Love Life: How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person, and Live Happily

The right relationship is one where things get better when you communicate. If your relationship gets worse when one of you speaks the truth, you’re in the wrong relationship.

Attention is not intention.

The love of your life can only ever be the person who chooses you for their life. It can never be the person who doesn’t choose you.

Don’t invest in someone based on how much you like them, invest in someone based on how much they invest in you.

In love, we don’t need everyone to want us. We only need one person.

The days of me getting excited about someone who’s not excited about me are over. I can’t find the energy to get excited about someone who doesn’t want me. If someone doesn’t want me, it kills it for me, because I know this person will make me so unhappy.

It’s OK to be disappointed that someone didn’t turn out to be the one. But don’t grieve as if they were the one. If they didn’t choose you, they’re not.

Most of us have been living life waiting for other people to educate us on what our worth is. But it’s time to start living by a different truth: While there will occasionally be special people in life who uniquely see our worth, it is actually our job to educate others on what our worth is, not the other way around.

I believe that the right person can only be the right person when it’s two people choosing each other.

If you have those teammate traits—if you’re the one who’s trustworthy, kind, committed, communicative, consistent, generous—then you’ve got the rare stuff that’s worth fighting for. It’s also the rare stuff you should protect. And if someone doesn’t recognize those qualities in you, they’ll never value what’s valuable in you. You should keep them at arm’s length until they do. In the meantime, they’re definitely not a person worth fighting for.

it requires two people who actually have a vision for where they want the relationship to go, and the daily execution to move toward that vision. Exceptional relationships are not found. They’re built.

All our capacity for understanding doesn’t help them change.

In this way, curiosity helps you step out of fear, and by doing so you rob the thing you’re afraid of of the power it has over you.

I wince at the lack of compassion I showed myself, and at just how dangerous my determination and tolerance for pain can be when directed at the wrong target—in this case, martyrdom in a relationship where most of my core needs weren’t being met.

People are so often defined by the things they want, the drives they have and everything they determined to accomplish. But we’re also shaped by the things we rejected. Everything we have to say no to just to get to where we hoped to be - it takes a lot of living to know the things you can’t put up with. And each time you put one more of them behind you it takes you further from the person you used to be and the choices you once would have made. Then someone appears in front of you who has arrived at that same place and you recognising each other the distance you’ve traveled from home that it isn’t magic or if it is it’s not a magic it was ever available to you when you were nineteen.

No one is more valuable because the spotlight is on them.

One of the greatest things you can find in a partner is a sense of certainty about you.

building. Ask yourself, Do I have a builder, or is it just a connection? Connections don’t build castles; builders do.

Even when the results are just barely different—the difference between a 7 and a 5 on the pain scale—that still represents the wedge you can use to reshape your life.

But you lose nothing by communicating. The right relationship is one where things get better when you communicate. If your relationship gets worse when one of you speaks the truth, you’re in the wrong relationship.

but there’s no poetry in a relationship until the two of you start working together on something that will stand the test of time. Don’t overvalue the poet when there’s no actual poetry.