The Difference Between Chemistry & Compatibility Nobody Explains | Quinlan Walther
In a Nutshell
The core message is that chemistry creates initial attraction but compatibility—shared values and visions—builds lasting relationships, while self-trust through curiosity, capacity, compassion, and commitment determines whether you choose partners who reflect your self-love. The key takeaways are that love requires action over feeling, boundaries must be respected rather than hoped for, and you should focus on becoming the partner you want rather than fixing or changing someone else.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
You shouldn't go grocery shopping when you're starving. When you're hungry, you grab the first thing you see and all the things that look exciting, not necessarily what you need. This applies to dating and relationships. When you start dating and looking for a relationship, you want to have a solid understanding of what you're looking for, how you love yourself, how you show up for yourself, the life you want to create, and the relationship that would be an added bonus to that life. Rather than feeling like you're trying to fill a void, you end up seeking connections from a place of desperation that can't be fulfilling because it's essentially pouring into a bottomless pit.
Ask yourself those questions first and spend time understanding who you are, what you want, how you can love yourself, how you can support yourself, how you can commit to building a life you like, and the relationship that could be a bonus. It doesn't mean you have to hide away, do all those things, and then come out and find the relationship. It can happen at pretty much the same time, with the focus being on understanding who you are, what you want, and not going looking for love when you're metaphorically starving.
It feels real today to feel lonely, desperate, and not chosen. When you're not getting to curb your craving by getting some fast food or fast love, you need to build self-trust. Self-trust is imperative for liking who you are, understanding who you are, and making decisions that align with who you really want to be. That pays off in relationships.
There are four C's when it comes to self-trust:
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Curiosity: Are you curious about who you are, why you do what you do, the feelings that you feel, your motives and intentions behind the decisions that you make, what you want out of life? You can't trust yourself if you don't know yourself. From curiosity comes comprehension.
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Capacity: Emotional flexibility and emotional stability. Can you build the capacity to stay anchored in who you are even when you feel really sad, helpless, hopeless, overwhelmed, angry, or frustrated? Can you find an anchor in yourself to support yourself through all those emotions?
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Compassion: Having humanity for who you are and understanding that you're a flawed human who makes poor decisions sometimes. Being able to meet yourself with softness and warmth is paramount. If you aren't compassionate with yourself, you'll be far less likely to be compassionate with the people around you and your significant other. Changes happen from a place of compassion and support and love, not from rigidity, blame, shame, or judgment.
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Commitment: Your devotion to being who you want to be, making decisions that align with that, and building a life that feels fulfilling from within. You can have the first three, but if you don't have the commitment to bringing who you want to be to fruition and building that life, things go astray.
The idea that you have to be complete before meeting someone doesn't add up. Any relationship will change you—some for the better, some for the worse. If there isn't any change happening in the relationship, you probably aren't actually showing up to it. When you enter a healthy, safe, loving relationship, it's going to reflect back to you the parts of you that you haven't yet seen, worked on, grown through, grown out of, or grown around.
You need to practice the four C's so that you have the awareness of what growth feels like and what it's like to meet yourself. When you're in a relationship that is asking you to grow more, there's already a familiarity there. If you don't have the awareness that feedback is probably coming from a place of love and a desire to improve your relationship, if you don't have a growth mindset, you'll get defensive, snap back, won't listen, and you'll drive a wedge between the two of you.
As you grow and know yourself and like yourself, you don't need as much from the relationship itself. You aren't expecting the person to be a validation machine to meet you in every way, in every moment, all the time so perfectly. You can show up and actually allow the other person to meet you in this almost third entity—there's you, the other person, and then the relationship that you create together. The point of a relationship is to relate to another person, to walk alongside them, to be a source of love, encouragement, enthusiasm, and to grow individually in your own right.
When you choose a partner, look at this in early dating: what is the character of the person you're seeing? How do they treat their friends? How do they treat their family? Are they a person of integrity? Are they typically kind and well-intentioned? Because that's going to bloom into a relationship with that same character. When someone gives you feedback, can you trust that they're well-intentioned and that what they're asking for or reflecting back to you is for the greater good of your connection or simply a request to love them better, to love them in the way that they want to be loved?
If there's too much black and white thinking, if someone comes to you and says, "You skipped my friend's birthday, you didn't remember that important meeting last week, and you forgot to take out the trash. You must not love me. You don't care about this relationship, and I won't stand for it," that's unreasonable. That's ego speaking. That's an insecurity. That's not kind. That's not a loving way to communicate or think.
