In the long term, it helps love to practice self-love (Maeck S. & Botzenhardt T.)
A relationship with yourself and with love. It is a relationship that we cultivate throughout our life. It’s a relationship that changes its meaning over the years, a relationship in which we are swept from a constantly wave of emotions, that opens our eyes to the world and leaves us with many question marks. The relationship with love is a relationship that we mostly take more care off compared to the ourselves love and that influences how we deal with our partner. It is around this topic that I want to speak about. In the last few months I have constantly asked myself about how I can build a relationship with a person and at the same time cultivate my self-love. If we love ourselves enough, if we know our values and our needs, we will be able to truly love someone else and build a healthy and positive relationship with our partner. In a healthy relationship we feel loved and accepted, we don’t need to close our swings just because we chose to get close to one person. We don’t build the confidence on ourselves on the appreciation received from the partner but we know what’s our values are. I’m talking about a love that adds value to our lives not which conduce us to forget who we are and for which values we keep inside.
In my eyes the relationship with love represents a drawing that we paint and repaint throughout our life. We can point out each experience and observe the emotions that we felt on that time. I invite you to find out a moment to watch on it and enjoy this complexity of feelings. Maybe you grow your awareness about what you felt, in that situation, with which kind of person and why. In recent months I have often sat down in front of this picture trying to keep out the meaning of the history it’s trying to tell me. Watching it from an external point of view let you notice links between your behavior, your feeling and the situation you were living.
What are you seeing in your picture? What is it telling about you? Which picture of „You in Love“ do you have? Maybe watching it you can very well distingue the situations in which you were yourself and where you was just a copy of yourself trying to being appreciate or to please your partner. I’m sure it will deliver you some important and interesting messages about yourself.
Well, if I describe my picture of “Me in Love” to you, honesty, it is very confusing. I see some traits of myself but all around I recognize my attempt to be different, to match with some ideal of woman I’m not. My drawing tells a story of a young woman who lost herself many times during her relationships, a woman that left her selflove fall to the last place between her priorities. Maybe because of an excessive effort to satisfy the someone else’s needs and the expectations.
I would like to close my first windows on this topic delivering you a final little message:
- We are the artists,
- We know the picture we won’t to see afterwards,
- Let no one else draw it for you,
- Self-love is a color we should be able to integrate in the Color’s table we use for painting our self in our relationship, always!
Byebye Valé
Source: Maeck S. & Botzenhardt T. (2016). Was Paare zusammenhält. In: Liebe. Der Traum nach gemeinsamen Glück. Geowissen, (58), S.72.
