10 Definitive Ways To Tell You’re In Love With The Right Someone

via elitedaily.com

Falling in love is one of the most exciting, rewarding and scariest things you could ever do.

Once you’re in love with someone, it’s hard to remember how you lived without him or her. Of course, you were alive before you met this person, but you really didn’t start “living” until the two of you met.

I remember when I first fell in love with my girlfriend; it was a very scary feeling, as I had managed to elude love for the entirety of my life before her. I specifically remember the transition from when I liked Vanessa to when I began to love her.

Vanessa went from being someone who made me smile to being the greatest catalyst of the happiness and joy in my life. She went from a gorgeous girl I met to the most beautiful girl I know. She went from my crush to the love of my life.

Everyone experiences love differently, and at different times. Even the meaning of love is extremely subjective, but I say for certain that anyone who’s experienced it knows it’s the best feeling ever.

Here are 10 ways to know if you might be in love — rather than in like — with someone:

1. The best part of your day
As Childish Gambino said, “When I’m alone, I’d rather be with you.” Seeing my girlfriend is always the highlight of my day. If you really love someone, you never truly get tired of him or her.

No matter how great your day might be going, your special person will make it better. When you just like someone, he or she might make your day better, but probably isn’t the best part.

2. The first person you think about
Your love will be the first person you think about when you wake up and the last person you think about before you go to sleep. When something good happens to you, this is the first person you want to tell.

When something bad happens to you, you look to this person for support.

3. Prioritize above your own needs
Love is selfless. I was the most important person in my world until I met my girlfriend. Once I fell in love with her, her needs became much more important than my own.

This is just how love is. Your needs always seem trivial in comparison to your significant other’s needs.

4. You’d do anything
If I tried to construct a list of things I wouldn’t do for my girlfriend, the list would be pretty empty. When you’re in love with someone, you do whatever you can to make the person happy.

When you like someone, you may feel like there is a lot you would do for the person, but you have your limits. True love knows no limits.

5. You are never afraid to express your feelings in public
I have this semi-bad habit of telling the world how in love I am with my girlfriend.

When you’re truly in love, you want everyone to know. You are not bashful about your feelings by any means. When you like someone, there is a lot of holding back on how you feel.

6. You love the imperfections
My girlfriend is the most beautiful girl I know, but she does have some imperfections. But, to me, they’re not imperfections — they’re unique qualities and things I love.

When I tease her about them, she thinks I am making fun of her, but I am truly just admiring them. Love is the ability to know and accept someone’s faults.

You may know the imperfections of a person you like, but having the capacity to embrace them likely won’t happen unless you fall in love.

7. You think long-term
When you’re in love with someone, it’s hard to imagine a future without the person in it. For this reason, you will think long-term about how you can build a life with this person.

You won’t give in to short-term temptations that might mess up your long-term goals. When you just like someone, thinking long-term can be pretty scary.

8. You become a better person
No one is perfect; we all have room for improvement. But, being in love will force you to work on these things.

You want to become the best version of yourself for the person you love. I am a better person now than I was before I met my girlfriend.

9. Your feelings are unconditional
When you love someone unconditionally, it means that your love knows no conditions and is absolute. I don’t actually like the term “unconditional love” because I think it’s redundant — I believe all true love is unconditional.

When you like someone, your feelings change depending on the condition.

10. Your love is your best friend
Sometime along the way, my girlfriend became my best friend. I believe this to be true for most people who fall in love.

Your significant other becomes your partner in crime. You feel like, together, you can take on the world.

Ten Tips For Dating During The First Month

Via MidLoveCrisis

Kristen Crockett tells us about how important the first month of dating is. She shares 10 important tips for people who have just started dating.

The first month of a relationship is critical.  It determines the expectations and outcome of the relationship.  Before I met my husband, here is my personal list of things that were important for me to have in a partner:

1)    Do what you say. If you say you will call on Sunday, call me on Sunday. If you can’t call me, let me know. It's really that simple. If you memorized all those formulas in math class, you can definitely handle this concept.

