Relationships Are Thoughts

We’re so confused about how relationships work. We’re under the impression that other people need to behave a certain way so we can feel good.

We have so many rules for our relationships that we have stopped experiencing them and are locked into our expectations of how these relationships should be instead.

Our relationships are simply our thoughts about another person.

Let me give you an example. I have an imaginary friend, Justine, who I love. She’s amazingly fun, gorgeous, smart, funny, and loyal. However I’ve noticed that not everyone has these same exact thoughts about Justine. How is that possible? Justine is fun, gorgeous, smart, funny and loyal. Why doesn’t everyone who knows her think that she’s as amazing as I do?

Think about it. Someone else can know Justine and have a completely different relationship with her. Why? She hasn’t changed. Their relationship with her is dependent on their thoughts about her, not her.

Knowing this is the secret to all relationships. Your relationship with anyone is dependent on your thoughts about them. You may think that your thoughts about them are dependent on what they do and how they behave, but that’s not true. Your thoughts about them will be dependent on your expectations of them and how well they meet those expectations.

You can’t have love for someone. You just have love when you think about them. You can’t be mad at someone. You can only have thoughts that make you mad. Someone can’t hurt your feelings. You simply have thoughts that hurt.

Love feels great. It’s a wonderful emotion that you should choose whenever you can. Not loving someone doesn’t protect you. When you choose not to love someone because you don’t want to get hurt, you are simply hurting yourself ahead of time. Loving never hurts. Loving is the opposite of hurt.

If you love someone and they cheat on you, or lie to you, or say something horrible, it’s not the love you have for them that hurts. What hurts is the meaning you give to the thing they did. Your feelings of betrayal hurt. The love never hurts, and the love never caused the hurt. Loving someone never hurts. No matter what they do. It’s the lack of love that hurts. Withholding love doesn’t protect you or hurt someone else. It hurts you. Saying, “They don’t deserve my love,” is simply denying yourself the feeling of love.

Know this: You are the only one who feels your love. Love is an emotion. It’s a vibration in your body. You feel it. It doesn’t jump out of your body and into someone else’s body. Your love is YOUR feeling. So, denying your feeling for someone else doesn’t make sense. Even when you act loving toward someone else, they don’t feel it. They interpret it as a thought, and then they feel what they feel.

Therefore, you can genuinely feel something for someone, and they don’t experience it that way. Therefore, someone can love you, and you don’t feel the same way.

You create all your own feelings, and they create all their own feelings.

So, if this is true (and it is), why would you ever choose to feel anything other than love? Unconditional love means that you feel love toward them no matter what they do. You do this for your own sake. Because it feels good.

What most of us do is deny ourselves love when someone doesn’t do something, we want them to do. It’s like that idea of taking poison hoping someone else will die.

“I don’t like what you did, so I will punish myself by feeling negative emotion about it and reacting in a negative way toward you.”

This is always optional. We don’t have to put conditions on our love. We don’t have to deny ourselves that feeling when someone doesn’t follow our expectations.

We get to feel love no matter what the other person does.