Photo of Jenny Block by Terri Glanger
It’s a wild contradiction. We are living in a time when we need to love and be loved now more than ever. And yet, so many of us are separated from so many of the people we love. While at the same time, plenty of us are quarantined with at least some (even if it’s just one) of the people we love. Although we may have often wished for more time with our significant others, family, or friends, being homebound with no end in sight while the world rages outside our doors is an altogether different matter.
Things can get dicey. Familiarity breeds contempt, as Chaucer once wrote. Constantly sharing space while being under the stress of a pandemic can make even the very best of relationships a challenge at the very least. My book Be That Unicorn. Find your Magic. Live your Truth. Share your Shine is all about living authentically, warts and all. It means laughing the laughs and crying the tears. It means honoring the anger and the frustration as much as the peace and the joy. This life isn’t perfect. But with any luck, you can live a life that’s perfectly you.
I devoted an entire chapter of my book to love. I hope this excerpt from Chapter Six about how to Be That Unicorn when loving others—and ourselves—helps you to navigate this unbelievably unprecedented time. This too shall pass. In the meantime, may we choose to lead with love and abundance even when we feel like doing anything but.
Loving someone is the easiest—and the hardest—thing to do.
To love someone truly, freely, and honestly is heavenly…until it isn’t. And even if it is true love, it certainly is not always going to be divine. But when you let your inner unicorn take over, it can be a heck of a lot easier. Enjoying a happy, loving relationship depends on several things. Two of the most important things are 1) that your partner loves you, and 2) that your partner is different from you.
Much of this applies to being a parent, a friend, a sibling, a son, or a daughter as well. Whether it’s your romantic partner or anyone else, love requires patience and kindness and honesty. We’re bombarded with messaging that suggests that loving someone—regardless of the relationship—is somehow the easiest thing in the world to do. But while feeling love is easy, showing it is another matter altogether.
For example, it’s not always a cakewalk for parents to love their children. Sometimes they do things that make you want to scream. That Unicorn freely admits that because That Unicorn knows the importance of eliminating every possible kind of stigma. Hiding how hard something is doesn’t help anyone, and that couldn’t be any more true when it comes to love. As long as we walk around wishing for something that doesn’t exist, we’ll always think that we have somehow failed, that we must not really be That Unicorn—otherwise love would be easy and our relationships would look like they do in the movies.
In too many ways, when it comes to romantic love, it feels like it’s supposed to be completely carefree. It’s supposed to be sentimental dates and shared whispers and eternal desire. Hopefully, that will be a massive part of it…but just a part.
Real love is about committing to someone and all the elements that make up who that someone is.
Real love is knowing how important that ugly vase is to your partner and putting her coffee cup in the dishwasher every morning and listening to how stressful work is and letting her backseat-drive when you bring her home from the hospital. Love is knowing that the depth to which she loves you is worth all of it, even the casserole she insists on making for every family event that no one eats except her. It’s not being with someone “in spite of;” it is genuinely loving someone “because of”…including the habits that make you crazy, because plenty of habits about you drive your partner crazy, too.
That Unicorn loves fully and openly. She’s smart enough to protect her heart, but also willing to let others in even though she knows she may get hurt. When you give that kind of love, that’s precisely the kind of love you can expect to get back. The most important thing you can do on this path is to always allow your inner unicorn to be your guide.
When it comes to loving, That Unicorn acknowledges that…
- Love and abundance are always the foundation.
- A unicorn’s partner won’t always operate from a place of love and abundance.
- Being patient is being loving.
- We all need to make our own mistakes in order to learn from them.
- Wanting time alone doesn’t mean you don’t love someone.
- Love begets love.
- Our partners are not us.
- Your partner’s past is important.
- Falling in love with someone’s potential rarely works.
- Love needs space to breathe.
For more mantras and more on these mantras on love, check out Be That Unicorn. Find your Magic. Live your Truth. Share your Shine.” Available at Amazon and nearly everywhere books are sold. Signed copies available at www.bethatunicorn.net.
Excerpted from Jenny Block’s, Be That Unicorn: Find your Magic. Live your Truth. Share your Shine from Mango Publishing, 2020.
