Name: The Only Relationship Rule That Matters
Uploaded: 2025-10-08T18:05:10.000Z
Duration: 5 min 45 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Some of us will require the better part of a lifetime to learn a very simple sounding lesson that should have struck us as obvious and urgent from the start.

That the only love worthy of the name, the only love we should ever be interested in, is reciprocal love.

In other words, a love where another person is entirely as convinced of us as we are are of them.

Where another person is every bit as present in the relationship as we are.

A love where we never need to persuade or beg.

A love where we aren't left anxious and agitated by evasions and ambiguities.

A love where we don't have to wonder where they are and when they'll get back to us.

Where we aren't repeatedly up in the early hours writing the messages explaining what we hope for from them.

Where they never cease to be entirely there for us as we are there for them.

And they are profoundly grateful that we are in their lives as we are grateful that they are in ours.

It's a basic law of emotional reciprocity that will strike us as peculiar or off putting for only one.

Because we haven't yet learned what we're owed.

Because we've come from a very deprived place, because we were somewhere early on trained to despise ourselves.

What nonsense we may sometimes accept in lieu of this essential and rightful fare.

How many years or decades of life we may already have wasted mistaking pain for love.

Times when we will have insisted on imagining that they didn't love us back, that they were just too shy to say so.

Times when we sat patiently and politely with them while they tried to decide whether they should be with us or or with a rival and we felt their dilemma so acutely.

Times when we paid for everything and they returned the favour with half heartedness and forgotten birthday presents.

We might have had a marriage behind us in which almost every evening we had to fight for our case.

We had to struggle to have basic things about our needs.

Heard that we needed their touch, that we wanted them to be more present, that they couldn't stonewall us.

We might have got involved in all manner of so called complicated relationships where the person seemed a little loving at first and then very much not so in the long run.

But there is never any such thing as a legitimately complicated relationship.

The other person either honours us or they don't.

They're either on the other end of the rope as firmly as we are, or they don't belong in our lives in any way.

Let's keep in mind always some fundamental rules that might, because so much went wrong in childhood, be the fruit of decades of inner work.

If they're still deciding but haven't yet, we must leave them.

If they're taking ages to reply to simple messages, we must leave them.

If they're flirting elsewhere, we must leave them.

If we need to explain to them why they should want to be with us, we must leave them.

If they are wrestling with psychological issues for which we have boundless sympathy, but

which mean they cannot be kind or present, we must leave them.

If they're not infinitely proud of us, we must leave them.

If we have given them several good chances and they didn't listen, we must leave them.

Ensure they are no longer in our lives, that they don't occupy the slightest space in our cupboards or our thoughts.

That there are no more reminders of them anywhere in our consciousness, that we've expelled them like the emotional poisons there are.

It is a complicating factor, but no more than that.

That we may be married to them, that we may have already invested five years with them, that sex is great with them, that we find them beautiful or clever.

All this might escape our notice for a tragic reason.

Because for some of us, our childhoods will have deeply muddled our emotional mechanisms.

They will have given us a sense that to love is to pine, that to love is to hope.

To persuade a damaged person who might initially present as sweet and dependable that we are good enough.

That we're never in the right relationship until we feel ignored, uncomfortable and harshly evaluated.

That the only person we really need love from is someone who isn't wholly persuaded by us.

We can't afford such self torture and self abandonment any longer.

We need to come down firmly on our own side at last.

Most people won't think we're fabulous and that's entirely their right.

We simply need to make sure that we don't ever mistake such types for characters we might love.

We need to grow sane enough to allow ourselves to locate, hold onto and tolerate a true ally.

This isn't in any way entitled, this isn't brittle.

Anything less isn't romantic, it's self abandonment.

A legacy of a let down that we didn't deserve then and don't deserve now.

We will have understood love when we know that the emotion is in no way about self sacrifice.

It's about two people who feel constantly blessed to have met and who care infinitely for one another.

When this finally, finally feels obvious, we'll be home.