#value the relationship

[virtu4l-di4ry]

yeah deancas is cool but you know what else is cool? they gave dean a best friend. dean who never stayed in a school long enough to bond with other boys. he never had inside jokes or slept over at his friend’s house. always an outsider, loner. john even suggested staying away from others in their line of work because no one survives. so they gave him a best friend who’s immortal and who lives with him. someone to have movie nights with and to laugh harder than he has in a while with.

[sk-lumen]

What a healthy, secure relationship looks like

He communicates consistently and clearly. Replies promptly, doesn't leave you on seen, checks up on you throughout the day/week according to his schedule and in agreement with your needs as well.

He pays attention to your needs and desires and quirks, and makes your life better using said details. Ie. buys your favorite kind of flowers, makes your favorite tea in the morning, remembers your food allergies when having dinner dates, etc.

Disagreements may still appear even in health relationships, and it's ok, as communication is essentual for a healthy dynamic. However, his approach to disagreements is a secure one: each will share their perspective, and if feelings were hurt or mistakes were made, he takes accountability for his side, and makes genuine apologies followed by reparations and direct actions (ie. "I'm sorry I did x, I didn't mean to hurt you. I will be/do y in the future", and then does as he promised).

Promises are kept. His actions are in alignment with his words, and he keeps his words. If he says he'll call you after work, he does. If he says he needs to cool off during an argument and will reopen the conversation in 1h, he does indeed return in 1h to continue the topic.

If you're anxious, he will reassure you and work through it. He doesn't run away or avoid the topic (as an avoidantly attached person would).

If you come forward communicating your needs, or sharing complaints or grievances, he will hear you out and actively seek a way to improve things. He won't freak out, or get angry or run away in response to you having needs or communicating your thoughts; these are normal relationship things you're entitled to, and a securely attached man knows this.

A man that is well-rounded, with a secure attachment style, will have a rich life of his own: hobbies, interests, circles of friends, activities, etc. He will enjoy having his independence and space, and will respect your need for your own. He is not co-dependent, nor gets in the way of you having your own life outside of him. He knows having individually rich lives is important for a healthy relationship. To expand on this, he encourages you to enjoy your selfcare time, your girl's night out, or whatever other activities nourish you.

[mauvefiles]

When a woman is consistently spoken to softly & treated gently, she becomes a new woman. You're helping her heal her nervous system, you're helping her heal generational trauma, you're allowing her feminine energy to flourish, you're helping her to remember who she is.

[mytardisisparked]

The reason Psych is the Important Show of All Time is because it said "friendship is the MOST important thing." Like, yes, the romances were good but the show spends even more time emphasizing and developing the friendships and that's why it rocks. Lassiter and Juliet love and support each other unconditionally without even the slightest whiff of romance and it is SO. REFRESHING. When Juliet almost dies, Lassie sacrifices his favorite gun to save her without any hesitation. He's the one there to hold her while she cries. She's his confidant. She leaves everything she knows behind so he can chase his dream of being chief without reprocussion. That's a deep, wholesome kind of platonic love. They also never had Shawn be jealous of how close Jules and Lassie are - instead, in the final episode, we see Shawn thanking Lassie for loving and supporting Juliet. We simply don't do that jealousy crap here. Lassie and Jules are best friends and that's an excellent thing. And then there's Shawn and Gus. Those characters are narratively and physically inseperable. The show makes it VERY clear that, without the other, neither one is complete. They balance each other and exacerbate each other's hijinks at the same time. They're closer than close and everyone around them just accepts it. It's just the way those two dumb boys are and no one is going to try to get between that. And then, of course, SO many friendships develop over the course of the show. Lassie and Shawn form a begrudging friendship eventually. Juliet and Karen end up bonding more than I think either expected. Friendship is the beating heart of this series and it's presented in a way that is unique and fun and I just don't see a lot of other shows that do it like Psych did.

[fizzierolli]

rewatching Ozzie's now is soooo fucking funny like they really were so bad at keeping this a secret 😭

[theambitiouswoman]

Types of relationships that look like love but are not:

Infatuation: This is an intense emotional or sexual attraction to someone that can give the illusion of love. However, infatuation is often based on idealized perceptions rather than a deep emotional connection.

Codependency: Codependent relationships involve one person excessively relying on another for emotional or physical needs. This dependency can mimic love, but it is rooted in the need for validation, control, or a sense of purpose.

