#108 | How to Love Intentionally ❤️
A collection of the best hidden gems, mental models, and frameworks from the world’s top thinkers; to help you become 1% better and live a happier life ❤️
Hello curious minds 🧠
Love is not about staging the perfect proposal or creating the perfect relationship. It’s about learning to navigate the imperfections that are intrinsic to ourselves, our partners, and life itself.
— 8 Rules of Love by Jay Shetty
The book 8 Rules of Love by Jay Shetty gives us eight simple rules to help us build love in a purposeful way.
These 8 rules are grouped into four stages of love:
Preparing for love: This is about learning to love yourself and understanding your past relationships.
Rule 1: Let yourself be alone
Rule 2: Don’t ignore your karma
Practicing love: This involves loving others while still loving ourselves, understanding what love is, growing with our partners, and managing our priorities and personal space in relationships.
Rule 3: Define love before you think it, feel it, or say it
Rule 4: Your partner is your guru
Rule 5: Purpose comes first
Protecting love: Here, we learn how to resolve conflicts to safeguard our relationships and how to handle breakups if they happen.
Rule 6: Win or lose together
Rule 7: You don’t break in a breakup
Perfecting love: This is about extending our love to everyone, making it limitless.
Rule 8: Love again and again
Just knowing these four stages of love is empowering because they show us how we can love more deeply. Each rule comes with exercises, which can help us apply these principles in our lives. While I won't dive into all the exercises here, it’s worth checking them out.
But there's one rule I want to explore further.
That's Rule 3, which covers the various stages of love and emphasises how important it is to grasp them.
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Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮 and I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.And so, with The Limitless Playbook newsletter, I will share with you 1 actionable idea from the world's top thinkers every Sunday 🎯
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🎭 Rule 3: Define love before you think it, feel it, or say it
How do we define love?
How do we know we love someone?
How do we know if they love us?!
Well, this rule introduces four phases of love that we all experience with people who matter to us:
Attraction
Dreams
Struggle and Growth
Trust
🎨 Phase 1: Attraction
This is when we feel a spark, an interest, an attraction.
You're curious. You want to learn more.
In this phase, we see people for how they look, but we don’t really understand what it’s like to be in a relationship with them yet.
To connect and understand them better, we need to gradually share more about ourselves. This means revealing our vulnerabilities over time. As we share our personalities, values, and goals, we start to understand the person and see if there’s a connection.
You don’t have to have the same personality; you just need to complement each other.
You don’t have to share the same values; you just need to respect them.
You don’t have to have the same goals; you just need to be okay with the differences being part of your life.
From attraction, we move towards dreams; dreams of what it would be like to build a life together.
🎨 Phase 2: Dreams
In this phase, we ground our dreams in reality by establishing rhythms and routines that would create a safe space to nurture the relationship.
These rhythms and routines help us get to know each other while figuring out how our partner works. We also learn to communicate our needs to our partner and set healthy boundaries.
So what are the best rhythms and routines?
The best ones are the ones that suit both of you. What works for others might not work for you, and that’s okay. This phase needs good communication and patience to discover what rhythms and routines are best for both people in the relationship.
🎨 Phase 3: Struggle and Growth
Conflict is bound to happen in any good relationship.
There will be things you and your partner don’t see eye-to-eye on, and in this phase, you will uncover these differences and decide if you want to work through them.
Love means valuing your partner enough to tackle these difficult areas.
During this phase, through many disagreements, you may wonder, “Is this the right person for me?”, in which there are three paths you might take:
You choose to end the relationship as you realise this person doesn’t match your priorities
You work together as a team to overcome the challenges. Through the experience, you discover both of you can grow together
You decide to stay together without changing anything, in which case you both suffer and don’t learn anything
Never go with path number 3 ☠️
🎨 Phase 4: Trust
If you choose path number 2, you'll grow together over time. You'll learn how each other operates. This growth and many successful conflict resolutions lead to trust.
Trust builds up gradually through actions, thoughts, and words.
The breadth and depth of trust for someone is a way to understand the love you have for each other. There are three aspects:
Physical trust — feeling safe and cared for when you're with them. They are attentive and present, and you feel comfortable around them
Mental trust — trusting their thoughts, ideas, and considerate nature. You trust the way they make decisions, even if you sometimes disagree with the final choice
Emotional trust — trusting their values and who they are as a person
📚 This week, I finished reading…
2 books in progress 🤓
Have interesting gems you want to share with me and others? Share it by replying to this email and I will include it in the next gift box :)
With love,
Ryan O. 🎮
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