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Ugobaby
The Truth About Long Lasting Relationships No One Talks About
~5.5 mins read
I’ve had only one successful relationship in my life, but it has lasted for over 17 years. It began under the most unlikely and challenging circumstances. And I credit the Golden Rule of relationships for overcoming those odds.
Our bond strengthens when we follow this rule and weakens when we stray from it. All other acts of love follow when you do this first.
We danced around the border of friends and lovers but never crossed the threshold, despite the constant encouragement of our mutual friends. She was moving to Colorado in less than three months. My opportunity to make something happen was vanishing. I had one chance left.
It was the night of the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah in September of 2002. I went to my parents’ house in Long Island and would not be back in New York City until night time.
“I’ll be at American Trash,” she said. “Come by when you get back.” It was a bar, only a block from my apartment, and a regular hangout spot of ours.
I had my chances with her in the months leading up to this night, but I had always wimped out and opted to play things safe, maintaining our status as friends. And now, with her imminent departure finalized, I was regretting my hesitation.
A decision that shaped the next 17 years
I came home at around 9 PM. And debated what to do for about half-hour. Should I go or let it die? I decided that this opportunity was a priority. I couldn’t let things go without trying.
We kissed that night for the first time. It was around 2 AM. We were drunk, and it was on the corner of 76th Street and 1st Avenue, outside of a 24-hour diner. Hardly romantic, but still memorable.
We dated casually at first. I didn’t think she wanted a long-distance relationship, so I tried to avoid cramming a year of dating into two months.
And then sometime in October, I met a mutual friend, Beth, for dinner. We sipped on margaritas and chowed on roasted duck burritos. She asked me what I thought of my nascent relationship. I told her it wouldn’t go anywhere. “She doesn’t want to start anything serious,” I said.
Beth told me I was mistaken. They had spoken, and Beth had gotten the impression she would embrace a long-distance relationship.
I recall feeling hopeful disappointment with that news. There was a possibility we could make it work, but it would be near impossible. The logistics and the sacrifice. How could I do it?
I didn’t brood for long. I decided that night I would make it my top priority. And if she would do the same, we could make it work.
The magic slips away
November rolled around, and we both ran the New York City Marathon. She left for Colorado the following week. We spoke every night after she left, but I felt the connection slipping away. We’d each get caught up in our day to day lives and eventually move on.
I decided to do something out of character. I threw a surprise birthday party for her on a return trip back home.
I coordinated with all of her close friends to make sure invitations reached everyone in her circle. I found a bar that would host the event. It took a lot of effort to pull this off, but this relationship was my number one priority.
It was a magical night that solidified our relationship. We saw each other only once over the next two months, but we somehow strengthened our bond.
In February, I made what would be my last trip. I was out of vacation days. She had time off from school in April but was having trouble getting affordable tickets.
We hadn’t discussed what our next steps would be, but I knew we would struggle without a planned date of when we’d see each other again.
Our super risky adventure
On a whim, she suggested I move out to Colorado. She might have been joking, but I followed by asking if we should move in together. It was a crazy thing to say. We had been friends for a few years but had dated for only five months. Three of those months were long distance.
We agreed on a plan. Two months later, I quit my job, sold my apartment, and packed up my car for Colorado.
There has been a multitude of ups and downs since those early days. But I still can’t believe the decisions I made back then, so out of character for me.
In all the critical moments of those first five months, I made our relationship the most vital thing in the world. It was more important than my career, social life, and financial condition. I haven’t done that for all 17 years we’ve been together, but I try to remember it during times of struggle.
The golden rule of relationships
Make your relationship the top priority in your life. That’s the golden rule. When you do so, you take chances. You put the other person first. As long as both of you make it a top priority, you’ll find it easier to compromise and look for win-win outcomes. You do kind things for each other without being asked.
All of the loving behaviors that enhance your relationship flow from making that special person your first concern.
During the early stages of a relationship, we’re insecure about our status, uncertain of where we stand. We make our relationships the top priority to achieve that certainty in status.