2)    Be open to newness.  If you aren’t willing to at least try sushi one time, you may not be willing to keep up with my desire to grow.  The world is filled with things I have never seen or done before.  I’d like to try out the new stuff together.  Experiencing something new on your own is no fun. 

3)    Apologize.  If you find it difficult to apologize when you are wrong, you are probably not going to be accountable for your actions or comments in the future. I admit when I am wrong so I need you to practice that talent as well.  An apology goes a long way to mend hurt feelings.

4)    Family. I come from a huge network of aunts, uncles, and cousins.  I’m into family. If you never talk to your family, don’t see your kids, or talk horribly about them, I’m not the person for you. I value family and I need you to as well.  If you don't, that's totally cool too...for someone else who may want you.

5)    Bashing your ex. With the ability to grow comes the ability to forgive. If you are still saying awful things about a past relationship, I know that I am next in line to be talked about if we break up. It also tells me that you don’t take responsibility for your part in a relationship. 

6)    Handle your childhood issues. We all have them. But if by this age you haven’t done some work to grow through them or to heal, you probably won’t ever do it.  Life is too short to let our childhood issues affect us as adults. And there are too many therapists out there with sliding scales. 

7)    Have priorities.  If you buy $200 jeans but can’t pay your car note, we aren’t going to work out.  If you spend $2,000 on a spur of the moment vacation but don’t have health insurance, I can’t expect you to have me as a priority when you can’t get the basics down.

8)    Fix it before bed. It’s simple.  I like my sleep.  Arguments affect my sleep.  I need a person who solves problems in the same way that I do: before bed.

9)    Make lemonade out of lemons. Problems happen and issues come up.  It’s why they call it life instead of something else.  A change of course sometimes leads you to a better path.  When something is thrown my way, I make the best of it.  If you like to complain and ask God why me, you won’t last a day with me.

10) Appreciate all people.  If you scream at the waitress just before you short her on her tip for not bringing you a glass of water that was exactly 72%, you are not for me.  I was raised to respect everyone from the people who clean the streets to the CEO.  And I am a stickler for tipping.  Plus, your words have to match your actions.  You can’t work at a non-profit and disrespect other people in one breath.

The Cuddle Sutra” & the Benefits of Touch Therapy.

Via elephant journal

Source of the Below: The Snuggle Buddies. “a “professional snuggling” company on the east coast that will come, “platonically snuggle,” with you in your home for up to 10 hours at a time.

The Benefits of Touch Therapy

“Do you find yourself depressed at times? Do you ever feel lonely and wish that you could just talk to someone that would genuinely listen? Do you find yourself suffering from stress, anxiety, or sleep loss? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you are not alone. Many people lack the companionship they want in their everyday life.

It has been found that people, especially in the United States, have higher rates of depression and aggression compared to most other countries. This could be due to our fast-paced lifestyles, or our mentality of constantly telling ourselves that we just don’t have time. We seem to forget that in order to boost our own morale we need to make time for human interaction.

Studies have shown that the lack of human touch is an enormous factor towards causing depression. Platonic human touch releases oxytocin (chemical in our brains), which is why touch therapy and professional cuddling services have been so successful. Oxytocin has a major role in lowering blood pressure, lowering stress levels, reducing social anxiety, helping to relieve pain, and protecting against inflammation, which is said to make us age faster! Snuggling is an extremely important part of life that is considerably undervalued. It helps us grow mentally and physically because of the chemical changes it causes in the body.

Human beings thrive on contact. The Snuggle Buddies, an alternative therapy company specializing in professional snuggling, was created with the sole purpose to help relieve everyday stress, depression, and anxiety by the simple act of human interaction. Whether it’s through cuddling, or conversing, we feel that all individuals deserve to experience happiness.

Below is a comprehensive list of the benefits that occur from snuggling, which are caused by its ability to release oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, and inhibit cortisol.”

