“Looking good on the outside is not going to change your inside.” - Iyanla Vanzant
Think about this… many people spend more time contemplating what to wear each day than they do on reflecting how to maintain or improve their love lives. We match shoes with hats, ties with shirts, and scarves with purses with the precision of a surgeon at an operating table. Then we stare at our reflection in the mirror until we’re satisfied with the image staring back at us. And if we’re not satisfied, we change our clothes!
More often than not, we don’t do the same with love. Sure we think about our significant other, or the partner we would like to have, but in a more random way than we think about what dress would be perfect to wear to a gala. For the gala, we design our appearance long before we make an entrance. With love, we condition happiness on being accepted just as we are. Even when we see the colors clashing, we are reluctant to take time to change.
If you want love; lasting love, rapturous love, the kind that’s written all over your face and unmistakable… Design Your Love. Match your desire for a positive harmonious relationship with the partner of your dreams to a willingness to be habitual about the choices that lead to that outcome. Start by throwing away all the clichés in your closet. You don’t look good in them no matter what you believe or whoever tells you that you do. Stop wearing “Take me as I am.” Stop wearing, “I have a lot to offer.” Don’t rely anymore on “Everybody wants some of this!” or “You don’t treat me right.” Those are old clothes. They’re out of style.Design Your Love. Make your relationship, or the happiness you are seeking, the body you are picking out the perfect attire for. Think of your emotional needs and desires as only one part of that body; they may be the arms and legs, but your partner’s emotional needs and desires are also part of the same body. If you only plan to wear a shirt, and nothing else, out of your house, understand that you’ll be walking around half naked. And the reason we rarely move through life half dressed is because instinctively we realize it’s not optimal. We are habitual about dressing ourselves, and habitual about checking what we are wearing. We take time to design our appearance but won’t make time to design our love.
Love requires self-reflection and a willingness to go through our emotional closets and throw away thoughts that are worn out, faded, ripped beyond repair, too small, too ostentatious, or simply out-dated. Don’t let them sit there. Don’t pretend that someone else may have a use for them. Get rid of them. Then begin the pleasure of coordinating your bright colors with the matching shades of your partner. The simple part is in understanding what doesn’t match. Dr. Melanie A. Greenberg in an article titled Healing the Cycles that Tear Couples Apart provides the following list:
- Lack of Trust
- Blaming and Fixing
- Criticism and Putdowns
- Emotional Distance
These are the emotional garments that we have to stop wearing. The difficult part is in learning what to do when we recognize them, or have them pointed out for us. That’s where self-reflection comes into play. If you can’t wake up in the morning and thank your Creator for having the person you’ve chosen to love in your life then you may have to throw the entire closet out! But if where you are emotionally is something less than that, change clothes. Don’t wear the clichés that are either self-deluding or hurtful to your partner. Get rid of the emotional garments you’ve been dragging with you from home to home, into new relationships, or that ruin new opportunities to shine in the gala of life. Become habitual in showing your partner respect and courtesy, be habitual in the way you approach communication, in valuing your relationship and in saying every day, “I love you!” Design Your Love, and enjoy the compliments a well-dressed love is sure to bring.