Letters for Your Love | LQ024

Crystal Clark: 00:00:00

Welcome to our love space today. Today I have actually been inspired by something super cheesy. But as I'm recording this, it is national love note day, and so I apologize, but that by the time you'll actually be listening to this, the real day will have passed. But says totally okay, because, as always, we are chatting about here today works for every day of the year. So please indulge me. I know that there are a million of national whatever days right out there for like, anything you could possibly think of. But what I wanted to think about today on national love note day is the fact that it's supposed to be a reminder to encourage us to express ourselves to the people we love, to show them that love appreciation, but through written word. So whether that's supposed to be a romantic partner or a close friend or family member. It's supposed to be a reminder that it's important for us to just take that time, right? Take that moment to reflect on, you know, our relationships and express our feelings. And obviously, I'm all for that, right? I'm all for pausing and taking a moment to share how we are feeling with everyone. And that's really just, it's this is just like another little detail way to, you know, add some communication and affection right into our cake model. It's one of those detailed ways, right, being able to write a love note. I know that last episode we talked about bids for connection, which, you know, again, the way that we talked about how there are different types of bid for connection that should focus us into some details, right? Those would be the details of our relationship. So the big picture for last episode was that, you know, the we do these bids for connection and communication, and then the ones that show up in our relationships, those are the details of how our quirky love works with each other. If you haven't had a chance to listen, definitely go back and do it'll change your perspective on some of the ways that your partner tries to communicate with you, or maybe at this point in your thinking, tries to annoy you, but they're not actually annoying. So once your perspective has changed, we've also, I know, talked about a little mini written form of expressing your affection, where we talked about texting our partners to help create more excitement around our mega moments of love, or rather, our date nights. I think that was, oh goodness. Let me think I think that was all the way back in episode two, maybe Oh my goodness. I can't believe that so much time has passed. But I think that was called putting more cake into date night. So anyways, get you can also give that a listen if you haven't given that a listen, because that is a great one. So anyway, back to our love notes. So love notes, you know, could they be one of the details for your relationship where that's what we're going to dive into, right? So I know it's a little it's a little detail oriented today, but that's okay, because I'm going to give you the big picture pieces or ideas about the love notes and how it could be something to add into your relationship to get a little bit more cake, and then you can decide if it's a detail that is for you. Okay? So what I'm curious in this conversation is, let's start off by just thinking about where love notes or love letters are for you in your relationship. Are they a thing, right? Are they a cheesy, don't do ever, and your relationship grows, yak, ugh, I roll. Or are they like a yes, please, and even, you know, send it in the mail like real mail with a stamp and everything. What would you like, you know, is that? Or are you somewhere in the middle, right? Because we always have that spectrum. So as always, here your relationship is yours. I'm just inviting you to try some new things, right? Go outside your comfort zone. And this could even, actually, this could even be a two for for vulnerability, right? For practicing our vulnerability, trying out a love note, trying something that's new and feels weird and uncomfortable. There you go some some hidden vulnerability practice you if it's something that's cheesy, and I don't do in your relationship, and you kind of go and do it, but maybe do it in a way that fits your relationship more. And that person is like they're going kind of going outside their comfort zone. I know crystal tells me to receive that kindfully, right? Okay, then, great, fantastic. Let's give it a try. Okay, actually, it could even be a three for going outside your comfort zone, because, but this would be like a personal aspect, because when we practice vulnerability. And going outside our comfort zone, this also helps us grow our own personal self worth and self confidence. So how can we not try some of these new things? Right? If it's growing all these things so any anyhow, as I love to say, your relationship is yours. It has this quirks. It has its own way of being. So our love knows going to be a thing for you and your LOL, well, let's take a quick peek at you know, some benefits of putting things into writing, right, rather than saying them out loud to your love of life. So one of the benefits is that it can make you think about your own thoughts and feelings, that's right. It can give you that pause to be like, Hey, how do I