If someone can come to you and hold the nuance, they can see the color: "Hey, you've been really stressed, you had a really busy week, you forgot about my meeting, you missed my friend's birthday, you forgot to take out the trash. I know you've been busy. Can I help support you in some way, and is there any way that you can make the event next week with me be really important?" It's being able to hold that this hurts, that they see where you're coming from, that you're a human with finite capacity and they don't expect you to be a superhero, and that the relationship is important.
If it's black and white, demanding, and only considers one perspective, then you might want to consider a different approach. Love is consideration, but not consideration beyond someone's capacity. People can only meet you as deeply as they've met themselves. They can only meet you given whatever emotional resources they have available at any given time. Where we get stuck is expecting someone to anticipate and meet our needs all the time uncommunicated, and then there's devastating disappointment when they don't show up the way we want them to. That's not a lack of love. That's dependency. That's a parent-child dynamic—not having to ask, having all your needs tended to without any forewarning or insight. That's not an adult-adult partnership.
People are exhausted with dating. They've developed mindsets like "there's no good men left" or "all the good men are taken." When you feel exhausted, you have two options: you can stop and not date, take a breather, or you can shift your expectations. Not needing to walk into every first date as if you're interviewing for the position of your future spouse. Can you go in and try to have fun? Can you change the energy that you want to bring to the room where you're just meeting someone new, going to grab dinner or coffee or drinks? Can you enjoy yourself? Can you have fun with it? Deciding the energy you want to bring to the function typically allows you to enjoy the function more rather than feeling like "here we go again, another disappointment."
The spark is real and it matters, but it changes and fades and grows in other instances. You need to feel an immediate attraction to someone you're romantically interested in. That doesn't mean you need to be flooded, overwhelmed, hot and sweaty, can't catch your breath. But you do need to think, "I'd like to be a little closer to them, scooch my chair a little bit. I should figure out a way to talk to them." Connection and intimacy and attraction can grow over time, especially for women. But you should find the person attractive, and there should be a spark of "yes, I want to be physically closer to them, but I also want to know more about them. There's some magic here, something to work with." As you get to know a person and the novelty wears off, that spark will change, and that's okay.
The spark can mislead when it feels like you're on a roller coaster, when you find yourself pining for someone. We only obsess over people who aren't fully available to us. The spark can be mistaken for obsession where there's something we're projecting onto someone that's so full-on it feels like an obsession. There's a gap between who they are and who they could be, the relationship you could have and the relationship you actually have. That gap is a reflection of who you would get to be and how you would get to feel if the fantasy became a reality. That can feel like a spark, a deep overwhelming obsession. When we're projecting a fantasy onto someone, that spark can take us away into a whole other world.
You shouldn't feel like you're falling off a cliff or a free-fall of adrenaline and anxiety. You should be excited to see someone, excited to be around them, to get to know them, but it should not feel like the ground falls from underneath you when you're with them or not near them or uncertain about what's going to happen.
Compatibility is about shared values and visions of the future. Compatibility really boils down to how you value your time, attention, and energy when it comes to the most important things in your life. If you value family, want children one day, want to be married, want a long-term partnership with love, honesty, trust, you need to find someone who values those same things. If you start dating someone who wants to live out of a van and travel around the country and you want to live two blocks away from your parents in Iowa forever, you're probably not meant to be together. Don't order what's not on the menu when you meet someone. If they say work is their most important priority, don't get into a relationship expecting to change that about someone. That's not fair to them or to you.
Chemistry is the magic that you feel just being around someone. It can be a quiet intimacy like a soft intimacy where you're pulled towards each other, or banter and wit with a similar sense of humor, or physical attraction where you just want to be close to them. Chemistry is something you want, but chemistry won't build the long-term relationship or long-term partnership that some people want.
The biggest mistake you can make in a relationship is one of you wants the other person to change for them and the other person doesn't want you to change at all. The truth is you're both going to change, but not in the ways the other person wants you to. You're just going to become who you're going to become. If you find that dynamic where you need them to show up in a specific way, that's black and white thinking. That's limiting to you, the other person, and the relationship.
Love as an action is willingness—the willingness to find the color, the nuance, the balance, to learn to love someone how they want to be loved, to show up and be loving when you feel the least loving. People say "I would die for my partner, I love them more than anything in this world, I would literally lay down and die for them," but would you put your phone down when they're telling you about their day? Do you take their hand when you're walking down the sidewalk with them? Do you notice when they come home from work and their mood is a little off? Do you take the time to stop and ask them about it, to remember the little things they tell you, to care? That's love. That's love as an action. That's what keeps connection. Love as a feeling will be fleeting if we don't follow it through with action.
