We’ve been brainwashed by the culture to expect an ideal of love & relationships that’s unrealistic for most. If you weren’t loved & cared for properly as a child then released with compassion & acceptance as an adolescent, then love is a skill that must be laboriously learned 1/

You may feel the emotion known as love for others, but to be in a healthy and intimate long-term love relationship will require the equivalent of learning a new skill or trade. You’re not just going to meet the right person and suddenly know how to do it right. 2/

As for relationships, we’ve also been misled. Romantic movies end at the moment when desire, fear, or separation end and mutual love begins. And we presume it’s happily ever after from there. But in a real relationship, that’s when the actual work begins. 3/

If we continually bicker in our relationship or are unhappy or don’t feel understood or don’t have trust, then we think it means we’re in the wrong relationship. Yet in our careers, we work hard, and we struggle, yet we stick with it because in the long-term it is worth it. 4/

In a realistic relationship, so too are there ups & downs, parts where we struggle or suffer, but we stick with it because it’s worth it in the end. That is, *if* we are both willing to put in our own work, rather than continually resenting the other for not doing their work. 5/