Unrequited love: This refers to a situation where one person has romantic feelings for another, but those feelings are not reciprocated. It may involve one-sided affection, longing, or an obsession with someone who does not feel the same way.

Limerence: Limerence is an intense and obsessive form of attraction characterized by intrusive thoughts, longing for reciprocation, and an idealized image of the other person. It can feel like love, but it often lacks a genuine emotional connection.

Conditional love: In relationships based on conditional love, affection and care are only given when certain conditions or expectations are met. This type of relationship lacks unconditional acceptance and can be manipulative or controlling.

Trauma bond: A trauma bond forms when two individuals share intense emotional experiences, often negative or abusive. Despite the harmful dynamics, there may be a strong attachment due to the shared trauma, leading to a mistaken perception of love.

Transactional relationships: These relationships are based on mutual benefit or convenience rather than genuine emotional connection. Partners may stay together for financial security, social status, or other practical reasons, rather than genuine love and affection.

Manipulative relationships: Manipulative relationships involve one person exerting control and power over the other through emotional manipulation, coercion, or gaslighting. The manipulator may feign love and affection to gain control or exploit their partner's vulnerabilities.

Fantasy relationships: In fantasy relationships, one or both partners create an idealized version of the other person, often based on unrealistic expectations or fantasies. The relationship may lack a true emotional connection, as it is based on the person's fantasy rather than the reality of who their partner is.

One-sided relationships: These relationships are characterized by an imbalance of effort, care, or emotional investment. One person may consistently give more while the other takes without reciprocation. It can create an illusion of love, but it lacks equality and mutual respect.

Love addiction: Love addiction refers to a compulsive or obsessive pattern of seeking out relationships and being dependent on the euphoric feeling of being in love. It can lead to a cycle of unhealthy relationships, as the person seeks constant validation and excitement without addressing underlying emotional issues.

[francesderwent]

Taylor Swift really wrote an album with the thesis “a man who tells you he loves you and lives together with you in a committed relationship for six years but never ever proposes is essentially the same as a man who tells you he loves you to get you into bed and then ghosts you a couple weeks later”

[jcghz]

[oneworldnewsindia]

How big is your ego? We all live in a competitive world, where everyone is running behind their individual targets, to prove themselves better than others. Who actually are these others?  It’s none other than our own friends, folks and relatives. However, the fun fact here is that it’s mutual. While we are trying to surpass them (thanks to our materialistic life), they too are trying the same. This has always made me ask 2 specific questions to myself: All this for what and why?

All this fuss….for what?

Over a period of time, we all have gradually learned to seek happiness in the things around us: Cars, houses, clothing, jewelry, jobs and what not. Thanks to the programming we have done to our mind. And amongst all this, we have also gradually unlearned to be happy with the moments, people and emotions we created. The loss is ours, but the choice is ours too. Amid all this, we are rearing a generation who will be more competitive, egoistic and lack emotions in the near future.

Why all this fuss?

One thing for sure…we all want to be the winner of our game in our lives. No matter what, we want to win the game as that is the only means by which we can satisfy our EGO!!! You, I and every one of us thinks that peace will only come when things fall into place as per our will. How can this be possible?? Instead, things will fall into place once peace prevails in our life. And for that, we need to give up staying into a self-created world of ours & the desires which ultimately feed the ego of ours. If uncontrolled, we make our ego bigger than our emotions, relations and us!!

Is it that BAD??

If someone negates having an ego, that’s completely incorrect. Ego is a sense of self. The sense of “I. Ego is having a passion, a goal in life and the drive to achieve the same. Ego is present in the excitement when we achieve what we sought. And we all have it. Just named differently: self-esteem, self-confidence, self-respect etc. The important thing is how we use it in our favor and create a halo of positivity around us. This halo helps us to identify our true needs from life, the emotions we need to cultivate and the hope we need to have to cherish the people and moments around us.

Why is it important to embrace our ego?

Till a certain level, ego is important to us, as it develops the drive within us to go for the ultimate achievement-Peace and contentment. It is important for us to embrace our ego, for introspection and to attain the fact of the core self. This process of self-discovery is known as self-realization, as the fact is that we are the path to our own development of wisdom, soul, and growth. Ego is a friend if you learn to use it in the correct way.

It’s the spark to our creativity, and fire to the soul and fuels dreams. Ego helps us to cherish the bonding we develop in the journey of life and hold the relations we value by being humble and kind. A person with a diminished ego is nothing more than a person living without any objective in life. Low self-esteem makes a person nothing more than a wandering soul without a purpose.

