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“The relationship we have with ourselves is the most important relationship we will ever have, and we will have to continuously work on that relationship to break through the barriers that prevent us from true emotional intimacy with another person.” —Jillian Turecki
With a new year’s beginning, the idea of love may be dancing about on our intentions list. But in order to successfully experience real love, we need to build a foundation to be able to identify it, choose it, and then nurture it. Jillian Turecki’s successful podcast Jillian On Love shares advice on how to build healthy and fulfilling relationships, and in January of last year, her book It Begins With You was released quickly becoming a New York Times Bestseller. Along with her IG account, she continues to share tips and insights based on her relationship coaching sessions with clients and her own relationship experience.
In today’s episode, I’ll be share nine insights I walked away with, rest assured, not the nine overarching points mentioned in her subtitle, that provide specific reminders of how we play a role in being able to successfully find the love (hint, hint, it involves being loving to ourselves) we want to experience in our life.
Let’s get started.
1.Choosing Ourselves First is Not Selfish — It is Our Responsibility
Choose to learn and strengthen the skill of emotional intelligence.
Turecki teaches that our first step toward healing is to “understand how our personal struggles manifest into patterns that negatively impact our love lives.” Whatever behaviors or choices that arise because we do not feel we are enough, consciously, but at the time unconsciously, this is a part of ourselves that needs to heal. What do we do when we feel insecure or feel love will not be forthcoming, or that we might not be accepted? Examine these behaviors in yourself and then seek out resources for healing, learning, and growth.
But remember, you do not need to be perfect to have a healthy relationship. The key is in being willing to heal and putting in the effort to have an open mind, while honoring your needs.
“Being in a relationship means we have to open up, speak up, and break patterns, because even with the right person, we’ll have to face ourselves.”
2. Change the stories in our head, and then get out of our head and into the present moment
“Change your story, change your life.”
How well we manage, reduce and respond (or react) to stress will determine the health of all of our relationships. “When we’re stressed out, we cannot see clearly.” Our relationships improve when we change how we manage our stress. From chosen regular activities such as meditation, daily moments, reducing work and life responsibilities, caring for our four-legged companions and giving them our full attention, spending time with friends who nourish you and you them by engaging in healthy activities, even just being together sipping tea, emptying time in your schedule to just be, engage fully with a creative outlet.
Our job is to exercise awareness to notice when our mind is telling us unhelpful stories. And taking notice of why and when those stories arise will help us from reacting and believing the unhelpful story. Often, it is when we are stressed for any number of reasons that the unhelpful stories arise. Manage your stress well, learn the various mindfulness skills shared above and regularly discussed here on TSLL and in the podcast, and you will get out of your own way, learning how to communicate lovingly and know when it is constructive to do so.
3. Chemistry is not the Beacon to Strive For that it is Made Out to Be in the Media
“We’ve been conditioned by movies and literature to believe that love is the same thing as lust . . . We’ve been brainwashed into associating the roller coaster of tumultuous relationship with loving someone.”
Lust is easy, becasuse our physical body is doing all of the work for us to remain interested – natural chemicals are being released – pheromones, oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin, but when those wear off (and they will), we have to use our mind and the skills we have learned involving how to communicate nonviolently to express our needs, how to foster a secure attachment, and many other skills all of us can learn, but will not just miraculously happen just because we have chemistry with someone.
4. Know the True Source of Where to Find the Emotional High of Being Whole
“The truth is, that incredible feeling of wholeness and aliveness is an emotional state of being that comes from deep within ourselves. That deep, blissful pure love we feel when we’re falling in love is simply a reminder of the love and joy we’re capable of experiencing. It reveals the love and passion that are already inside of us, waiting to be recognized and awakened, with or without the presence of a romantic partner.”
The myth of finding “the one” sets us up first to have expectations about life. And as we talk about often here on TSLL, expectations pull us away from the Present and limit our ability to see all the opportunities available to be savored and experienced; second, having expectations doesn’t leave room for us to evolve, discover, and realize all that life would like to show us about our capabilities, about the world, about being human.
Turecki reminds us that a healthy relationship is chosen. The one person you choose to be in a relationship with at any given time is a choice. A choice we each make, choosing to continue to foster, to grow, to understand and be loving, again and again and again, day after day, not just once.
Because instead of having an expectation, we live with intention and let go of the outcome. Our responsibility is to be wise enough to choose well, and then support a relationship that gives us the freedom to be fully ourselves, and for our partner to be fully themselves.
5. Understand the Skill of Love
“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.”
Turecki goes on to continue this list of what loving someone involves, but I think this first list is a great place to start. The wonderful news about knowing how to love is that it is something we have been doing all along if we are living a life of contentment. The skills of mindfulness and self-awareness lie at the foundation of cultivating inner peace and they also lie at the heart of being loving toward others we are building a healthy relationship with.
Yet again, intentionality comes into play, putting our ego in its place and taking responsibility for caring well for ourselves, healing, growing, and, yes, when we are truly content, it is in concert with being truly loving because we are already doing so throughout all aspects of our lives.
6. Understand the Importance of Choosing Wisely and That You do Have a Choice
While I deeply appreciate the many storylines and life insights as well as stereotypes broken by the writers of And Just Like That, when I heard SJP’s character Carrie utter “I was chosen” in response to the question as to why she married Big, I attributed this inclusion to the limited thinking AJLT writers wanted us to surpass and evolve away from as women, or anyone really. 🙂 Yes, he chose her, but was she choosing him, or did she feel she truly feel it was the best for her life well-being? We cannot forget the choice we have, as much as the other has their own choice to make.
