girlfriend – Rosie Culture

The Courage It Takes To End A Relationship

When break ups happen, I think the person who did the breaking up is often overlooked. The person who got broken up with must be so shattered, must need tons of support – but, no one stops to think about how hard it really is to break up with someone.

It takes a lot of courage to end something that has been so important to you. To cut ties with someone you loved, someone whose family has become your family, someone who knows everything about you. It takes courage to flip your life upside down because even though you’re not happy in the relationship, how do you know you’ll be happy outside the relationship?

And while it’s hard to get broken up with, it’s so hard to smash the heart of someone you care so deeply about. For a lot of people, it’s hard to be selfish and put yourself first and realize that the relationship isn’t making you happy anymore.

A lot of people would rather stay in a bad relationship forever than go through all that. They’d rather just settle than face the confrontation. I can’t blame them, especially if it’s just a fizzled relationship. Where there’s no reason to leave, but there’s also really no reason to stay.

I think it takes courage to end a relationship and start over. I admire the people who take this huge step because I know it could not have been an easy one for them. And I hope that everyone has enough self-awareness to get themselves out of something that’s making them unhappy.

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Relationships

Mid-relationship Crisis

A mid-life crisis is an emotional crisis of identity and self-confidence that can occur in early middle age. So I think that would make a mid-relationship crisis an emotional crisis of identity and self-confidence that can occur in early mid-relationship.

And shout out to whoever googled the term “mid-relationship crisis” and somehow got to my blog and inspired this blog idea.

I think it’s very easy to have an identity crisis in a relationship. Before I started dating my current boyfriend, I had been single for years and even living by myself. I had become very independent, which isn’t quite like me, but I enjoyed it. But then we started dating and mostly everything became about us.

It’s not a bad thing to invest your time and emotions in someone else and of course the beginning of a relationship will be so happy and sweet you won’t want to tear yourself away from it. But as the relationship progresses, you may begin to lose your independence. You may be giving up parts of yourself and you might not even notice. And these things are mostly because you allowed yourself to do it, not because your partner forced you to.

All of a sudden, you realize you barely see or talk to your friends anymore because your significant other kind of satisfies the role of a friend. And you stop making the gym and eating healthy a priority because it’s so fun to come home and chill on the couch with snacks and your boyfriend. You stop putting in a lot of effort towards how you look because you see the same people every day anyway, why does it matter?

They are little things that can build up and cause an identity crisis which can cause a mid-relationship crisis and make you think you need to call it quits for everything in your life to be better again. But that’s not always the case.

You can be independent in a relationship and even if you lose it for a little while, you can always get it back. Everyone at some point freaks out about their relationship whether it’s the commitment, longevity, fear of losing someone, etc. Assess your own happiness and decide whether this crisis really needs drastic measures or just a step back into your old comfort zone.

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Relationships

I Don’t Believe In Soulmates

My high school boyfriend and I once laid in the grass on a baseball field at night looking up at the stars and he told me I was his soulmate…..gag.

I don’t believe in there being only one person out there for you. That there is one person that your soul is destined for and you better find them or you’re just screwed.

I am very happy in the relationship I’m in, but if for some reason we broke up, I’d be able to move on. I could get someone to date me – but they might not necessarily be right for me.

Because what are the chances that my soulmate was waiting for me right here in New Jersey where I’ve been here all along? That out of allllll the people in the world, your soulmate was just right in front of you at your gym, your college, your high school. There are so many people in the world, so many people that could be a good potential match for you.

But if you find someone you like, who you have common interests with, who treats you right and is in the right place at the right time – you can make them your soulmate. The gods didn’t put you together, there is no invisible string in the universe that attaches you. We make it work with the people that work. Timing, effort, and compatibility are extremely important when it comes to the person you’re going to spend your life with. It’s not fate, you just met someone who you enjoy spending time with and you fought to stay with them.

I don’t believe in soulmates, but I believe in love. I believe that if it’s meant to be, it will be and if it doesn’t work out, there’s probably a good reason for it. Do you believe in soulmates?

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Relationships

What It Really Means To Love Someone

I will first start out by saying, everyone loves differently. So I can’t speak for everyone, but I can try to speak generically.