Becoming slaves to self can be dangerous

However, if uncontrolled, we are nothing more than the slaves to the self. It devastates the spirituality every human has within him/her, destroys the rationale and compassion we should have towards others and culminates the understanding about the surroundings and others.

It makes us believe in the world we create around us, which operates on our terms and conditions. A mirage we create around us, to satisfy our ego, our desires and our sense of security. We stop taking “No” to our solutions and ideas and start negating the logical understandings of others if it doesn’t match with ours. We start thinking that failure is not for us. And ultimately, we stop LISTENING to others, and LISTENING to our soul. And amongst all this, we become judgmental and start comparing the success we achieved to those of others.

Introspecting is important

Probably, to avoid all this, we should take some time and introspect. It’s good to ask questions to self, whenever we feel that we are going on a different path. This is a part of self-realization activity we can do for ourselves, to keep our ego under control. Here are a few questions that you need to ask yourself to keep your ego in check.

1. How many people will walk with me in the time of need & Uncertainty?

2. What kind of emotions currently I am having within me?

3.Has failure deterred me from trying again?

4. Is it material or the emotions: which is important for me?

5. A friend got a promotion, was I happy with this news?

6.Can I go beyond my way to help out someone?

7.How frequently I took No as an answer to my ideas, in a positive way?

8. Am I a good listener? Does my listening help others?

9. How frequently do I adjust with the ideas of friends and relatives, to retain them in my life?

10. Do I give up easily on people and relations, considering that I will meet new people in life ahead?

There may be many more questions which may help us in introspecting ourselves. The above are only a few.

Wrapping up- “Value the relationship with self and others, and the emotions we inculcate in life, and not the things we attain, because it’s the people, which keep us going and not the things.”

[northnodal]

i appreciate people who are selective with their social surroundings. it shows they’re not afraid to sacrifice quantity for quality. they’re intentional with who they want around, and better yet, can appreciate who they have around. if you know who you are, you know you’re not for everybody—so don’t be for everybody. be picky with who you give your valuable energy to.

[demigods-posts]

me whenever i see people write off annabeth as an annoying and controlling and crazily jealous girlfriend with anger issues. understanding that the foundation of the rhetoric is based off of annabeth's behavior toward percy and rachel is tbotl and tlo. except annabeth's behavior in those books is soley due to the surplus amount of traumatic experiences she's had. ranging from her parents neglecting to care for her well-being when spiders attacked her in the middle of the night as a seven-year-old. to watching everyone she's ever dared to care for die, abandon, or leave her for a better option. so it's much more likely than annabeth was expressing great mental and emotional distress during a period of her life where it was uncertain if the boy she loved would drop dead on his sixteenth birthday. on top of having to uphold a reputation as the best strategist at camp half-blood and devise a plan to fight in a war and save the world before she's a sophomore in high school. so the notion that annabeth is an abusive and toxic individual lacks the consideration that maybe she was just a child forced to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders at all times.

[sk-lumen]

If you're not treated right, your first response should not be "let me prove how valuable I actually am, they just don't see it yet". That mindset is toxic and you're going about it the wrong way. Instead, your response should be "they don't see my value, that's on them. Clearly, we don't resonate. I have nothing to prove. Time to replace them with something/someone who does". Your response should be walking away from anything that is not nourishing your spirit.

[whetstonefires]

Thinking about the parallels set up between Wei Wuxian and Mo Xuanyu, and how actually most of them are oddly specious.

The sketch of the backstory lines up, but on close examination they're mirror images.

Wei Wuxian wasn't kicked out of his sect, he left it. Wei Wuxian didn't hate the house he grew up in, he loved it, and getting the people there killed was the absolute last purpose for which his dark powers were ever intended.

Jiang Cheng was no Mo Ziyuan--his jealousy was a complicated thing all twisted up with love, and while he would lash out at Wei Wuxian both as a casual means of shit communication and more damagingly in moments of high tension, he had neither the desire nor the ability to bully him, and in general respected his boundaries almost too well.

When Wei Wuxian destroyed himself about Jiang Cheng, it was to give him cultivation, and protect his life and happiness. He would never have killed him.

Madam Yu was a domineering aunt-like figure, who hated Wei Wuxian for reasons of reputation, and because she had resented his dead mother, but she crucially did not have the power to actually disrupt his lifestyle to any significant extent.

