How is your love life today? I am having a lovely day in LA, my favorite city and I asked my husband to go on a date so we went on a walk and out to lunch. We love hanging out together and even after two years of the pandemic, working at home, somehow, we have gotten closer.
Being friends has always been vital to our happiness and now more than ever, we value our friendship. We met when we were teenagers starting college and were friends for eight years before falling in love. We had crushes early on but our friendship was important to us and it took that long to grow our friendship to the point where we were brave enough to fall in love and choose to be together.
It has not always been easy to keep our friendship strong throughout our marriage. We have had plenty of moments where we were not friends, whenever anything was strained between us, we knew we missed the ease and fun of being friends. It is so easy to get caught up in the stress and pain we get caught up in. It is also unfortunately also extremely easy to take each other for granted. In these moments, when you start to feel lonely in your relationship, you can acknowledge that you miss your friend and check in with each other.
My #1 tip to growing friendship in love is to listen. I don’t have a hearing problem but I do have a listening problem. I have become a much better listener but I definitely caused a lot of pain by tuning my husband out and ignoring him. If you are going to be in a relationship, you have to choose to listen. It might take practice to strengthen your listening skills but it will be worth it. When someone is willing to be present with you and acknowledge that they are hearing what you have to say, they feel cared for and loved. Friends listen to each other!
As you practice listening, you can also ask questions. My second tip to growing friendship in love! Friends ask each other questions and check in with each other. It’s crucial if you are sharing your life with someone. How are you? What makes you happy? Is there anything I can do to support you? What is the future you desire? And one of my favorites, if anything is possible, what would you choose? Questions are kind and invite us to greater possibilities and choices. You can inspire each other when you ask questions! If you are struggling with anything, or you can see that your partner is feeling stuck somewhere, what question can you ask?
Asking questions is one of the ways you show up for each other. Which is tip #3, show up in your relationship like a good friend would. If there is something you care about, let your partner know. One of the greatest gifts of being in a relationship or having great friendships, is when they show up for us. If times are tough, or we are celebrating something, true friends show up for each other. This doesn’t mean you have to be together every second, or go everywhere together, it means showing up when you know it’s important to your partner.
Tip #4 Friends do not make each other wrong. A great way to stop being friends is judging your partner as wrong or bad. Have you ever made your friend feel wrong about something and then suffer for the pain you caused? You are hurting yourself with that judgment and you are actually judging yourself anyway! You would never judge someone unless you are already judging yourself. And please stop believing that there is something wrong with you or your partner. Wrongness is the killer of all joy and possibilities.
If you are stuck in a loop of trying to prove you are getting life and love right, do you always end up feeling wrong anyway? Or lonely? Being right is a very lonely place usually. And it is NOT FUN! How did our parents ever convince us that we should give up having fun to be right? And they still expect us to be happy? Tip # 5 Go back to what is fun for you no matter what and as soon as possible. You cannot get love or life or anything right except a math problem! If you want to be right, solve math problems because you have no other problems to solve.
Or is that what your relationship is for? To solve your problems? What if you had no problems? Would having fun be a priority for you?
Again, somewhere this got twisted that life is serious business. How often were you made wrong for having fun? Or being silly? I am sure my incessant giggling was annoying but I do miss it and wish I hadn’t been told to be quiet and appropriate. There is a wild, silly, hilarious and very fun girl inside me somewhere, and how much of you have you been hiding like me? What if we valued joy, fun and laughter on the planet? And in our families. And school. Or in war?
