After three whole years of writing this blog, this chapter is coming to an end. As I sat down to write one final post, I realized I did not want to write another blog about conflict resolution, communication skills, or date night ideas, as important as they are. Instead, I wanted to write a love letter to relationships themselves and share some of what I have learned along the way.
For those of you who have been reading these blogs for years, I have never introduced myself. My name is Karly Grace, and I love Love. I began my journey with XY ConneXion right after graduating with my master’s degree, teaching relationship education classes and courses to couples. Over the years, I became a couples therapist and have had the privilege of helping train therapists and coaches on how to integrate XY Theory into their own offices. This blog also became something I regularly send my own couples to as a resource, and I hope it can continue to be that for couples long after I have written my last post.
I have spent the last several years teaching people something I wish all of us were taught much earlier in life: relationships are a skill.
Relationships are one of the few things in life that almost all of us deeply want, yet very few of us are ever taught how to do well. Instead, we learn what the generations before us learned and pass those lessons along to the next generation. That does not always mean what we learned was healthy. Sometimes we need somewhere else to learn those skills, whether it is reading a blog, taking a relationship education class, or going to couples therapy. More than anything, I wish couples would give themselves permission to ask for help long before their relationship is in tatters.
After years of teaching relationship education, working with couples, and writing about love in all of its forms, two themes have consistently emerged as the biggest predictors of relationship success: trust and effort.
Trust, to me, means trusting that this person’s got you. Whether it is a hard day, a bad argument, or a vulnerable share, this person’s got you. Trust is knowing that even when life gets messy, you are not navigating it alone.
Effort is about showing up. It does not mean being perfect or giving 100 percent all the time. It means choosing your person every day, even if you do not like them very much at the moment, or you are tired, stressed, or overwhelmed. It means doing the best you can to show them that they mean something to you.
If I could teach couples only one thing about love, it is that love looks like a million different things. Everyone has their own actions that make them feel loved, and rather than assuming, it is important to ask. We spend so much time comparing our relationships to timelines, social media posts, or the people around us that we forget every relationship is different.
Healthy relationships are not perfect. There is no “the one.” Relationship strength is what you put into it. People overcomplicate the details and the timeline when what matters most is whether two people are willing to continue showing up and growing together.
I have also learned that people tend to think relationships are about the big things when they are actually built in the smaller, beautiful moments. Relationships are built over tea before work, sitting next to one another on difficult days, holding hands after (or during) an argument, and remembering to ask how your partner’s day went. Those moments matter more than we often realize.
Perhaps one of the most beautiful lessons I have learned is that you get to learn to love the same person in a thousand different ways.
The longer you are with someone, the more versions of them that you get to meet. We often do not notice the change in the way that parents do not notice their children growing, but someone who sees them only occasionally notices they have suddenly shot up like a tree.
My partner and I have been together for ten years, and we have loved many different versions of one another. I have been a high school perfectionist, a nanny, a college student, a wedding planner, a graduate student, a school counselor, a relational program developer, and a couples therapist. I have been happy and sad and sick and grieving. I have dealt with mental illness and physical injury. Through it all, I had to learn to love each version of myself the way that my partner had to learn to love me, and vice versa.
Relationships are not static. You are going to change physically, emotionally, spiritually, and relationally throughout your life. A huge part of relationships is growing together and choosing to do so.
Meet your partner where they are at.
I think that is one of the greatest gifts we can give another person.
I also hope readers have taken away something else from these blogs: hope. In a world where only a small percentage of romantic relationships last a lifetime, love can feel daunting. But I have seen couples overcome some of life’s hardest challenges. I have seen them survive grief, conflict, life transitions, mental illness, parenting struggles, and seasons where they were not sure they would make it.
Even after seeing couples in their hardest moments or writing blogs on difficult topics, I have always known that couples can overcome hard things because I have seen them do it in my offices and classes.
What gives me hope for the future of relationships is that I am seeing more and more couples seeking support preventatively rather than waiting until problems feel insurmountable. I am seeing couples come in with communication and conflict resolution skills they learned from resources like this blog. I am seeing people become more curious about how to love one another well.
If there is one thing I hope you remember, it is this: healthy relationships are not found. They are built. They are built through trust, effort, resilience, and a willingness to keep learning how to love the person sitting across from you as they grow and change beside you.
You do not find “the one.” You become “the ones” by choosing each other over and over again.
After all these years writing about relationships, I have learned that love is possible in all places and in all kinds of ways. We just have to have enough hope and care to reach for it.