True and enduring love is the most testing love

Relationships require work. They test us. Sometimes break us.  But in most cases help to make us. Through long and committed relationships, we learn so much more about ourselves – what we can and cannot take. What makes us thrive and what makes us want to run away.

True and honest relationships are lasting relationships because they ask us to dig deep. To share unconditionally. To open to our most vulnerable sides in order for us and our relationships to flourish and to grow.

Too often we become mired in self that we do not see the benefit of the people we have allowed into our innermost circles. People that are here as gifts to help balance us and to help us to get through the toughest times in our lives just by being there.

There are also some relationships that are not meant to last and we cannot beat ourselves up for letting them go because they were only meant to last for a season. To teach us something about ourselves. And once we get the lesson we are free to move on with love and light. Not with malice or mal-intent. If we are harbouring any of those feelings, we have not learnt the lesson we were meant to learn and that lesson will continue to follow us – different faces but same issue – until we get the lesson.

Marriages or long lasting committed relationships are the most challenging because we have to be ourselves at some point in our relationship and that means letting down our guards. Letting down the guise we put up for the rest of the world and being who we truly are. It is only for so long that we can pretend that everything is okay. That we are okay. But eventually we have to be who we are and be willing to share that part of ourselves with our partners. And they with us as well.

When we are willing to be who we are honestly and truly, we find our relationships are the most wonderful gift we can be given from the universe because we are allowed to relax. To take off the armour and to be accepted for who we are – imperfect and flawed human beings trying to grow. Learning to love and to forgive through our everyday life existence. Not the extraordinary but the ordinary.

And it is for these reasons that we must show gratitude to our partners as much as we can and not take them for granted because their very presence helps us to be who we are and what we are every single day.

Enduring relationships require work. Require patience. Require love and forgiveness. But they are worth it in the end because they help to ground us to the reality of who we are and what we came here to learn. Our life partners are reflections of who we are. Mirrors of our souls. Sent to show us our deepest and darkest selves. Our shadow selves. Teaching us that often what we dislike about them is what we dislike about ourselves. And if we want that relationship to flourish we must own our dislike and magically  the resentment disappears.

And when we let go and surrender to our relationship, we find we see the world through a whole different lens  - one of love and light, peace and forgiveness, and full of abundance and grace because we become beacons of love and light radiating out for the rest of the world to share in. There is nothing more liberating and satisfying than enduring love, true and unconditional love because that love begins with us and us alone. We cannot love another fully unless we learn to love ourselves first.