I’ll always remember June 2, 2014, as the day my life fell apart. My mother had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer and been given just three months to live. That morning, I suffered my third miscarriage. It was also the day my husband left me.
I hadn’t heard from him all day and when he finally texted me at 5pm to say he was staying with his parents, I knew something was wrong. When I called him, he told me our marriage was over. ‘We’re just on two different paths, Jillian,’ he said.
I recall sitting on a bench outside our house with my dog, shouting: ‘What the hell are you doing? I’m bleeding uncontrollably because I am no longer pregnant and you’re just going to leave?’ I probably looked like a madwoman.
It was the most devastating time of my life. For months, I felt like a shell of a person, filled with fear, hopelessness and despair. I leaned on my sisters, my friends, a therapist. And I showed up to teach my yoga classes. I survived.
For a long time, I blamed my husband for the breakdown of our marriage – and I’m not letting anyone off the hook for leaving a partner in those sorts of circumstances – but over time I came to realise I had played a role, too.
I studied what it takes to have a healthy and lasting relationship and what I learned surprised me. It has very little to do with luck, age or even being a good person. Instead, it has everything to do with the relationship we have with ourselves. Unless you have taken the time to reflect on yourself, a relationship doesn’t stand a chance.
My research led me to become a relationship coach and, at 52, I now have more than 20 years of experience. In that time, I’ve come to realise that there are nine hard truths everyone must face if they want to make a relationship work – something I didn’t do before getting married.
When I met my ex-husband, I thought I was ready for ‘the one’. I’d had several long-term relationships, good and not so good. I’d been in therapy and had taught yoga for nine years, so I felt I was self-aware and deeply attuned to both my mind and body.
Jillian Turecki says the key to a lasting marriage is self-reflection, otherwise you don’t stand a chance
But there was one thing I hadn’t dealt with: My relationship with my father, the noted psychiatrist Stanley Turecki. In 1985, when I was 11, he published a parenting bestseller called The Difficult Child – a book all about me.
It became one of the most influential books on child psychology. My father was even a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show, twice.
Being labelled ‘difficult’ so publicly affected me for a long time. In my marriage, I tried my hardest not to be difficult and so I wasn’t honest about my feelings. I was never truly vulnerable with my husband as I didn’t want to be an inconvenience. I never had really hard conversations with him about things like sex, money and how we were going to bring up any future children.
We got married when I was 38 and divorced when I was 40 and I now realise I spent those two years desperately trying to convince him that I was enough, rather than unapologetically being who I really was.
A lot of relationship advice focuses on how to communicate better but, as someone who has helped thousands of clients – and gone through the wringer myself – I now know that a good relationship always starts with our relationship with ourselves. So whether you’re single, embarking on a new romance or have been married for decades, here are the nine hard truths about love that will change your life.
Truth 1: You can’t always change him – but you can change yourself
When a relationship goes wrong, it’s human nature to blame someone else, but you are not a victim of your circumstances. You can change your love life. If you love your spouse and are going through a rough patch, ask yourself: What am I doing to contribute to this and what can I do differently to make things better? Even if it’s something small, such as having a calm conversation instead of being defensive.
The two most important decisions you’ll ever make in a relationship are: Who you choose to be with and who you choose to be. You can’t change your partner, but you can change yourself.
Truth 2: Don’t let the stories you tell run away with you
Your partner may have annoying habits, and they can strive to be a better partner, too. But if you love someone, you have to look for their positive intent
‘Stay in your head, and your relationship is dead’ is a useful maxim I tell my clients. Your relationship will suffer if you get stuck in your head and create stories that have little basis in reality.
Say your partner didn’t pick up the milk on their way home as they said they would. You start telling yourself, ‘They’re doing this because they’re lazy, they don’t care about me, they don’t love me.’ Pretty soon, you have a whole orchestra in your mind creating this fiction around your partner. Instead, you should take a deep breath and say, ‘I’m letting my mind run wild. I have to rein it in.’ If necessary, have a brief conversation. Be vulnerable with him by saying, ‘I felt let down today. Can we talk about it?’
Yes, your partner may have annoying habits, and they can strive to be a better partner, too. But if you love someone, you have to look for their positive intent.
Truth 3: Lust is not love
Lust makes us feel alive. If you’ve been feeling a bit numb inside – maybe work isn’t going well or you’re a bit bored in your relationship – lust can make every cell inside your body light up.