Mo Xuanyu was shut up in a small room to rot; Wei Wuxian didn't even attend classes unless he wanted to. Mo Xuanyu was weak and disliked; Wei Wuxian was brilliant and popular.

Mo Xuanyu's uncle is a cipher of a figure, without character or agency, a nonentity who is resented to death apparently mostly for what he didn't do; in theory he is the master of the house, but he certainly never protected his wife and son's punching bag from them.

And this is what got me thinking along this track: because people keep interpreting Jiang Fengmian as this, as exactly like Mo Xuanyu's nameless uncle, a nonentity who lets his wife make all the decisions, and is contemptible therefore.

He shows up in fic characterized this way all the time, handled narratively as a gap rather than a person, an absence where there should have been a parent, and it's...totally inaccurate? The man only has a few scenes but the things that are most firmly established about him are:

he regularly goes out of his way to protect Wei Wuxian

he's extremely fond of Wei Wuxian

he cares a lot about ethical behavior

he's conflict-avoidant and gentle

he can and will overrule Yu Ziyuan when he's made up his mind, and there's nothing she can do about it

his communication skills are mediocre at best

he doesn't understand jiang cheng

he has a dumb sense of humor

Now almost none of this made it into cql besides point 4 and maybe 6, 5 is technically there but buried by the cinematic framing, so I totally get why the fandom on the whole struggles to characterize him well, and it's easier to write him off.

But it keeps bugging me to see him and Yu Ziyuan squashed into the mold of the Mo, because not only is that boring and reductive and kind-of-missing-the-point, it's like. Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng's characterization suffers a lot when you alter the environment and take away the influence exerted by their shared father figure.

Jiang Fengmian was Wei Wuxian's primary adult role model and it shows.

Jiang Cheng's relationship to his own sense of ethics is fraught because 'teaching him good ethics' was his dad's number one parenting goal, but they misunderstood each other so badly (partly because Yu Ziyuan kept loudly misinterpreting them to each other, which is so realistic I can't get over it, that's exactly how it works good lord) that Jiang Cheng has a direct association between the concept of 'doing the right thing even when it's hard' and a feeling of personal inadequacy.

The fact that Wei Wuxian got their dad-person's approval for being exactly himself and Jiang Cheng not only couldn't do that, he couldn't even get that same level of approval when he really pushed himself to rise to expectations, because Jiang Fengmian did not intend that warmth as a 'reward,' and so never realized he was withholding it, and therefore misunderstood Jiang Cheng's visible jealousy as a dangerous sense of personal entitlement that had to be carefully restrained, which reinforced his distrust of Jiang-Cheng-the-person and fed into a shitty loop where they were less and less able to relate to one another--that's fantastic. That's so human! I love it so much.

Both their failures are their own but at the same time it would never have gotten so bad if Yu Ziyuan hadn't been interjecting herself in there, in the middle of their relationship, fucking it up. That's family, baby.

I would ofc like if there was more fic engaging with the subtleties of all this because it's so good, mxtx did such elegant work here and it is not sufficiently appreciated. But it's the kind of thing that's hard to write good fic about; I am struggling with it myself.

So mostly I wish there was just more fic that didn't impose Mo Xuanyu's cliche angst backstory on Wei Wuxian, who has a whole different thing going on.

[wizardsimper]

I keep thinking about how almost all of Gale's scenes involve him holding the players hand in some way; pulling him out of the portal, holding the players hand to his chest when he reveals the truth about his orb, imagining holding his hand for his act1 romance scene, him caressing the players hand during the astral scene in act 2, and him holding the players hand in his act 3 astral boat scene.

If anything it shows just how much he values the players touch, something that maybe never happened much with Mystra (simple acts of intimacy, even as innocent as holding hands).

[wordsofwisdomandsoul]

[theambitiouswoman]

💗 A Healthy Relationship Should:

Boost your confidence

Encourage you to achieve your goals

Elevate your happiness

Bring you peace

Provide stability & security

Cultivate experiences

Nurture emotional and physical intimacy

Inspire you to take care of yourself

Enhance your life

💗 A Healthy Relationship Should Not:

Undermine your self esteem

Hinder your independence

Limit your growth

Create stress

Promote jealousy

Neglect your needs

Isolate you

Manipulate or guilt you

Be overly dependent

Ignore boundaries