the love for yourself will burn through.
Nobody can love your spark more than you.
