When the world gets tough ...

Tenderness is not the bravest way to take care of each other.

"That's just the way I am, whoever loves me, let him accept me completely."Be careful with that phrase, which many people use because they simply decided to stop working on themselves.

No one wakes up one morning saying: Today I'm going to stop being me.

That change starts with small things. In relationships where you start to give in here, keep quiet there, let something go that you wouldn't have accepted before, convince yourself that loving also means adapting a little more. But one day you discover that you've been taking care of the relationship for so long, that you stopped taking care of the relationship with yourself.

And I think that's one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves: who am I getting next to this person?

Every relationship changes us. That's inevitable. But there are changes that expand us and others that are making us smaller and smaller.

Many times the best decision is to end those relationships that overshadow us and although they hurt deeply, ending them does not mean that we fail. Finishing them means recovering your voice, your friends, your projects, your way of laughing, your desire, your opinions and even those little things that made you feel so you... Never think that your value was in discussion, you just needed to see it again.

Why? Well, because it's one thing to ask our partner to accept our snoring or our disorder, and it's quite another to ask him to accept our screams, or our punishments... * The first is coexistence, the second is abuse disguised as personality*.

And how do I know what I accept from my partner and what I should never accept? Here I leave the compass, by the way, mine.

Let's accept everything that makes us uncomfortable but that never hurts us, and stop in its tracks everything that diminishes us, humiliates us or turns us off as a person... "That line is non-negotiable.

And there is a third category...What is being worked on. Why what is being worked on? Well, because the one who really loves us and has maturity, when we show him that something of his is hurting us, he takes responsibility and changes. It's that simple.

That's why never believe the story that "people don't change”, people who love, change. The one who does not want, excuses himself. Perhaps the most perfect affection is to tolerate our flaws.

People change habits, behaviors, beliefs, when they truly love and decide to do everything right and somehow, responsibly. But that doesn't happen because the other person wants it. It's a personal decision.

That's why I think that perfection doesn't exist. There's always something we don't like and we learn to live with that.

Janitze 🦋