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  • Best Self Magazine

    The New Relationship Blueprint: It’s About Finding Yourself

    by Nancy Levin Feb 15, 2018 7 minutes
    the New Relatiohsip Blueprint by Nancy Levin, couple holding hands photograph by Uros Jovicic
    Photograph by Uros Jovicic

    The new relationship blueprint isn’t about losing yourself, it’s about finding your best self!

    —

    “You complete me.”

    Tom Cruise was on my TV screen saying that line to Renee Zellweger in the movie Jerry Maguire, causing women the world over to swoon.

    But not me. “It’s more like you deplete me,” I mumbled to myself.

    Given my marriage — and divorce — depleting would actually be a very generous way to describe it, so it’s no wonder I reacted this way to such romantic schmaltz on TV.

    It took me years to stop thinking I needed a permission slip to be myself and do what I wanted.

    Years to discover that my life is my own and that I don’t owe anything to anyone else. Years to get free from believing that the only way to get love is to buy it, by bending over backwards with people-pleasing. Years to live life from my own inspiration, motivation, and agency — rather than in response or reaction to anyone or anything else.

    Is it any wonder, then, that I even found myself feeling nauseated sitting at a dear friend’s wedding? It was a wedding like at the end of every romantic movie, times about a

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