Soon you start to think, ‘If I lose this, then I have to go back to feeling dead inside’, and you become obsessed with the person who made you feel this way. In reality, you’re obsessed with that feeling and are equating it with love. It isn’t. It’s just someone reminding you that you have a beating pulse.
For a relationship to thrive, we have to understand that love isn’t just a feeling – we have to do love. That means giving your partner attention when you’re tired. That means bringing them coffee in bed every morning. Rituals keep love alive and makes love a verb rather than just a feeling.
Truth 4: Your partner will reflect what you believe you deserve
Loving yourself is very hard to do. I think we find it hard because we believe it means we have to love every part of ourselves when really it means accepting yourself in spite of your flaws. It’s about the way you talk to yourself. Don’t call yourself an idiot if you do something wrong. Equally, it means challenging yourself to grow and be a better person and partner.
How are you ever going to hold yourself in high regard if you’re not living up to your potential? Pursue your dreams and start the project that you’ve been procrastinating on. Ultimately, your partner will reflect what you believe you deserve.
Truth 5: Speak up and tell him the truth
In my relationship with my husband, I often withheld how I really felt. I’d be upset about something but I wanted to keep the peace so I’d pretend that everything was fine.
Not speaking up and saying how you feel only leads to resentment and misery. If something is bothering you, tell your partner. A quick, ‘Hey, I was really upset the other day. Can we just talk about it?’ or, ‘I’m having a hard day. I could really use a little extra love’, will suffice.
For a relationship to thrive, we have to understand that love isn’t just a feeling – we have to do love
And it’s not just emotional feelings which we push down. Even though we talk about sex more frankly nowadays, most women still don’t say what they really want in the bedroom.
They want to please, or appear a certain way, or they don’t want to hurt their partner’s feelings. You can address the subject of sex gently with your partner, but you have to discuss it honestly.
Truth 6: Try to be your best self
It’s natural to get comfortable with your spouse but when we do, we often fall back into the emotional patterns we had long before we met them. Never treat your partner as though they will never leave you. We can’t be consistently moody, stressed out and uncommunicative and expect someone to love us anyway.
Of course, you’re not always going to be at your best – life is hard and you’re going to have difficult days – but the goal should be to try to bring your best self most of the time. Yes, you should be relaxed around your spouse, but not complacent.
Truth 7: You can’t make someone love you
The moment you start strategising to get someone to love you, you’ve lost. People don’t do it consciously, but they’ll start changing themselves to be ‘enough’. If your partner wants to leave, you have to let them go.
You might be able to convince them to stay temporarily, but then you’re only trading the fear of losing them for the pain of knowing that you had to convince them to stay. It’s far harder to recover from abandoning who you are than it is to recover from being abandoned by your partner.
Somewhere deep down, I knew that my husband was someone who would run away. After my previous miscarriages, he withdrew and became emotionally absent. I desperately tried to be ‘enough’ so that he would stay but letting him leave was one of the best decisions I ever made as it allowed me to heal.
Truth 8: No one is coming to save you
The expectation that the ‘right person’ will fix us runs deep. We’ve been influenced by one too many romantic comedies to believe that love saves the day. We expect that love will solve all our problems but, in reality, even the ‘right person’ doesn’t hold the power to make you happy. Your happiness is your own responsibility.
Similarly, it’s important to know you can’t save someone else. People often go for the broken bird thinking, ‘My love will transform them or their love for me will be the inspiration for them to change.’ Neither of these things are true. You can be a support, which goes a long way, but the other person has to save themselves.
Truth 9: Make peace with your parents
Throughout my childhood, my father suffered from undiagnosed bipolar disorder. His moods were highly unpredictable. He was narcissistic, passive-aggressive and abusive towards my mother. He also had a drinking and prescription drug problem. I was always afraid of him and angry at him and because of that, I avoided him like the plague. But the problem with constantly running away from something is that, at some point, it catches up with you.
When I was about 35, I hadn’t spoken to my father for 13 years. I realised I couldn’t run any more so I got in touch with him. It was a clumsy, bumpy road but my dad acknowledged his failure as a father and was remorseful. He died three years ago and, even though our relationship wasn’t as strong as I might have liked, I felt I had done the best I could.
It’s important to remember that your parents are two people who did the best they could. Being able to see them as human beings is part of growing up.
Making peace with your parents is important. If your anger or bitterness towards them is consuming you, it’s going to influence how you relate to others.
It Begins With You: The 9 Hard Truths About Love That Will Change Your Life by Jillian Turecki is out now (HarperOne, £18.99).
As told to Lina Das
