1. If someone wants to be with you, they will be with you.

2. If someone does not really want to be with you, they will test you. They will explore the depth of their feelings for you. They will try you on as a partner, without making it official. They will come up with excuses like “it’s just not the right time” when really, it’s that they just don’t feel the right way.

3. It is never the right time until it is the right person.

4. When it is the right person, you don’t think about things like “timing.” You only think about how you can reorient your life to this relationship, because nothing has seemed to matter more.

5. Romance is common. It’s best friendship on top of romance that is rare, but makes for a happy, lifelong partnership.

6. You don’t lose yourself in love unless you want to lose yourself in love. There’s an odd fear that people have of thinking they will have to be less themselves in order to accommodate for someone else being in their life, but that only tends to happen when there’s uncertainty or a desire to escape in the first place.

7. In fact, the most amazing thing about a good relationship is that it makes you more yourself than ever before. It makes you more confident, clear, driven, honest and self-assured than you can ever remember feeling.

8. It also makes you more sensitive. When your child self feels genuinely loved, their feelings come out… especially the ones you’ve been suppressing for a long time.

9. “Love is enough” is not only untrue advice, it’s bad advice. It should be replaced with: “Willingness is enough,” because love is great but doesn’t mean commitment, and compatibility is great but doesn’t mean love. It is the willingness to be in a relationship that holds you together for good.

10. Interestingly, that willingness doesn’t usually just sprout up for anyone. It’s usually only when you hit the perfect combination of compatibility and chemistry that it becomes inconceivable to ever part.

11. Love will not come when you think it should.

12. Love will not look the way you thought it would.

13. Love will feel different than you imagined it could.

14. Life has a funny way of removing the people who aren’t good for you, and handing you the ones that are – even if you disagree with that assessment at first. We don’t always know what’s best for us until we try.

15. Another person can’t save you, but when you feel completely loved for who you are and as you are, love can make you feel strong enough to save yourself.

16. Your perfect partner is an obvious thing. If you have to second guess it for too long, you already know the answer, but you’re afraid of what that answer would mean for your life.

17. The right partner will respect themselves enough to demand respect from you.

18. If you let yourself grow through those expectations, you’ll find that they will turn you into more – not less – of the person that you wanted to be all along.

19. You won’t always know the instant that you see someone that you’re meant to be with them for good. “Forever” is built on a million little “nows,” and that’s why to be in a good relationship, you have to value what it is rather than what you imagine it to be. You have to work on it today, rather than hoping it will be different tomorrow.

20. Soulmates aren’t found. Don’t listen to what anybody tells you. Soulmates are what happens when you give up on the idea of “finding your soulmate,” meet someone you think isn’t your soulmate, and get to work on trying to build the relationship of your dreams. As long as you sit around waiting for the perfect partner to find you, you’ll be waiting forever. Good relationships are consciously designed.