If you have a clear vision of the kind of relationship you want—the way you want your relationship to feel, consistent, reliable, warm, fun, playful—when you understand that, it becomes a lot easier to discern who's for you and who's not. Someone who's still worried about all the other fish in the sea, who's easily distracted, who catches their eye, and you feel like you have to control them—if it feels like you have to control them, it's not love. You can't build a fulfilling relationship from that place. If you notice that they don't value the same things you do, they don't value commitment in the same ways, then they're probably not for you. The last thing you want to do is chase after them, try to convince them to want the same things you want, and please them to choose you. Then you end up losing yourself in the very ways you're trying to avoid in the first place.
We're willing to tolerate bad behavior from someone we're really into versus someone we're kind of into. When we say we want reliability, if the person we're really into doesn't message back, we'll be patient. But if someone we're kind of into doesn't message back, we're like "red flag."
A childhood wound centered around the question "Am I lovable? Am I difficult to love? Who do I have to become to get someone to choose me?" creates a pattern where people accept partial attention and tolerate disrespect because they're receiving "a little bit of what I want." This leads to testing partners in stable, loving relationships by rebelling or becoming hard to love in order to earn affection again. The pattern doesn't heal until accountability is taken for it.
The shift happens when someone becomes "sick of my own" repeated hurt, anxiety, and cycles. The realization emerges that stability and love require making value-based decisions first and foremost, showing up to support oneself, and learning to respond rather than react when the impulse arises to run, beg, or react.
Rock bottom experiences include losing oneself while chasing the feeling of being chosen, giving up on dreams, losing all confidence, and tolerating the worst possible behavior until becoming "a shell of myself." At this point, one either pulls themselves out or faces how deep and dark it will feel without finding the courage to change. The decision to change requires knowing it will be hard and will take time, attention, understanding, and patience with oneself.
The pattern of trying to earn attention and be chosen "primarily came from my mother." Her death from cancer in 2019 was devastating yet healing because repair conversations occurred before she passed. These honest conversations created safety and space for feeling seen, chosen, and loved even at the end. This experience coincided with rock bottom feelings and revealed the search for evidence to confirm or deny learned beliefs about being hard to love.
The work involved learning to show up for oneself and no longer tolerate beliefs about being difficult to love or needing to fight to be chosen. These beliefs were no longer taken as fact. The love, support, and honesty found in conversations with her mother, combined with post-death work, became the foundation for change.
Repairing with parents is worth attempting if possible, but "you don't need to." Not everyone has parents with open hearts and minds to meet them in repair work. The grief of not having a parent who will meet you in this way is acknowledged. However, a similar process can be done independently by meeting oneself in the ways one wishes the parent would meet them.
The things wished for from parents—"I wish you would accept me. I wish you would just love me. I wish you would look at me and say, 'I'm so proud of you. I see you'"—are the same things brought into romantic relationships. When with a safe, loving, patient partner, these conversations can happen by communicating feelings and origins, bringing beliefs into the open for understanding and reprogramming.
An early experience of being over-loved and then made to feel guilty for not reciprocating created a pattern of over-loving and then guilting partners for not reciprocating at the same level. This created a "scoreboard" mentality where love was measured and tracked.
A pivotal conversation revealed the pattern when a partner said, "I just don't know what I could ever do to make you happy" and realized that even if the partner did all requested things, "it would never be enough because I'd just find something else." Going above and beyond was never requested or wanted by the partner—it was self-inflicted.
A later conversation revealed another pattern when stating "I feel like I'm always planning our vacations" and receiving the response that while the partner was willing to plan, when they did, "you'll have a hundred things you'll find wrong with it." This illuminated how the pattern was self-inflicted and how taking responsibility on both sides improved the relationship rather than focusing on changing the other person.
This common dynamic occurs when one person says "I want more" and the other responds "Why is nothing that I do ever enough?" This can spiral into criticism and withdrawal. The underlying communication is often "Can I share this mental load? Can we share in the emotional labor here? Can you show up and can you help? Can I get some support? Can I feel your connection?"
The ability to understand why something bothers us and communicate that is paramount. Equally important is listening for the intention even when a partner cannot explicitly communicate it. Both criticism and withdrawal often stem from the same driving intention expressed through different approaches.
