Keeping love is much harder than creating it. Creating is always easier than keeping. Yes, starting a relationship can be hard, all of the feelings, learning that person, trying to combine your personalities and thoughts into a cohesive relationship, all of that is hard. But maintaining it over 5, 10, 30 years is even harder. The amount of effort and time needed to maintain it for long periods of time is often overlooked. I know a lot of newer witches will go straight towards love potions or spells to try and real their partner back in should things begin to wrong in the relationship but honestly, relationships are complicated and far transcend the abilities of magic.
We have a mindset, a belief if you will, that everything should just stay the same. “I loved how things were when we first met”, “Remember how we used to spend our time on the weekends?”, “Our first dates were so much more fun than they are now”. People want to recreate those feelings and times. They wish they were back in that time again. Life becomes about reliving old memories than building new memories. This can be a huge mistake in life because we become stuck in the nostalgia of the past, glued to how things used to be, when sometimes they weren’t even that great when they were happening, that we have deluded ourselves into recreating memories instead of creating new memories. Things can become stagnant and that is when we begin to think about spells and such to ‘get back what was lost’ so to speak.
Once we have completed school, college included, we have no real way to measure growth anymore, nor much reason found to do so. Up until that point there was growth in your life: exams, classes, graduation to the next level. Afterwards, you practically live the same life, year after year. If you don’t set new growth, new targets, new organic milestones, life becomes boring and immeasurable. That repetition becomes a hindrance on our happiness as our brains are always craving new stimuli. This is the same thing that happens after you have been dating for a long period of time, the same thing that happens after marriage, and the same thing that happens after you move in with someone. You lose that next organic milestone. And once you become compliant and used to the usual, when a change does happen, good or bad, it puts stress on a relationship.
It is important to expect a relationship to change, because we as people, will change, every one of us. And hope for it to change. And work to make it change. A lot of people consider their wedding day as the day that they found the one and are now going to be with that person forever. But in reality, it is a starting line, not a finish line. With a normal race, you know the course. With marriage or any relationship, you have no idea what you will encounter so there is a lot of learning and growth that NEEDS to take place in order to be successful.
Expect to be challenged, expect to fail, and expect to overcome those challenges. If you believe everything will be perfect, you are setting yourself up for a greater downfall vs. knowing that we are not perfect and our relationship is not perfect. When things go wrong, you will need to pivot and potentially change directions with where it is headed. Saying “From today onwards, everything is going to be perfect. You are going to do X, Y, and Z and I am going to do X, Y, and Z and everything will work out” is great. Only, that isn’t how relationships work. Relationships ARE work.
Many times, it feels as if we were made to believe that if you aren’t with someone you can’t feel love but that just is not true. One of the greatest forms of love, and the most foundational, is love for ourselves. Self-love. Love for our self comes from self-respect. Love starts with respect. Being alone well is an art form. Sadly, growing up we are told only other people can provide the love we are looking for and that is one of the biggest reasons so many of us feel lonely or jaded about love. When people don’t live up to our expectations, we feel let down. Learning to love yourself can help mitigate this and gain insight on what you both want and need. Learning to navigate your personal relationships will deepen them and create stronger, more lasting bonds. Spells are great and can enhance what you have created but only your own personal efforts will truly create love and keep it in your life.
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From our altar to yours, with love from the sea,
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