Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Best Self Magazine

    The New Relationship Blueprint: It’s About Finding Yourself

    by Nancy Levin Feb 15, 2018 7 minutes
    the New Relatiohsip Blueprint by Nancy Levin, couple holding hands photograph by Uros Jovicic
    Photograph by Uros Jovicic

    The new relationship blueprint isn’t about losing yourself, it’s about finding your best self!

    —

    “You complete me.”

    Tom Cruise was on my TV screen saying that line to Renee Zellweger in the movie Jerry Maguire, causing women the world over to swoon.

    But not me. “It’s more like you deplete me,” I mumbled to myself.

    Given my marriage — and divorce — depleting would actually be a very generous way to describe it, so it’s no wonder I reacted this way to such romantic schmaltz on TV.

    It took me years to stop thinking I needed a permission slip to be myself and do what I wanted.

    Years to discover that my life is my own and that I don’t owe anything to anyone else. Years to get free from believing that the only way to get love is to buy it, by bending over backwards with people-pleasing. Years to live life from my own inspiration, motivation, and agency — rather than in response or reaction to anyone or anything else.

    Is it any wonder, then, that I even found myself feeling nauseated sitting at a dear friend’s wedding? It was a wedding like at the end of every romantic movie, times about a

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from Best Self Magazine

    Best Self Magazine6 min read
    Navigating Grief with Ayurvedic Principles: A Q&A with Sweta Vikram
    Estimated reading time: 9 minutes — In this Q&A, Bill Miles, Co-Founder and Creative Director of Best Self Magazine, puts forth questions for Dr. Sweta Vikram, inspired by her new book, The Loss that Binds Us: 108 Tips on Coping with Grief and Loss.
    Best Self Magazine5 min read
    Balancing Act: What I Learned from Letting Go of a Lifetime of Accumulated Possessions
    Estimated reading time: 7 minutes — When my wife passed away in 2017, I needed to downsize from a house to an apartment. I was too overwhelmed by grief and the complications of life to think clearly about much of anything. So I filled three storage
    Best Self Magazine7 min read
    How I Left: Reflections on My Journey into Marriage…and Out
    Estimated reading time: 10 minutes — My grandmother was fourteen when a man in her Southern Italian village asked to marry her. He was twenty-eight, a stranger to Gramma. She said, No! But her mother told her, “Marry him. He’ll take you to America.”

    Related Books & Audiobooks