The question posed is: "How would you feel if someone said that they can tell how much you love yourself by the partner that you've chosen?" The feeling this evokes—whether compliment or insult—offers insight. If someone has tolerated treatment that doesn't feel loving or great, it may reflect not loving oneself enough to choose differently. Conversely, choosing a patient, loving, incredible person may indicate sufficient self-love to select someone who loves in that way.
The question prompts reflection on whether decisions and relationship investments reflect love for oneself. It asks whether one is making value-based decisions or participating in negative dynamics through stagnation or complacency.
Dating is about discernment, not devotion. Devotion should be reserved for marriage or long-term partnerships. For someone realizing their relationship dynamic isn't as loving as desired, the first step is examining one's own side without blame. This involves envisioning the desired relationship and adding more of those elements oneself—being the first to show up as the partner one wants to be.
It's easy to get sucked into focusing only on what a partner isn't doing or doing wrong. If wanting the relationship to work, one must pull out of this spiral. Even if choosing to leave, one shouldn't leave from the bottom of the disappointment spiral. Instead, clean up one's side and go first.
Have a conversation stating "I want more of this because I love you. I feel really distant. I feel really lonely. We both have a lot going on. Can we come up with a plan to reconnect?" Frame it as an exciting opportunity rather than a negative fix, coming with the right energy. If it's the right person, they'll at least try to meet there.
One cannot hold people accountable or force them to change. When noticing inconsistency or lack of follow-through, the issue can be brought up: "This is what I'm noticing. I'm finding it hard to rely on you because you haven't done the things that you said that you were going to do." If the person wants to make the change, the onus is on them. One can be loving and supportive, but cannot breathe down their neck or meet them with criticism or constant disappointment.
People tend to judge themselves by intentions and others by actions or follow-through. Someone might intend to go to the gym five days but only go once, maintaining their good intentions. However, when observing others going only once, it becomes a reflection of character—unreliable, lacking discipline, unmotivated. Finding the color among black and white thinking is essential.
Relationship conversations often focus on spotting if someone is good, positioning oneself as detective and the other as villain. Most people are flawed and making mistakes simultaneously. To have a peaceful, emotionally intelligent partner, one must be the other half of that relationship—patient, calm, slow to conflict, kind with words even when frustrated, able to handle disappointment.
Focusing on all red flags to look out for and specific ways others need to prove themselves wastes time. Instead, focus on being the other half of the desired relationship rather than trying to figure out quick fixes to avoid bad partners.
"The only people who are upset with your boundaries are the very same people who directly benefit from you not having any." Someone who loves you wants you to have boundaries and limits on what you'll tolerate and your capacity. Boundaries aren't designed to keep people out or hurt feelings—they maintain finite energy and attention. Someone loving will encourage and respect boundaries.
A boundary follows the structure: "I will or won't blank if blank." Examples include "I won't participate in this conversation if you yell at me again" or "I won't stay if you keep talking to me that way." Boundaries are rules for oneself, not threats or demands that others can't do certain things. The hardest part is respecting one's own boundaries rather than compromising them.
When stating "I won't participate in this conversation if you lie to me" but then continuing to participate, it's not truly a boundary—it's hoping they'll stop lying. This mixes a threat with the hidden hope of getting the other person to show up and love you, rather than having one's own back and respecting oneself enough to walk away.
Setting and maintaining boundaries requires choosing self-respect over the desire to be chosen or not be alone. This is paramount but difficult.
"The one is the one that you choose." The one is the person whose natural essence complements yours in a way that makes love and growth a little bit easier. Discernment involves admiring someone's integrity, respecting them, cherishing them, and liking them—not just checking boxes about height, money, or other external factors.
Being the one and choosing the one requires being your partner's biggest fan. If you can't be—if you don't want their dreams to come true, don't want them to succeed, don't want them to be their happiest, best self—then do not promise to spend a lifetime with them. You want someone in your corner on worst days and best days, feeling like you're on the same team.
There's a discrepancy between the time spent planning weddings and building marriages. Writing vows takes time, but living up to those vows requires a different set of skills that aren't typically developed with equal effort. Maintaining those skills is equally important.
