Smart Women Never Allow Love To Fully Consume Them

If John Legend is singing about wanting “all of you,” shouldn’t you give it to him? No.
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By Liz-Pardue Schultz

No matter what any self-help guru claims, there’s no one-size-fits-all plan for dealing with your own independent emotions on any given subject, nor should you listen to anyone else’s advice on how, specifically, to cope with your own. The important thing is to actually learn how to coexist with what your heart wants while also honoring yourself and your needs.

It took me a long time to learn how to compartmentalize my feelings from my actions for the sake of my own health. I’m one of those people whose emotions fully engulf them. If something’s on my heart — good or bad — my entire energy is wrapped up in it.

Despite what society has to say about it, being an emotional person doesn’t inherently make me an idiot or make me somehow ‘less qualified’ to make decisions in a public forum. However, not having the self-awareness to deal with this character trait responsibly would be an act of irresponsible ignorance, especially when it comes to romance.

What I found easiest to forget when caught up in affairs of the heart is that who I am in a relationship is just a fraction of who I am as a person. My love for someone else is just a small part of my whole entire being, and no matter how dear my beloved is to me, any romance only deserves a limited amount of my personal energy.

To the romantically inclined, it seems cold and standoffish to preserve the majority of yourself independently of your relationship. After all, if John Legend is singing about wanting “all of you,” shouldn’t you give it to him?! The unpopular but healthiest answer is “no,” and this is for the benefit of both you and whomever you share yourself with.

See, when you let yourself be all-encompassingly consumed with love’s ebbs and flows, it not only dictates your moods and behaviors but it starts tearing at the edges of who you are as a beautiful, independent being and molding you into one-half of a separate energy.

The reason a healthy relationship works is because two functioning people bring their separate selves together to create a symbiotic energy; if you’re giving up your own identity for the sake of someone else, you’ll never have that.

The same goes for heartbreak as well. If you’re still so consumed with grief, anger, resentment, or pain that you’re not taking care of or respecting yourself, then you’ll have no personal base from which to heal and build fresh.

Smart women experience feelings that range from the most beautiful to the most hideous. Smart women fall hopelessly in love and make terrible mistakes based on what our hearts want. Smart women are vulnerable even when we are strong and sometimes lose our heads in times when emotions run high.

But smart women always, always check back in with ourselves and make sure we’re taken care of in any circumstance love throws our way.

This article originally appeared on YourTango.

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