Number 6 is most important! Link to Free Weekly Relationship Check in Template in bio! #relationshipadvice #relationshiptok ##relationshiphelp #relationshiptips #relationshipgoals

One of the biggest issues I come across in my practice is people having unrealistic expectations of their partners or of what long-term love is supposed to look like. So here are six hard truths about long-term relationships that nobody really prepares you for. One, you will fall in and out of love with the same person over and over again. Nobody tells you this because it sounds kind of scary. Long-term love isn't one continuous feeling. There will probably be stretches where you can't get enough of them and stretches where you look across the kitchen and go, "What are you?" Long-term love has room for both of those though and they're just growth. Two, the person you fell in love with is going to disappear in some respect and so are you. In 10 years, neither of you will be who you were when you started. Long-term love means repeatedly meeting the next version of someone you already love and choosing to be curious about them all over again. Three, some years of a genuinely good relationship are kind of boring. Work, laundry, dinner, bed, repeat, no fireworks, no crisis, but most of us were trained to read low intensity as low love. It isn't. Low intensity is often what safety feels like and safety is good soil for everything else to grow in. Four, your partner cannot make you feel loved all the time. They will misread you. Forget something that mattered. Say the wrong thing. Be emotionally available sometimes because they're a full human being with their own things going on. Not a feelings delivery system. Built for your needs on demand. Five, there will be things you have to let go of without ever getting to fully process them. I'm not talking about betrayal or cruelty or something that genuinely needs repair. I'm talking about the weird tone on a Saturday morning, the bad mood after a hard day. Not every irritation needs an investigation. Some things you just need to let roll off. In six, eventually long-term love becomes less about finding the right person and more about how you treat the person you found. Chemistry gets you through the door. Compatibility matters, but decades of love get built out of small decisions. How you speak when you're exhausted, whether you assume the best or the worst of your partner, whether you let tomorrow actually be a fresh start, because most of the time a great love story doesn't look like a great love story while you're living it. It just looks like Thursday, but a thousand Thursdays tell the real story. If any of this resonated, my four horseman workbook and my weekly check-in template are both built around exactly this kind of long-term, unglamorous real love. So if you want to create that in your relationship, the link is in my bio.