How do you know if you're in love with someone or just the idea of them? Is there a difference between how you wish they would be and how they actually are? How wide is that gap? How much of the relationship do you actually enjoy versus how much time are you spending trying to change them, trying to change the dynamic? If you allow your person to be exactly who they want to be without molding them, without controlling them, without micromanaging them, but you allow them to show up just as they are, does that help you feel more or less like the person you want to be? Does that feel more or less like the kind of relationship you want to be in? It doesn't mean it's perfect. It doesn't mean it's all the time. It doesn't mean that they won't change. It doesn't mean you can't change, but if you really allow them to be, if you accept them for exactly who they are, does that help or hinder what you want love to feel like? That's one question to ask. And do you need a bit more? Is that bit more that you're missing really really important to you? If it is, by all means, do what you got to do. But a lot of times we fool ourselves into thinking that the little bits that we're missing are make or breaks. We forget that loving someone is such an honor.
This is more so geared towards long-term relationships, marriages of sorts, but it's a real honor to be able to love someone through several seasons of their life. To be able to be their support system, to be the smiling face that picks them up on a day when they feel shitty, to be there when they lose someone that they love or they lose an opportunity or they hit their highest high, to sit with them on a Sunday night on the couch every Sunday for years and years. It's an honor to love someone and to be there. Sometimes we need to reframe the way that we view the person we're with as a whole human all on their own that we get the honor to love. That tends to clear out a lot of the little bits that we aren't getting. You look at that person and you think, "My god, I really do love them. Look at the way that they do the dishes or tie their shoes. I love the way that they drive, the way they dance to music. I love to watch them get ready and put, you know, do their morning routine or whatever." You just look at that human and remember that it's an honor to love them. Maybe that'll clear out some of the bits that you're missing.
What do you wish people asked themselves before they got married? Do I want to be a partner or do I want a spouse? The difference there is when you want to be a partner, when you want to be someone's support system, when you want to be the co-creator of the marriage that you're about to step into, the life that you're going to build, there's accountability and responsibility in that. It really allows you to focus on what you can control, which is how you show up. Now, assuming you're walking to that altar and you know this person pretty damn well and you've spent a good long time seeing who they are, understanding their heart, really caring for them, all of that, you're going to have to remember that sometimes the best you can do is show up as the partner you want to be, even if your seasons are misaligned. Matthew McConaughey has this great bit in a podcast that he did where he says, "Sometimes you're walking and they're running and sometimes you're running and they're walking and you just have to make sure that one doesn't get too far ahead of the other."
One of the challenges is that everyone wants their partner to talk to them more emotionally and tell them more. And there's a lot of people who don't want to do that or don't know how to do that or don't feel the need for it, and the person who wants to talk kind of gets a bit annoyed and frustrated and upset that their partner won't talk. What's the loving thing to do? That probably requires both sides of the aisle to adjust a little bit. You're not going to get perfect words all the time. It's not going to happen. You're going to have to give imperfect words a lot of the time. You're going to have to try.
The aunt and uncle are in their mid-70s, early 70s. They've been married for 25, 30 years. The secret to this is she tells me what she wants to hear and I repeat it back to her. The aunt Beth will say, "I need you to tell me that this is going to be okay. You hear me. You've got my back and you've got it covered." And he will recite it right back to her word for word. And they say, "Okay, I love you." If your person is asking to be loved in a specific way, put your stuff aside and show up to the best of your ability. It will not be perfect all the time. But do the loving thing. And that is typically to show up in the ways that your partner is explicitly asking you to. If you want bonus points, anticipate some of those needs, pay attention and try to do it without having to be asked, but don't knock the direct communication and then choosing the loving thing to do.
How do you start to trust yourself again when someone breaks up with you that you thought you were going to be with for a long time? Step one, grieve. There's an acute phase of heartbreak where you don't have to do anything right or well. You can just be. That's step number one. Especially if it's a breakup after a long relationship. The next step is reflection. Right now the story might be they left me, they didn't love me, all those years were wasted. How could I have done that? I should have known. I must be disposable. There's more color in that story. So, what were some of the red flags or some of the even just the disconnection, the things that weren't working? Take some accountability in that. Take some accountability around how you may have contributed, what you want in your relationship moving forward, and more so focusing on who you want to be now that that chapter has closed. Because the person who is for you is the person who wants to be with you. If they aren't willing to try, they're definitely not your person. Most relationships can be worked out if two people are willing if you want it to barring some extreme cases. But if they're not willing, they're not your person.
