Dear Joshua,

I am dating a man that I love very much. In fact, we had dated before, broken up, got back together, and things are better than they ever have been. However, nothing is ever good enough for me. I see all my friends being showered with gifts from their boyfriends, being taken out to nice places, and spoiled. I do not get treated this way.

I know these are not necessary in a relationship but I cannot stop the feeling that because he doesn’t do them it means he doesn’t really love me. I know this is driven by fear or a limiting belief but I don’t know how to move away from these beliefs. I want to be with him but I’m not sure if these feelings are trying to get me to move away from him. How can I be happy with him and believe that he does love me even if he doesn’t treat me this way? Does he in fact love me even if he doesn’t show it in those ways?

Michele

Dear Michele,

You are treated exactly the way you expect to be treated based on the vibration you are emitting, the beliefs you hold, the attitude you take, the desires you seek and thoughts you constantly think. If he treated you differently, you would think it was strange and unusual and you would feel uncomfortable. He is in your life because he is the exact representation of what your vibrational signal is emitting. If you want him to be different, you must simply change your own vibration. It is always you, it’s never, ever the other person.

You believe that if he loved you then he would be different than he is. However, this is a flawed premise. He is the way he is because you are the way you are. He is simply a representation of what you think you want and how you feel about yourself. Your friends have different relationships because they have a different set of beliefs, expectations, desires, and attitudes about relationships. That is all that’s happening here.

Without the comparison to others, you would feel more secure in your relationship. You would look for signs that he does love you rather than looking for some indication that he may not love you. If you were confident in yourself as being worthy of love, then you would only notice how much he really does love you. If you loved yourself truly, you would not even care whether he loved you or not, you would simply love him and that would be more than enough for you.

Is it more important to love or to be loved? You are loved more than you can ever imagine by more than you could count. Your love resides inside, it does not need to be verified by gestures that you don’t really want or need. You are a being of love and you really only want to express your love. Needing to feel loved by another is not necessary when you realize that you are the essence of love yourself. However, you don’t really understand that. You don’t realize that the only love that matters is the love you have for yourself. The only real love is the love of oneself. Until you learn to appreciate yourself and love yourself, you can’t expect others to show you signs that they love you. You would not be able to see it.

If your partner suddenly started expressing love with overt gestures, such as the type you see being offered to your friends, you wouldn’t see it as love. You might even be suspicious that something was wrong. Why suddenly is he acting like this? You would be skeptical. This is why you chose him in the first place. You knew he would not be so obvious. You knew he would express himself in more subtle ways. This is what you wanted because you knew you would feel uncomfortable with flashy and insincere expressions of romance.

We would say that there are many ways he shows his love for you and you can appreciate this as long as you understand that any other way would not be appropriate for your relationship. You cannot compare your relationship to those of your friends because you cannot know what is actually going on inside those relationships. If you knew the entirety of their relationships, you would not trade yours for any of theirs. You are a vibrational match to your relationship, but not to anyone else’s.

If you would like to see more signs of love from your partner, we suggest you look for things to appreciate. We would ask you to think more about yourself and find things to appreciate about you as well. You are a being of love and when you see this, you can express your love as well. There is nothing to fear. When you begin to love yourself more, you will begin to express your love more and you will receive more expressions of love. The way to change anything is to change yourself. Think differently about yourself rather than asking the other person to change. Create the change from the inside out and your world will respond. This is simply a basic law of the universe.

You are love. You are loved.

Joshua