Time passes. We get comfortable and secure. Our relationship goes from being the top priority to one of many priorities.
Your personal ambitions and desires re-emerge. There’s nothing wrong with that. We need our space, but sometimes we forget the tenuous circumstances that forged our relationship and the risks and sacrifices we made to make them safe and secure. We get lazy and take things for granted.
If that’s where you find yourself, put your other priorities aside, and remember the golden rule.
Written by Barry Davret
Written by Barry Davret
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Ugobaby
The Only True Love Is Unconditional Love
~9.7 mins read
Unconditional love is the only true love there is.
But, to be honest, I don’t really know what ‘unconditional’ means. I don’t think many of us do.
We know what’s not unconditional love.
Expecting someone else to fulfill your needs is not unconditional love. Neither is doing them favors if those favors are attached to that same expectation. Even hoping your partner will want all the same things you do isn’t unconditional love. That’s just delusion.
Blind trust is not unconditional love. When you see your girlfriend walking right into a trap, you must call her out on it. False pride isn’t unconditional love. Sometimes, our loved ones screw up. If your boyfriend is on the wrong side of an argument, tell him why and help him see.
But what is unconditional love? Here are some ideas.
Love is understanding
Will Smith’s house cost some $42 million and took seven years to build. Everything is custom-made, from the recording studio to the basketball court, and it looks like a Moroccan-style wonderland. The house is called “Her Lake” because Will dedicated the Herculean feat to his wife, Jada — or so he thought.
Dissecting the misunderstanding, Will remembers being devastated when he realized that, actually, he built the house for himself. Having grown up in an abusive household, a perpetual theme park mansion where everyone is happy 24/7 had somehow crept into his picture of an ideal family — and it didn’t matter whether Jada wanted the same or not.
Today, Will uses a little acronym to not repeat this same mistake: L.U.V. — Listen, Understand, Validate.
“There is nothing that feels better to a human being than to feel understood. The mission is to thoroughly and completely understand what the person is saying.”
In order to understand, we first have to listen. That’s hard when you’re just waiting to get out something you want to say. You have to “quiet your own mind, your thoughts, needs, and desires” so you can pay true attention, Will says. Then, make sure your judgments are correct by repeating — and validating — some of what your partner has just entrusted you with.
You won’t always succeed in understanding others, but you can always make the effort — regardless of the final outcome.
Listen, understand, validate. That’s unconditional love.
Love is help
Someone once asked a Navy SEAL instructor who makes it through the training for the most elite combat unit in the world. This was his response: “There’s no certain kind of person, but all the guys who make it, when they are physically and emotionally spent and have nothing left to give, somehow, they find the energy to help the guy next to them.”
We think of war as the polar opposite of love and, in many ways, it is. Ironically, being a good soldier — someone destined to fight — is not about being tough, smart, or fast. It’s about loving the person next to you and helping them succeed. As he recounts this story, Simon Sinek says:
“It’ll be the single most valuable thing you ever learn in your entire life: To accept help when it’s offered and to ask for it when you know that you can’t do it.”
Of course, to receive love when you really need it, you must have offered it to others before. It’s a circle. We all must take care of each other.
“The minute you say, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m stuck, I’m scared, I don’t think I can do this,’ you will find that lots of people who love you will rush in and take care of you, but that’ll only happen if you learn to take care of them first.”
The primary reason to help someone shouldn’t be that they need it but that you can. After you cover your own basic needs, the easiest way to feel love is to offer it to someone in the form of mental, physical, emotional, or material support. It doesn’t have to be big. You don’t have to sacrifice yourself. Take a small step out of your way so someone else can take a larger one on theirs.
Will Smith agrees:
“At its core, I think love is help. Everybody is having a hard time. I think love is a deep desire for our loved ones’ growth, blossoming, and all around well-being.”
Look left. Look right. Who’s standing next to you? Those are the people who need your love right now. They deserve it as much as anyone. Who knows? Soon, you might be the one in need, and they too will give you a hand.
Love is help — and true help is unconditional love.
