Most of us deny ourselves the depths of love we want in our marriage—by not going all in on working to create the vision we have for it in our heart of hearts. Because we are—somewhere deep in the crevices of our unconscious—afraid... Could you be doing that to yourself? If so, please know I was once guilty of it, too! It is predictable. Human. And .... ...TRAGIC. It's why most marriages are unhappy... or even miserable. It's why we don't do better at love in general as a society. If you are not going all in on making your relationship what you want it to be, it's likely because you're afraid of the discomfort that you'd feel if you FAILED at actually making it better. You’re afraid you’re going to disappoint yourself, feel angry at yourself, be mean to yourself because of it! But listen, this is not what people who know how to truly love and care for themselves do! You wouldn't have this experience if you truly learned to love yourself. When we love ourselves, we don't beat ourselves up for going for the thing we most want. We don’t keep ourselves from our dreams in order to avoid feeling bad about ourselves. People who love themselves go for their dreams, choose the thing they want deep in their hearts-- even if it doesn’t come easily. Especially then, we love ourselves, encourage and comfort ourselves…. through our own disappointment, through any pain that may come up along the way. We metaphorically (and sometimes literally!) hug ourselves through it all.
Like a baby learning to walk, we do not utter one mean word to ourselves when we fall, we just get back to putting 1 foot in front of the other to create what we really want.
NOW, you might not be a wizard at loving yourself yet. And that is normal and totally okay!! We always start right where we are.
But don’t STAY there, when you don’t need to.
Loving yourself is exactly what you will learn to do when you decide to make your marriage what you want it to be.
Because loving yourself— at the very least accepting yourself and having your own back —is essential to genuinely enjoying and making your marriage into one you love.
Which, of course, you want. Because it feels incredible to love your marriage.
Just getting by and tolerating OKAYNESS in your marriage??
That’s not what your heart desires.
HERE’S THE THING: To give yourself what your heart wants --a relationship you love with your husband--it requires the very thing that might be hardest and most scary for you if you don’t have a lot of love for yourself:
Taking the initial act of love for yourself of committing to learn to deeply love yourself and your marriage.
Risking the discomfort of failure, to reap the comfort of deep love in your marriage.
Being willing to experience a bit of temporary discomfort on the way to the much deeper long-lasting comfort of achieving our dream of love.
And remember:
Even if you were to fail, or pass through some discomfort, you will have the wildest clearest depths of your own love to gentle yourself through any passing disappointment, so any pain would fall away quickly, easily, leaving you resting back in LOVE and COMFORT.
You cannot lose this way. You can only win.
THIS IS HOW you shift the tides of love in your life, to swell up full and deep.
Make the most loving decision for yourself to build a relationship of love with yourself and your husband by coaching 1:1 with me.
Once you’ve made that initial decision, you will not be alone in it. I will lovingly walk you step-by-simple-step all the way through and out to the other side:
To feeling so good about yourself, like you always have your own loving arms to turn to.
To the secure knowing that you always have the loving arms of your husband to turn to, to be nurtured by.
All it takes to get started is that first courageous act of self-love of saying yes to coaching with me. Email me at Hannah@lifeisworthloving.com and say "let's chat," and we’ll have a love-filled talk about next steps.
With big belief in you, Hannah