actually feel about that person? Right? How do I actually feel about my partner? And this could be fun. You could have some fun realizations with this. You could even have some eye opening like, whoa. You know, now that I've taken a pause and thought about it, maybe I didn't even know that that's how I truly felt about them. Maybe I didn't even know that I appreciated that part of them. Maybe I didn't even know, you know, about the love and the appreciation and joy I had for them, right? You know you like them, you know you love them, but what exactly sparks that love? Maybe you haven't paused and thought about it in a little while. Maybe you know life has just been going by day after day after day, routine after routine after routine, and now you've taken a pause and you're like, Wow, do you know that is actually awesome and amazing, right? That's that kind of cheesy. Like, give yourself a moment to actually stop and smell the roses, right? So fun. Which makes me think so funny. So, you know, you can probably tell I'm a little bit of, you know, a cheesy kind of rom com girl, but only in certain ways. I don't love them all, but literally, me and my partner were walking around in the in Vancouver, because that's where we live nearby. And we were out there for probably a concert or something like that. And we're just having a little walk around during the day. And we went to the Rose Garden in Stanley Park. And if you haven't been there in in summertime. It is absolutely delightful. And I just popped into my head to be silly and be like, Hey, let's actually pause and stop and smell the roses. Like, let's smell them all. Because there's so many different colors. They all have different names. There's little adorable signs up that tell you what kind of roses there. And you know, some of them smell like nothing. Some of them smelled so gorgeous you could not believe. Some of them smelled like they were a scratch and sniff sticker that been scratched too much and totally lost. I smell maybe never had a smell, I don't know, but, you know, stop and smell the roses. Don't be embarrassed. It's fun. It's literally fun and figuratively. Okay, so, yeah, it so having to put something down in writing, it stops. It makes you pause. It makes you think about what this person is actually for you next. Putting something in writing, it lets you express things that you might feel too awkward or cringey or weird about to say out loud, looking your love of life in the face, being like, hey, you me a strong eye contact, and these are all the things I love about you. Maybe that is a little too awkward, a little bit too big of a step to take. Maybe that's not your style. Maybe, your style could be more in writing, and you just don't know it right? Okay? So it gives you that space to maybe to be a little bit awkward into the actually, the good thing with a love note is you can write it and leave it right. You can leave it somewhere where they're going to see it during the day, where you actually don't even have to be in the room or in the home or in the wherever in the vicinity, so that you know your awkwardness is just there and on the page. So that's another good reason to use writing, right? It lets you be clear about your love and your feelings to your lol. So again, we're not all good at sharing our ideas with our words, especially for those of us who feel maybe like a little math, or you know about talking about our own feelings, maybe we're not quite practiced or in touch with talking about our own feelings aloud. So we can do this in writing. We might be more flexible. We might be able to be more concise, have less like, you know, get less tongue tied, or, you

Crystal Clark: 00:09:44

know, get lost in our tangents. I think you can probably tell from my style of talking that I am the person who will get lost in a tangent or start to say an important thing and then, you know, veer off, that I have to give 100 million details to support this important thing. And then my. Point gets lost in whatnot. So having things like writing to make it concise and simple as still heartfelt and meaningful is so helpful. All right, writing is also and this is one of my favorite ones. Writing is also concrete. It is a tangible, right? When you write something in a note, it is a tangible item. It's a thing, right? It's a thing that we can hold and touch, and it doesn't just disappear into the air like words do. It is a thing that we can read or experience over and over again if we want, right? When people say something lovely, romantic to us, it sounds so great, and we get a wonderful warm feeling, but then it's bleeding, then it's gone. It's in the air, it's evaporated. And that's okay, please do keep saying things out loud to each other, but with something that is written, you can read it over and over again. I love that part of it. I mean, for me, my my LOL, my love of life. He's pretty flexible with me, like, if I'm like, Well, tell me how much you love me, or tell me your favorite thing about me. You know, he he will indulge me and He will fill me in. But you know, the the times he's texted me or left me like a little love note or like a little sticky or, you know, one time he even left me he saw my car parked somewhere, and he left a little note on the back of his