Loving someone doesn’t mean saying “I love you” every morning, evening, and night. It doesn’t mean spending all your free time together and thinking about them every minute of the day. It doesn’t mean falling asleep in each other’s arms or getting them the most extravagant gift for your anniversary.

If some of those things apply to you, that’s all nice and good.

But loving someone means not being that grossed out by all their gross habits. It means thanking them for going the extra mile for you when you’re tired after a long day at work. It means thinking of them a few times a day and being able to go a few days without them, but being so happy when they finally come home. It’s about sacrificing time in your day to pick up the groceries so they don’t have to or walking the dog in the morning so they can sleep a little longer.

Loving someone is about constant care, work, effort, and appreciation. It’s not about getting the perfect photo for Instagram and explaining to everyone why you both love each other SO much. While everyone loves each other differently, loving someone rarely means the things you can see from the outside. It’s everything inside that goes unnoticed by everyone except you two.

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The Hookup On...

Posts You May Have Missed

Been busy this summer? Me too! Check out some of my favorite posts you may have missed along the way and feel free to drop your newest blog post in the comments so I can take a read! 🙂

Thanks for reading!

xoxo

Rosie

Relationships

The Pressure Of Long Term Relationships

My first serious relationship was 4 years long and when I say serious, I took it very seriously. I pictured marriage and kids. Planned where we’d live, where I’d go to college, and how our lives would be.

At that point in my life, I would frequently say “why bother being in a relationship with someone if you don’t think you’ll get married?” And that was at age 18 ish.

But I can now tell you I was wrong. Because relationships are learning experiences, sometimes it takes 2 seconds to know you don’t like someone and sometimes it takes 2 years. Why should we stop ourselves from diving into love just because we don’t know how serious it will be, how long it will last, or if we’ll get married?

Long term relationships can really apply that pressure especially when you’re in your mid-late twenties where everyone is starting to get engaged and married. It makes you think that the longer the relationship goes on, the harder a break up could be. Just because you’ve been together for someone for three years, does that mean you’ll marry them?

And if you don’t end up marrying them, did you waste your own time or theirs? Is it unfair to be in a relationship if you’re not sure you see marriage down the line?

As always, I preach communication with your partner because it’s honestly something they should know so they can decide for themselves the risks they are taking. Obviously every relationship doesn’t end in marriage, the one I thought that would ended in lots of tiny pieces set on fire. So you can’t base anything off of if you’ll be spending the rest of your life together, you just have to enjoy the time you’re spending together now.

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Relationships

Moving In Together – 6 Months In

After about a year and a half of dating, my boyfriend and I moved in together and I wrote about my first impressions here.

Leading up to it, I wasn’t nervous at all. I was excited to be in one place, no more traveling back and forth to see each other and leading separate lives. Everything would be more convenient and it just felt like the next step. But the day we moved in, I freaked. The weight of all that could go wrong fell on me.

We’ve now been living together for six months and a lot has happened. We got a dog, we moved past the newness of living together, we’ve settled. We’ve had friends over, we’ve stayed in, we’ve fought, we’ve enjoyed our time together, and we’ve learned to give each other space.

It all really just happens naturally if you’re not forcing it. Nothing in life is rainbows and butterflies. You’re going to load the dishwasher wrong and he’s going to throw your dry clean only pants in the dryer and the dog is going to chew up all of your socks. Though social media doesn’t quite show those things, that’s just the way life is.

It’s basically nothing like the photo I used for this blog post. It’s not perfect, but that’s okay.

Six months in and we feel very comfortable in our little apartment together with our little family. It feels right for right now, but does have me thinking about the future a lot. Being together is great, but life has other factors and questions to consider. Do we want to live here forever? No, but when can we move? Are we on the right path for our careers? Can we follow those paths together? When’s the time to make next steps? Do we have to get engaged soon? Married? AH!

Everything is moving slow right now and I kind of just want it to speed up. But that’s no way to live and I’m way too uncertain about most of life’s decisions lately to be able to hop skip and jump to the future. All I can do is try to live in the moment and know that the here and now in our relationships and our little home is great.

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