In her latest book It Begins With You: The 9 Hard Truths About Love That Will Change Your Life, Jillian Turecki — author, relationship coach, and host of the podcast, Jillian On Love — unpacks some of the essential skills and habits needed to maintain long-term and healthy relationships.
Turecki shares her own experience, marked by her husband's abandonment, that prompted her obsession with the essential ingredients that go into making a relationship work: “It was the absolute worst thing that could ever happen to me that this relationship failed… And so I became obsessed with this question of what makes a relationship work? And it was through my obsession over that question that I went on a journey to figure that out.”
Turecki says there are many things that can help, but the health of a relationship is determined by two things: “Who you choose, because I think selection is incredibly important, and then how you choose to show up.” In one of the chapters in the book, Turecki addresses why so many couples find themselves disillusioned with the state of their relationship: “Lust is not the same thing as love. And I think that so many of us are conditioned from literature [and] from movies to believe that.”
“A lot of people do not know how to transition out of that stage into the more committed stage of a relationship. That loving someone is a selfless act … The best relationships are formed by two people who really give selflessly to each other … It's about caring about the other person's needs as much as your own, that's love. The other stuff is not love. Lust takes, love gives. “
And when it comes to the pitfalls of modern dating. That dreaded rejection, the sickening thought of what might happen when someone doesn’t love you back, Turecki has this to say: “It’s a law of the land that you cannot convince someone to love you. It is absolutely impossible, so you have to let people walk away if that's what they want.”
Jillian Turecki, pictured here, says that “another thing behind good couples is they're not harping on the littlest things. Okay, you had a little disagreement, can you let it go and just move on with your day.” Photo courtesy of Lex Merico.