Falling in love is easy. Staying in love is hard.

Falling in love has always come easily for me. A deep conversation on a rooftop in Brooklyn at sunset with someone I just met would have me pondering the rest of my life with them. Running into a former crush I hadn’t seen in years on the subway, I was sure I had encountered the beginning of our epic love story. Once, I dated someone for 3 weeks who slept with her hand on my belly as if she was cradling my womb, and it was enough to envision our future children.

I’d fall in love with someone for their poems or their confidence or their socialist worldview. It might sound trite to you, but these were the enchantments that drew me into another person’s aura and inspired me to desire a long-lasting connection.

Falling in love was like encountering magic in another person. And if I were lucky, they were drawn to the magic in me.

Some of these relationships were short stints, some would last years. But they always ended because one day the magic that had drawn us together was nowhere to be found. On occasion, it was a betrayal that killed it. One time, it was abuse. Other times, the magic just seemed to leave the room unexpectedly, and we’d fight with each other as if we were trying to summon its return, like a ritual to resurrect the dead.

Falling in love was easy. Staying in love was hard.

It’s kind of a cliché to say relationships take “hard work”. Personally, I always hated that phrasing. It makes it sound like love is a capitalist chore or a boring job or that you and your partner are each other’s bosses who must regularly fill out progress reports. “Work” sucks all the magic out of it.

When I fell in love with my current partner, 10 years ago, I wanted more than anything to make our magic last. But I had no idea how. Staying in love felt like a game of chance, and I hoped I had found a winner. Years into our relationship, we hit a particularly rough spot where I wasn’t sure we’d stay together. Out of pure desperation, we ended up in couples therapy. I guess this is where the “hard work” really began.

But what that experience taught me wasn’t that staying in love required hard work, but that it required healing. Because you have to confront the ways your partner triggers your deepest fear of being unlovable. You have to confront old resentments that have built up over the years of being together.

And yes, healing is hard, but rather than thinking of it as hard work, I prefer to think of it as hard magic.

Healing shows you what you couldn’t see before, such as the behaviors and perspectives that keep you trapped in conflict and suffering. Healing unearths the ghosts of your past, revealing how they have been pulling the strings and wreaking havoc on your relationships by projecting onto your partner. Healing expands your consciousness like a psychedelic potion, opening your heart up to new forms of communication, compassion, patience, and flexibility.

Did you know I started a YouTube Channel? Watch my first video essay: Your Breakup Is Your Awakening: here

After going through nearly a year of what felt like the dark night of the soul of our relationship, where we cried and yelled in therapy, had the most honest conversations we ever had outside of therapy, made drastic changes to how we talked to each other and the structure of our relationship, my partner looked at me one day when we were driving to the farmer’s market and said, I feel like we broke a spell and our relationship is new again.

I felt the same way.

If falling in love is easy magic, then healing is hard magic that keeps the flame of love alive.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think all partners who heal together stay together. But I do think healing gets you to the truth of the relationship. And sometimes that truth means going your separate ways. But I don’t think it’s possible to stay in love without both people being willing to heal themselves and heal together.

Staying in love means choosing magic every day- both the easy and hard kind. I think this is what boomers mean when they say things like keeping the spark alive.

So I want to share with you a list of 6 most profound lessons I’ve learned in my quest to stay in love. Maybe you are having conflicts in your relationship; maybe everything is going great, and this could be more lessons in prevention. Maybe you are single and wondering just how much inner work it takes to keep the flame of love burning bright. If this newsletter is anything, it’s a healing skill share. I don’t believe in gatekeeping! And perhaps this list will keep you out of couples therapy (and save you hundreds of dollars lol).

1. Cultivating independence keeps you close. One of the most surprising paradoxes of staying in love is that in order to feel connected, you need separation. You need to spend quality time apart. You need to know who you are outside of the relationship.

   My partner and I lived in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn during the pandemic lockdown. We went from having relatively independent lives to spending every moment together within the same 800 square feet. Then, in 2021, we moved to a new city where neither of us had a solid friend group. At the time, I was writing my book and feeling extremely isolated. I depended on my partner to meet my emotional and social needs. And even though we were spending so much time together, it felt like we were becoming more spiritually distant- bickering often, on our phones all the time, stuck in a co-dependent domestic routine that was not fun or sexy. Eventually, when we both found community, it was like the spark came back. I realized that when we were so entangled, I not only lost a sense of who I was outside the relationship, but also of who my partner was independent of me.

   The thing is, autonomy is attractive. And attraction makes you desire closeness. The attraction you felt toward your partner when you first met them had nothing to do with who they were to you. You saw them as their own person, and you loved it! You desired them, but you didn’t take them for granted. The energy of attraction requires a kind of separation, and ironically, it makes your time together feel so much more present and special. I have never felt so close to Khara, and I know a big part of that is knowing that I don’t need them for everything and vice versa. When we hang out now, we don’t take it for granted. We plan fun things to do together or exciting meals to cook. We feel inspired to be physically intimate because hanging out together feels renewed and novel. We don’t have to be the same old versions of ourselves together. We can still surprise one another. It’s hot to be independent! So now I understand that prioritizing my friendships and hobbies is not only good for me but also good for our relationship. It’s a win/win.

   So whether you are at the beginning of a relationship or 5 years in, prioritize your interests, curiosities, and friendships outside your coupledom. This is soooooo important!

2. You can’t really trust someone without believing you deserve their love. Ugh, this one is so huge. It’s going to be hard to explain clearly, but I will do my best. So you know how many of us have a fear that we are unlovable? Because we have been through hurtful things that put a story in our heads that we weren’t deserving of love and care? Well, even though I knew on an intellectual level I was lovable, and that my wounding created insecurities that weren’t necessarily real, I didn’t realize there was a part of me that still didn’t believe it. And it created distrust in my partnership. But the thing was, I thought I did trust my partner because I didn’t think Khara would betray me in a big way, like cheat on me. I didn’t realize that distrust also manifests