List of Benefits

• Decreased stress and increased relaxation
• Lessened depression
• Lessened anxiety and social anxiety
• Improved social skills
• Improved self-esteem Improved sleep
• Lowered blood pressure and heart rate
• Reduced risk of heart disease
• Improved immune system and faster recovery
• Protection against inflammation and oxidative stress
• Pain relief and raised pain threshold
• Reduced drug cravings
• Lessened PTSD

The Truth About Marriage, Monogamy & Long-Term Partnership.

via Elephant journal

Everyone around us struggles in marriage.

But you wouldn’t know it because most people feel bad about their struggle, so they hide it.

I have yet to meet a couple who were not challenged to some degree.

As a couple’s coach and relationship specialist, I work with this all day, every day.

If you are married, or you are going to get married, it’s important to read this thoroughly. It may help you be more realistic.

The media and our culture inundate us with misinformation about how relationships are supposed to be. Many of us still think that when we find the one all will be well and they will complete us. Or maybe some of us think a “conscious” relationship means that we somehow transcend our issues, triggers and neurosis.

When we finally do commit to a long-term relationship and the warm fuzzies of the honeymoon stage wear off after six months or a year or two, we finally get to the goods of a real relationship.

One of the first things we discover is that it is challenging.

We struggle, blame, judge and even hate. We shut down, we distance, we run away. We do and say mean things or we just freeze in fear. We do all the things that we did as a child, (but probably don’t remember) or we act like our parents—the thing we’d swore we’d never do. We then suffer because our fantasy of what we thought a relationship was supposed to be doesn’t match our lived experience of the real relationship we are in now.

We discover that a relationship is full of pleasure yes, but that it is also full of pain. It’s not just happy, but it’s sad. It’s not just blissful, it’s depressing. We don’t just experience warm fuzzies, we also experience cold iciness and rage.

Then, we judge ourselves against the one-sided marriage paradigm that was sold to us. We get depressed thinking that perhaps we made a mistake or something is wrong with us. Or, we blame our spouse and hold them accountable for our pain, which is also depressing.

Some of us might feel alone and struggle to tell anyone about what’s really going on, perhaps because we don’t have those kinds of friends. And, even if we did have friends that would accept us in our funk as we fumble through marriage, our culture trained us to hide our relationship struggles so we put on our upbeat face and continue hiding. We unconsciously embrace the game everyone plays in this culture to be a half-version of ourselves.

But when it’s quiet and no one’s looking, we might be courageous enough to look in the mirror and acknowledge that we are in pain, that we don’t know how to get through it, and that we are in unknown territory.

We might take the next step and admit we can’t do it alone, so we finally reach out to someone for help. We might first talk to a close friend, a pastor, a therapist or our parents to get their councel. But often what we receive is not what we need. The most common response we can get is advice, problem solving and fixing—all well intentioned with the agenda of getting us back to “normal,” which translates into getting us back to our happy place.

This lack of validating our experience has us feeling more alone and even stupid. Remember, other people don’t want us to suffer. Our suffering makes them uncomfortable. So, if we are not careful and we want their approval/acceptance, we might abandon our true feelings and take their advice and try to get back to being happy again. But meanwhile under our mask, our suffering ensues.

Next, if we are religious or spiritual, we may look to our texts and self-help books to support us. We might even pray to God to make our suffering go away. We might even meditate and try to pseudo-embrace our pain all the while secretly wanting it to go away.

Yikes!

This entire process is common, normal, and I see it every day.

In my experience as a relationship guide, people finally get into a marriage and have no idea what’s at stake and no idea how to proceed. It’s like being lost in a thick forest in a far away place with no map.

Add kids to the mix, years of financial stress, miscommunication, less and less sex and an inability to do real conflict, and we have a recipe for affairs, divorce and stuck marriages. If we are honest, we finally start to admit we have few to no skills in the long-term relationship department.