When it comes to moving on specifically, stop trying because we think that if I just do all of these steps, I have to do this in the morning and this at night and this is my evening routine and then I'll wake up someday and I'll be moved on as if it's a destination. Imagine yourself tomorrow morning you wake up and you get what you wanted. You want to move on. You want to trust yourself again. If you knew for certain that you would wake up tomorrow and that was your reality, what would you do with yourself? What would you think about? How would you spend your time? What would you invest your energy into? Who would you spend your time with? What would you think about? What would you talk about? And then just start to do some of those things. Bring the grief with you. It's probably not going to happen as fast as you want it to, but you want a direction. You want a clearer vision of where you're going so that you can head in that direction. Moving on doesn't even necessarily mean that you don't care. You might still care. You might care about that person for the rest of your life. But you want to build whatever your next chapter is to be as enjoyable and intentional as possible. And that gives you somewhere to go.
Oftentimes there are beliefs almost identities that we find ourselves wrestling with when a breakup happens. No one will choose me. I'm never good enough. Nothing that I do is good enough. No one will stay. It was all my fault or it was all their fault. How could they? These absolutes are really difficult to do anything productive with. It doesn't make you feel better emotionally. You can't really move yourself forward from there. Be malleable with the story. For a while, for the first month, for the first, add a maybe. Add a question mark to the end of that. Like, "I'm difficult to love?" Just don't wrestle with the absolutes. Give yourself time and space to consider another narrative because there's color. There's nuance in that. They didn't leave because you're hard to love. Someone choosing not to love you is not a reflection of how lovable or unlovable you are. So, don't wrestle with the absolute. Give yourself time and space would be another piece of advice.
Have you ever had your heart broken? Many times in many different ways. There's an interesting relationship with grief now. Losing relationships and growing through heartbreak has always been a catalyst. It's usually quite ugly and it's usually quite messy to really look at yourself and put the pieces back together and try to move on. But always come out the other side liking yourself more, accepting uglier parts of yourself that you don't think you accepted previously. You got to take a real look at why you did what you did, how you showed up, the people that you chose. And sometimes that means accepting like, man, I've been making the best choices. You have to love that. You have to accept that. And it expands your capacity in a way that allows for the emotional flexibility where the deepest heartbreak, losing my mom, losing people that I thought I would spend the rest of my life with, makes everything else a little bit easier to process. If I can survive that, I can survive a lot. I've been there through all of that. I've picked myself back up. I've built a support system of people who remind me of that when I forget. But I really learned to like myself. I really learned to trust myself. And I really learned that there can be beauty in the mess if you stay put and go through it long enough to find the bigger story, the bigger meaning, the bigger narrative.
What is the best love advice you've ever heard or received? Do the loving thing, and choose appreciation.
What is the worst love advice you've ever heard or received? Match their energy. Two wrongs don't make a right. That's the reality. Matching someone's energy means you're handing over your power. Your power is in how you respond. Your power is in your intention. Are you going to add more negativity to a situation you don't already like? Maybe you can choose how you want to respond rather than matching someone's energy. And even more so, maybe your love, your decision to meet them in a way that they can't seem to meet themselves in that moment is exactly what they need. You don't mess up your living room just because someone messy is coming over. That's just don't do that. I'm not going to match that energy because then I'm going to start walking over my rugs with my dirty shoes and why would I do that just because someone's coming over? It's like no, they're the messy person. That's fine. That's their mind and their space and I'm not going to messy up my mind because we're interacting. It's a very inauthentic way to move through the world to build relationships.
What did you used to believe to be true about love and romance that you don't anymore? I used to believe that love the feeling was enough. It's fantastical. It's alluring. Someone will show up and your whole life will be better. Everything you'll be whisked away by their love and live happily ever after. That's not a story that you really want. You want to build a relationship intentionally. You want to choose to give love and to build love and to build this relationship. And sometimes it takes those shitty moments, those really tough moments to remind you how much you value the really good moments. And if love was just a feeling, we would miss a lot of that. Love is consideration, the action, the willingness to continue showing up and creating more of it.
What's something that you used to value that you don't value anymore? Being understood. People can really only meet you as deeply as they've met themselves. Which means that some people simply won't have the ability to understand you. And that's okay. You don't need to fight to be heard, to be seen, to be approved of. Sometimes it's just okay to say we don't agree. I don't think you understand and let it be.
If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be? To live within your integrity to decide for each person individually. Like what is right to you? What kind of person do you want to be? What is true for you? Your truth. What kind of person do you strive to be? So much so that it feels in your bones, in your heart, just right. I wish it was a law that everyone had to figure out what that meant to them and then they had to act on it consistently. Because most if not all of us would choose to be good people, would choose to make value based decisions, kind decisions, loving decisions, not fear-based, hurtful, destructive decisions. If we were all living within integrity, if we had the courage to understand that for ourselves, we would do a lot of good.
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