Best Of Jillian Turecki's "It Begins With You"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from It Begins with You: The 9 Hard Truths About Love That Will Change Your Life by Jillian Turecki.
Breaking up is very challenging for everyone, because relationships rarely end because of a lack of love. They more commonly end because of irreconcilable differences.
p. 42
The truth is, "The One" is not a person. It is a metaphor for hope, change, and novelty.
p. 59
To love someone involves collaboration, negotiation, resisting the comfort zone, and togetherness as well as distance. In order to love, we have to be compassionate, empathetic, self-aware, and understanding. To love someone is to love them in the ways that they need us to,
not just in the ways that are comfortable for us. To love someone is to accept their past and commit to not being a continuation of the part of their past that has caused them hurt and suffering.
To love someone is to consistently remind ourselves that the person we claim to love is a gift, not a given. To love someone is to accept them for who they are. This means we accept all their nuances, quirks, and eccentricities. This is not the same thing as tolerating abusive behaviour or dysfunctional patterns [...]; it simply means that when we truly love someone, we don't try to change who they fundamentally are.
p. 63
A big lesson I've learned about love is that when our partner's needs are more important than our own, we become a resentful martyr in our own relationship, and we can never do love in this state. When our needs are consistently more important than the other's, we become selfish, and we are not loving when we are being selfish. Truly loving someone means that meeting the other's needs is as important as meeting our own.
p. 65
I don't belong on anyone's pedestal, and they don't belong on mine. Every single one of us is flawed, and we do the best that we can with the level of maturity and awareness that we have at any given stage of our lives. Every person you meet has a story, but not every story is a match.
p. 71
When we grow, the kind of people we're attracted to evolves, too.
p. 80
Every time we challenge ourselves to speak up when all we've ever known is staying quiet to keep the peace, every time we walk away from a relationship when our pattern is to stay too long, every time we
commit to a relationship when our pattern is to walk too soon, every time we travel when all we've done is remain in our hometown, every time we put ourselves on the line, vulnerable to the unknown, we raise our self-esteem. When we courageously face our fear of the unknown, we say yes to growth. And in that moment, we stretch beyond what we think we're capable of. We feel heroic.
94-95
I explained to her that neediness is expecting our partner to make us happy and secure all the time. Neediness is feeling that nothing our partner ever does is good enough, because we have the unrealistic expectation that our partner should be able to read our minds and never disappoint us. Neediness is forfeiting all our self-sufficiency and making it someone else's responsibility to take care of our needs at any given moment, as if we were a child. As psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm wrote in The Art of Loving, "Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you? Mature love says: 'I need you because I love you." Neediness isn't about loving the other person.
p. 126
The truth is, we are responsible for how we show up in our relationships. We must never stop pursuing the things that light us up and give our lives meaning just because we're in a relationship. And here's the harder part for most of us: we have to bring that light home to our partner instead of spreading it just to friends, coworkers, or strangers. When we consistently give the best part of ourselves to everyone but our partners, we slowly destroy the relationship.
p. 140
This is how most people in situationships ruin their lives. Because these "relationships" are so uncertain, we have to work extra hard to feel safe in them; therefore, we tend to ignore the other parts of our lives in the pursuit of love that isn't fully available to us. Trying to convince someone to choose us becomes our full-time job, and we end up abandoning our personal goals and deepest longings. This is how we self-abandon.
p. 173
The tragedy is that relationships rarely end because of a lack of love. They more commonly end because of a lack of connection that comes from feeling chronically unseen and misunderstood. Couples usually endure hurt feelings, resentment, and insecurity for months or years before one or both people call it quits. People struggle to stay connected to each other because they don't know how to overcome their fears, tell the truth, love selflessly, and love themselves more fully.
p. 178
When our lives feel directionless, we can easily use a relationship as an excuse to avoid focusing on steering our lives back on track. When our lives lack the adventure and novelty of new experiences, we can easily use a relationship to distract us from what's missing in our lives.
p. 199
Sometimes when we're stuck in life, held back by our fears and indecision and unable to create necessary change, we'll get into a relationship and feel inspired by the other person to expand ourselves.
But much more commonly, we'll remain the same and over-rely on our partner to save us from our discontent.
p. 200
The success of a romantic relationship is largely determined by two choices: the person we choose and how we decide to show up.
p. 200
When we break up with our parents as the sovereigns of our beliefs, we get back together with the parts of ourselves we never thought we "should" be. We give ourselves permission to be whole-to be authentic. From a place of authenticity, we can love our parents as adults, not as children in need. We can respect our parents without needing to please them. If needed, we set boundaries.
p. 227