business card and put it in my window. So adorable, but that's something I just have, you know, like in my little night table on my side door. And when I'm, you know, searching for jewelry or whatever, and I see it, I can feed it, and I can, you know, I can go bridge it in and like a swoon over it again, right? It lets me to enjoy it again, and they don't even need to know that I'm enjoying it again, right? So don't be like, Oh, I'm gonna have to hear about this. No, forever. No, your partner might not even tell you that they've read your love note in the last week or month, or that they read it all the time, right? They might not even say that to you, but there it is. That's something they get to enjoy, right? So those are the benefits of writing it down. It gets us to pause and connect to our thoughts and feelings, which is always great for personal reasons and for our relationship connections. It lets ask it out important feelings in a way that is clear and more comfortable for some of us. And again, it lasts forever. So, so writing is just fantastic. You don't have to do all the time, but, you know, we probably, we probably don't use it enough nowadays, I think, you know, and it's actually now that I pause and think about it. This is actually probably some of the reasons why people love to write a breakup letter, right? Love we love it right? Because it helps us get out of our feelings, our feelings about why we are done with that person in a very clear, concise and permanent way, right? There we are. Break up, letter, map. These are all the things I don't like about you. These are all the things that went horrible, and these are all the reasons we never, ever, ever, ever get back together, ever, right? You get to write that all down, and it feels so cathartic. What if it felt, you know, cathartic like a lovely release to write about how much we love someone. Are we funny creatures that we write, that we love, to write a breakup letter or to send a text about just about how you know you're so done with that person. But not a love note, not a this is how much I love, the way you smile at me text. Or this is, you know, the thing that I love, that you did today, or that, oh, I can't believe you supported me in this way. I appreciate you are just like your warm little bud next to mine was so fantastic this morning when I woke up. Why don't we do that, right? Why can't that be a lovely release to get to share those things? I think that would be magic if, if we did that more I need to do that more good. So now, now we've talked about why it might be magical, important, amazing, to write these things down. Great. Okay, so now I'm going to challenge you. I'm going to challenge everyone to try to let write a love note. It can be short, it can be long, it can be whatever you like, okay, but I'm challenging you to give it a try. Okay? So to encourage you to do this, I'm going to give you a few ideas of what you could write about, in case you're feeling totally lost, right? In case you're like, This is 100% out of my wheelhouse. Not even when we were first going out did I try anything so bold. Okay, so a popular one that to talk about in a little love note or love letter, maybe more in love letters, is how your love has evolved. And I'll read you this wonderful quote because, you know, I kind of went down a little rabbit hole when I was reading about national love note day. So here's a little quote from uh. A love letter from Napoleon to Josephine, and their love letters are just really like but despite whatever you think of them, personally as people, their connection and the way they connected and shared that with each other, beautiful. Okay, so Napoleon writes a few days ago, I thought I loved you, but since I last saw you, I feel I love you 1000 times more. Oh, wow. Can you imagine if someone wrote that to you, and they're not just like, oh, this is something nice to write, but that's, you know, they're expressing their true feeling. Oh, my goodness, feels amazing. Um, but, yeah, so, so, you know, this is maybe one of the cheesier ones. But you know this, this is like that I love you more every day. Like, I can't believe that. It could even be something depending on your sense of humor and your vibe with each other. It could be even be something like, I can't believe we're still in love, right, especially if you're in a really long term relationship. It's been 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. It's like, whoa. I can't believe that I loved you this much when I first saw you, or when we first got together, and that it has kept going, it's been resilient, and it's lasting, and it's here. Maybe we need to spice things up, Spark things up a little bit here or there, but it has, you know, I still have that love amazing like that is really amazing. Okay, you can tell the person how much you care about them. Again. This is an obvious one, but maybe we're not doing it very you know, all the time in life, right? Right? Maybe we're not telling them how much we care about them in our day to day. So let's do it. Put it in writing, make it tangible. They will love it. Okay? Tell them how they make you feel when you're together, right? For couples that have been together for a long time, this can be as simple as, like, I can totally be