Love is acceptance
I saw Michael Bublé in concert once. After the first song, he told all 10,000 of us the following: “You know, I used to be so nervous giving shows like this. What if I forget the lyrics? What if I trip and fall? But when you go through something traumatizing, you realize: That shit doesn’t matter at all.”
At three years old, Michael’s son got cancer. He survived, but for a few years, Michael’s life was a living hell. What do you do when your child is about to die? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Except, hopefully, find acceptance, and then take life one day at a time. That’s what Michael did.
Today, Michael carries that same acceptance wherever he goes. Whether it’s talking about his trauma, a confession on a talk show, or singing in front of 10,000 fans, the man is as authentic as they come. He radiates love at every turn, carrying a sort of lightness — a seeming disregard almost — for whatever happens next, because he knows he can accept it and handle life as it unfolds.
Acceptance is not victimhood. It’s registering the status quo in its totality, no matter how pretty or ugly it might be, and then dealing with it head on. It’s the Stoic skill of differentiating between what we control and what we don’t, and then doing the best we can about the former while ignoring the latter.
This also applies to our relationships. In Me Before You, a father tells his daughter over a breakup: “You can’t change who people are.” She asks, “Then what can you do?” “You love them.” Like us, our friends, families, and partners will never be perfect — and they definitely won’t be exactly who we want them to be — but that’s not the point. The point is to love them.
Will Smith shares a great analogy:
“I think that the real paradigm for love is ‘Gardener-Flower.’ The relationship that a gardener has with a flower is the gardener wants the flower to be what the flower is designed to be, not what the gardener wants the flower to be.”
How can you support your loved ones in who they truly aspire to become? That’s the question. It’s not about tolerating every flaw or never pointing out when they’re wrong, it’s about accepting them for who they are at their core.
Accept people without giving up on them. That’s unconditional love.
Love is a verb and — therefore — a choice
Understand, help, accept. These are actions. Not concepts. Not feelings. Actions. If true love sums up these activities, then maybe love itself is also something we do rather than something we feel. A verb much more so than a noun.
That’s the problem with definitions: If we don’t come up with our own, we’ll passively adopt whatever society hands us. In love, these cultural definitions are especially messy. It’s a broad word, and it subsumes a thousand different things, from the expensive chocolates on Valentine’s Day to butterflies in your stomach to the connection between a son and his long-estranged father.
It’s easy to get confused, to lose yourself in the abstractions and emotions, and to forget that the verb — the action of loving — is the part that matters. This dichotomy of verb and noun torpedoes our understanding of love so much that, often, we go about the whole thing the wrong way.
We end up so hell-bent on seeking love outside ourselves, on finding the noun — the feeling — in another person, that we forget we hold power over the verb at all times — and that exercising this power starts with loving ourselves.
In that sense, love is a choice. It requires no one’s presence but our own, and we can choose it in all circumstances. We can direct it inward and outward, and, at the end of it all, our actions will show how much we really chose to love. The feelings and symbols may come and may go. Love anyway.
Love is a verb. Choosing to love, over and over again, is unconditional love.
Love is compromise — without the feeling of loss
In all the above, there is an element of sacrifice. When we listen to someone, we can’t speak. When we help someone, we might slow our own progress. Acceptance can feel like giving up. And when we choose to do one thing, it means not choosing another.
Going back to the gardener-flower analogy, Will Smith says:
“You want the flower to bloom and to blossom and to become what it wants to be. You want it to become what God designed it to be. You’re not demanding that it become what you need it to be for your ego. Anything other than all of your gifts wide open, giving and nourishing this flower into their greatness, is not love.”
When you compromise out of love, you don’t feel like you’re losing something. You see agreement as a win-win. You gain from it.
Like Will said: Everyone is having a hard time. No one’s life is free of problems. In fact, it consists entirely of making tradeoffs. As such, the ability to compromise is a strength, not a weakness. We need flexibility.
Most of the time, the only way forward together is one neither party would have chosen on their own. When you’re alone, a narrow road might suffice. When you’re together, you need a path wide enough for everybody. Finding and choosing this path is an act of love.
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