Love, Care, Trust & Respect

By Natalie Lue

‘Love, care, trust and respect are the cornerstones of every loving relationship.’

In the quest to love and be loved, it can feel as if you’ve tried it every which way and yet, nothing is ever enough, leaving you wondering, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ or lamenting your emotional baggage. How can you ‘get’ love, care, trust and respect when you don’t know what it is or you don’t believe that you can or will receive it? Love, Care, Trust & Respect is a guide to the vital ingredients of loving relationships. There are many so-called rules and Natalie Lue, author of the popular self-help blog, Baggage Reclaim, explains why these don’t work, instead offering universal principles that apply in every mutually fulfilling loving relationship.

Discover:
* The five landmarks of healthy relationships
* The four essential qualities for a loving partner
* The key relationship blocks, why they cause pain, fear and guilt, and how to dissolve them
* The purpose of your relationships and how to recognise and practise love, care, trust and respect.

Never settle for crumbs again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Natalie Lue
• Release date: Jan 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781540371669

Natalie Lue

Natalie Lue is a writer, speaker, podcaster, artist, and founder of one of the longest running self-help blogs in the world, Baggage Reclaim and The Baggage Reclaim Sessions podcast. The British-born, Dublin, Ireland-raised author helps people understand how their emotional baggage is interfering with their ability to live their lives happily and authentically. Her advice has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, NPR, USA Today, and the BBC, among many others. Natalie lives in Caterham, Surrey, on the edge of south London with her husband, two daughters, and cockerpoo.

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Introduction

IT’S SO CONFUSING

Some people have had sex on the first date, only to never hear from the person again, while others have gone on to have a relationship and may even still be together. Some have waited several weeks/months or abstained until marriage and progressed to a loving relationship while, for others, the relationship fizzled out after sleeping together, or a multitude of problems were exposed. Some women (myself included) have called a guy after a first date and gone on to enjoy loving relationships and others got tumbleweeds. Some couples committed to the long haul within a few months and are still happily together and some decided after a few years and have broken up. There are lots of dos and don’ts about dating and relationships and they all pretty much come down to answering one question: ‘What should I say/do (or not say/do) in order to influence or even control that person into giving me the relationship I want?’ A rule that works in some situations doesn’t work in many others and so-called rules are ultimately there to stop us from having to think ‘too much’, but also to create guilt and anxiety when we misstep. Rules mask our lack of confidence, but they also hide our fear of vulnerability, intimacy and uncertainty.

THERE’S NOTHING ‘WRONG’ WITH YOU

Many people devote themselves to searching for the magic formula for relationships. They hunt for a blueprint that they can follow step by step and be assured of a successful outcome. They rely on rules, assuming that if they do X the other party will do Y and it will lead to Z (the desired outcome). As any person who has ever scratched their head in confusion, hurt and resentment over disappointment and rejection can attest to, this isn’t how life or relationships work. People break the so-called ‘rules’ all the time, possibly because they were never following them in the first place. When our relationships don't work out or we feel hungry, or even malnourished, despite us being in love or believing that this person ticks our boxes, we wonder, ‘What's wrong with me? Why am I never enough?’ or even, ‘It's not fair. I've done everything right!’ We retrace our steps, ruminating over the situation and, even if we continue to invest time trying to steer things our way, we eventually form the conclusion that it's us who is the problem. We compare ourselves to others and wonder why they’re in a relationship, especially if we think that they’re similar to us or that they’ve been too ‘naughty’ to have ‘earned’ love.

A RELATIONSHIP IN A BOX

Trusting our judgement and discerning what’s in alignment with our own values is tricky when we don’t know ourselves, or when we’re convinced that decent partners are in short supply and that being in a relationship trying to make them (or us) change to make it work is better than being single or trusting us to be in a relationship that’s not forced. We’re afraid of making the ‘wrong’ moves and that someone with the ‘right’ ones will snag this secret prince/princess. We fear missing out. We’d love a crystal ball to tell us whether it’s worth our time, energy, effort and emotion to invest. It’s like, ‘Can’t you just tell me when this is going to end?’, and wondering, ‘But what if I trust now and then it goes belly up in the year 2045?’ We want assurances that everything will be OK and that we won’t ever hurt or even struggle. We attribute our pain to us having failed to follow a rule in the past, so we feel perpetually guilty and afraid, especially because we still keep trying to figure out the rules to ‘get’ love. We lose faith and compassion, resigning ourselves to settling for far less than what we need or deserve in depleting relationships, writing off loving partners, or even writing ourselves off and avoiding relationships altogether to protect ourselves. We end up losing ourselves in our quest to gain someone else. It doesn’t have to be this way.

THE RULES DON’T WORK

If meeting a partner with whom you can co-create a mutually fulfilling loving relationship or nurturing and growing an existing relationship is high on your priorities, it’s time to throw out your internal rule book and get conscious about any external rules that you’re picking up and following. If you’ve carried the same baggage, beliefs and behaviours into each of your dating and relationship experiences and wound up with same person, different package or kept coming up against variations of the same problems and yet expected different results, the way that you see the problem of ‘getting’ a relationship and being a partner is the problem. The