The feelings we bottled up or tried to hide begin to leak out, sometimes as a slow drip, and other times as a raging mountain torrent. Or we feel afraid to move one way or the other, so we stay frozen in inaction, unsure of how to proceed. Meanwhile our body bears the burden as we compartmentalize our pain in silence, all the while we get sicker and sicker year after year.

Eventually we start to see that we learned what was modeled to us. We realize there was no relationship class in school. We just digested what was modeled to us.

We look around, compare ourselves to others and think, “they seem like their marriage is great, so what’s my problem?” But remember that under the masks of everyone around you is a hidden layer, a layer they, like you, would rather hide.

Read the whole article here.

How we end up marrying the wrong people

Via The Philosopher's Mail

Anyone we could marry would, of course, be a little wrong for us. It is wise to be appropriately pessimistic here. Perfection is not on the cards. Unhappiness is a constant. Nevertheless, one encounters some couples of such primal, grinding mismatch, such deep-seated incompatibility, that one has to conclude that something else is at play beyond the normal disappointments and tensions of every long-term relationship: some people simply shouldn’t be together.

How do the errors happen? With appalling ease and regularity. Given that marrying the wrong person is about the single easiest and also costliest mistake any of us can make (and one which places an enormous burden on the state, employers and the next generation), it is extraordinary, and almost criminal, that the issue of marrying intelligently is not more systematically addressed at a national and personal level, as road safety or smoking are.

It’s all the sadder because in truth, the reasons why people make the wrong choices are easy to lay out and unsurprising in their structure. 

They tend to fall into some of the following basic categories.

One: We don’t understand ourselves

When first looking out for a partner, the requirements we come up with are coloured by a beautiful non-specific sentimental vagueness: we’ll say we really want to find someone who is ‘kind’ or ‘fun to be with’, ‘attractive’ or ‘up for adventure…’

It isn’t that such desires are wrong, they are just not remotely precise enough in their understanding of what we in particular are going to require in order to stand a chance of being happy – or, more accurately, not consistently miserable.

All of us are crazy in very particular ways. We’re distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature, but don’t know quite the details because no one ever encourages us too hard to find them out. An urgent, primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad. They have to get up to speed on their individual neuroses. They have to grasp where these have come from, what they make them do – and most importantly, what sort of people either provoke or assuage them. A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there aren’t many of these on the planet), it’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening conscious accommodation between their relative insanities.

The very idea that we might not be too difficult as people should set off alarm bells in any prospective partner. The question is just where the problems will lie: perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us, or we can only relax when we are working, or we’re a bit tricky around intimacy after sex, or we’ve never been so good at explaining what’s going on when we’re worried. It’s these sort of issues that – over decades – create catastrophes and that we therefore need to know about way ahead of time, in order to look out for people who are optimally designed to withstand them. A standard question on any early dinner date should be quite simply: ‘And how are you mad?’

The problem is that knowledge of our own neuroses is not at all easy to come by. It can take years and situations we have had no experience of. Prior to marriage, we’re rarely involved in dynamics that properly hold up a mirror to our disturbances. Whenever more casual relationships threaten to reveal the ‘difficult’ side of our natures, we tend to blame the partner – and call it a day. As for our friends, they predictably don’t care enough about us to have any motive to probe our real selves. They only want a nice evening out. Therefore, we end up blind to the awkward sides of our natures. On our own, when we’re furious, we don’t shout, as there’s no one there to listen – and therefore we overlook the true, worrying strength of our capacity for fury. Or we work all the time without grasping, because there’s no one calling us to come for dinner, how we manically use work to gain a sense of control over life – and how we might cause hell if anyone tried to stop us. At night, all we’re aware of is how sweet it would be to cuddle with someone, but we have no opportunity to face up to the intimacy-avoiding side of us that would start to make us cold and strange if ever it felt we were too deeply committed to someone. One of the greatest privileges of being on one’s own is the flattering illusion that one is, in truth, really quite an easy person to live with.

With such a poor level of understanding of our characters, no wonder we aren’t in any position to know who we should be looking out for.

Read the entire article here.