Ryan Gosling attending the ‘Blue Valentine’ photocall during the 63rd Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France on May 18, 2010. Credit: Courtesy of MCT
Lately, I’ve found myself reflecting upon the relationships in my life, thinking about that great love many people have spoken about since Romeo and Juliet. We talk about love with our girlfriends, we see love portrayed in the media, and wonder if one day we will ever be lucky enough to come across that great love. Recently, I read an inspiring piece of advice in “Cosmopolitan Magazine” on love and relationships that really got me thinking. In the excerpt, New York Times Best Selling author Gabrielle Bernstein recommended, “Make a list of things you want to bring to a relationship … too often we think about what we want the other person to be, but don’t think about ourselves.” Ladies, we must first understand the importance of loving one’s self to bring out those dream girls from within our souls.
Today, many women are out there searching for that great love with their specific list of qualities they look for in that “dream guy.” Unfortunately, we do not think about what just might be the most important key in finding this love we all immensely desire — finding ourselves. We tend to solely focus on what we want our dream guy to bring to the table and neglect the qualities we want to bring to a relationship. Do we want to bring: passion, spontaneity, kindness, honesty, ambition or how about maturity? Ladies, you might just get back what you put forward. For example, I often hear from my girlfriends and see for myself how immature guys act. However, sometimes these complaints are because of our own immature actions.
This search for love is less about finding the qualities we desire in our dream guy, and more about finding those qualities we desire in our dream self. The only person you can control is yourself, so why not take advantage? Think about and write down the qualities we, ourselves want to bring to a relationship. We shouldn’t be out there searching and wishing for that dream guy to come along that checks off every little box on the list, or even worse, settling for a guy we know is less than we deserve. A lady’s intuition almost always knows when she is settling for less than she deserves. However, she ignores that gut feeling, thinking that this may just be as good as it gets.
That “dream guy” portrayed through our deceptive media with chiseled cheek bones and deep set brown eyes that volunteers at the local animal shelter does not exist, but you do.
Love is not like all those cliché movies where Rachel McAdams falls in love with the seemingly perfect Ryan Gosling and they then live happily ever after. We have these wrong ideas in this “quest” for love. This is the 21st Century, we do not need a man to fulfill our desires and happiness. We are all capable of becoming the best versions of ourselves and reaching our greatest potential.
Love begins within you. It starts with first loving yourself so you can really, truly and deeply love others to the best of your ability. If we find our dream girl within ourselves, maybe one day we will have the chance to experience that great love. A love we can share all our passions with and encourages us to be even more amazing than we already are.
Keep in mind this love we think of isn’t always that heteronormative idea we tend to automatically think of when it comes to relationships. Love comes in many different forms and love is felt from many different gender identities. If you’re lucky, love can come from many different people, passions or pets. When we start on that journey to become that remarkable person we have always wanted to be, maybe life will start falling into place just like we dream.