The truth is, we each have a choice, and we need to choose wisely because even if we love someone, if their flaws, their needs and passions trample on our own or limit us from living fully, then it doesn’t mean they are not worthy of love or even a bad person, it just means we’re not a good fit to be in a romantic relationship. To understand that love comes in many shapes and forms, and that we are actually being loving by choosing what would be most nourishing for both people, is a reflection of a secure and wise individual.
“Not every story is a match” as Turecki writes. She goes on to share from her own relationship experience, something she does frequently throughout the book, “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.”
Loving someone and being loved by someone means we do not try to change each other into someone we/they are not.
7. Take your time and give away the pedestal
“Trust and emotional safety take time to build. We need a lot of experiences together, a lot of tough conversations, and time to test the level of respect and loyalty we have for each other.”
Put the pedestal away and refuse to neither be put up on one or put your loved one up on it. Resist the impatient need of “playing house” with someone who is, yes, still very much a stranger. Let the intensity and all of the hormones surging through you subside.
We can prevent a lot of unnecessary pain, heartache, and suffering by simply slowing down. The easiest and most enjoyable way I have found to do this is to fall in love with your own life. Once you enjoy how you live your life, your everydays, your weekends, your work, your travels alone and with friends and family, you aren’t trying to fill the gap where it is only our individual responsibility to nourish, not the person we are romantically entwined with.
By going slowly as we get to know someone, life happens, and we get to observe both them and ourselves, and how we feel – both about them and about ourselves when we are with them. Do we feel energized, free, full of possibility, or… You get the idea. This is often clouded and subjective when we begin a romantic relationship, so give yourself time and put a pause on any significant life-changing decisions. Your future peace of mind and well-being will thank you, whatever the outcome.
8. Where to Find the Safe Harbor that is a Healthy Relationship – with Ourselves and Others
“At the end of the day, a relationship should feel like a safe harbor to come home to.”
How we care for ourselves reflects to others how we respect ourselves. From self-care, to physical exercise, to knowing the importance of and welcoming regular play into daily life and to valuing rest.
“Whenever our need for someone’s love is stronger than our self-love, we will abandon ourselves in the pursuit of their attention and validation. We’ll try to win their love even if it’s the wrong love; truthfully, in these cases it usually is the wrong love.”
When we accept ourselves for who we are, knowing that we are enough, and that even though our evolution is ongoing, right now in this moment, we are enough, we are far less likely to seek out someone to show us the love we are no longer missing.
Turecki makes an important point by sharing that while we may have taken the time to heal ourselves before stepping back into a relationship, and this is a very wise thing to do, we may not be 100% healed in the sense that in order to heal we have to have opportunities to choose differently. You will be challenged once you begin dating, once you start becoming involved with someone. Don’t let the challenge cause doubt that you haven’t grown and deepened your necessary skills. You have grown, now you have to apply those skills. Always hold with you that so long as you truly love yourself, knowing you are worthy of real love, you do not have to accept less than that.
And so, I want to conclude with this very good news. The paradox of learning to truly love yourself is that when you learn how to do so, you will choose differently; you will choose emotionally available partners because you now have more awareness of what this shows up as in people you meet. Remember to show up as yourself in your everyday life and in your dating. Accept that not everyone will be comfortable with you as you are, but they will see and recognize someone being sincere. Be kind and loving as we always say paired with honoring your integrity and you will meet people for all types of relationships, not just romantic, that you click with.
And speaking of integrity, “be a warrior when it comes to your personal boundaries. Be brave!” Turecki reminds, This will help you both fall in love with your life as well as quickly ascertain emotionally available and secure individuals to consider beginning to be involved with in a relationship.
9. Choose Yourself
“You do not have to be completely healed to have a happy, secure relationship. Each one of us is a work in progress. But you do have to finally choose yourself—and this applies to everyone, whether you’re single, dating, or in a partnership.”
When we become resolute in choosing ourselves, we remember that we are the hero of our story. We stop looking for ‘our other half’, our prince or princess, whatever analogy you were conditioned into romanticizing as a child and then with good intentions carrying into adulthood. The story that will be your legacy requires that you choose yourself because nobody else can tell your story, and you can only do that if you embrace your true self, courageously becoming honest with yourself, working on healing while embracing all that life has to offer.
From taking responsibility of your finances, strengthening your peace of mind, nourishing your well-being and maintaining your good health, when you seize these reins, your self-trust deepens. When we have self-trust, something we talked about in episode #414, life, every single day, is something to wake up and look forward to living. An enthusiasm for savoring that you may have never experienced before begins when you choose yourself. Choosing yourself puts you on the road to thrive and to realize your full, amazing potential.
If revitalizing your romantic life was an intention you set for 2026, begin by choosing yourself, and maybe picking up Jillian Turecki’s book, and get about the business of opening up your life to all of its possibilities – love-matches with emotionally available people and all.
SIMILAR EPISODES YOU MIGHT ENJOY
episode #265: Let’s Talk Relationships (with Ourselves & Others): Before & During, Embracing Chance and Choice
Petit Plaisir
BBC Sounds’s Radio 3, Breakfast (classical music with Tom McKinney)
An insightful post. I agree wholeheartedly that we ‘choose’ to love a person and in doing so, we begin to ‘round the corners of each other’ (ie accept or work with our differences). None of us are perfect, so why should we expect another to be?
Shannon, this podcast was a wonderful reminder that all of one’s external relationships are founded on the “golden relationship”, which is the one we have with ourselves. We must love, cherish, nurture and be true friends with ourselves before any sort of healthy external relationship can occur. When we choose to love ourselves, imperfections and all, then choosing to love another, with their beautiful imperfections, becomes the pathway to a true partnership, platonic or otherwise. (You also brought to mind the wonderful Mary Oliver –never a bad thing–“Love yourself. Then forget it. Then love the world.”)
OK, now searching for ways to listen to Tom McKinney’s Breakfast show, just for the birdsong intro alone!!