myself around you, or it's so comfortable to be with you, right? We can get a little about the word comfortable, right? Because we think comfortable and other words like exciting, fun, spicy, you know, whatever are exclusive, that those two things cannot exist together. But, and I think maybe that's because, like, that's what we see in movies, or that, you know, what we hear is, like, the downfall of relationships is that you get comfortable. I don't think that's the downfall. I think the downfall is not comfort and safety, relaxation, calmness, no, the downfall is complacency, right? Complacency and taking people for granted and not staying connected. Comfortable can be nice, right? Or is nice it's not. Can be nice. It's nice and it can be you can be comfortable and super sexy, spicy couple. You can be comfortable and adventurous, right? You can be comfortable and also leave your house. Okay? These are not exclusive things, right? So surprise, you can be them together. Don't think they're exclusive. However that person makes you feel when you're together. Share that, and I bet whatever word you choose, or whatever thoughts or feelings you choose to share here, because you have a connection, you guys will get it. You'll get it from each other. You'll be like, Oh my gosh, I can't believe you picked this word or use this thing, but it will make sense to you as a couple, right? Because you're filling in your own details. That's the magic of these weird little relationships that two humans get to participate in. It's amazing. Okay, tell them what you like about them. Whoa. Again. Sometimes I give you guys the simplest things, but we forget to do these simple things. Okay, so tell them what you like about them. Maybe you did this in the beginning and you haven't done it for the past few months. You haven't done it for the past few years. You haven't done it for the past few decades. Tell them what you like about them. And I know right now, for some of us, we're steering clear of making more of those comments or feedback about physical appearances and things like that. But I think when you're in a relationship that involves, like, a physical component of connection. You know, knowing that you have been with someone for two years or seven years or 20 years, or whatever, and they still like your butt,

Crystal Clark: 00:19:10

or they still like the way your skin smells or the way your smile melts their heart, right? I like to hear that, right? I like to know that my partner still thinks things are attractive and lovely about me, even if those things have changed, right, right? It can, you know, whatever you want to share the fact that you know my partner thinks I'm funny, actually, probably what he enjoys more is that I think he's funny, and laugh at all those jokes. But again, you know that's my relationship Quirk. If, if you don't like to share, if sharing physical details about each other is not in your relationship, then don't share them. If that's not what you enjoy them, then 100% share what you like about them that fits your relationship. For. You, but also, you know, especially if you've been in a long term relationship, and bodies change, and we age, and we go through different processes, and people have given birth and things like that, you probably still think that person is sexy and attractive. Let them know, right? Because sometimes what happens when we're in a long term relationship is actually the interesting way our brain works, is that a little bit we do become habituated to the way that person looks. But that's also actually helpful, because even the way we can be very critical and judgmental of our own bodies and our own selves, in our own whatever our own wrinkles and things like that. I bet the person that is the love of your life and that is living with you is probably not nearly as judgmental about your appearance as you are. And I bet because they're kind of habituated and they see these small changes over like, you know, little increments of time, right? The changes are like, happen slowly over a long period of time. That's how I wanted to say, that slowly, over a long period of time, that you are probably still just as beautiful and wonderful, because that's how they are used to seeing you and enjoying you. So don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to share those things. Okay, another one. Here we go. Tell them how they support you, or how they make life better for you, right? Life is better with our lols, right? Like we are little social creatures, and having a built in go to little social health buddy, right, a built in buddy that you know, we can connect with and enjoy and laugh with and share these things with, that makes our life better, that makes our life fuller. Let them know about it. Do they try your ideas even when they aren't interested, right? Do they think of dinner things? This is like such a personal one of mine. Do they think of dinner ideas and make them happen when you've had a long day, right? Like when I am done for the day. That's what tires out my brain. Moses, now I have to try to think of something to eat, even when I'm by myself trying to eat dinner, nevermind with like cooking for bonus kids and my partner or whatever. No, just even to feed my own little self, it can be hard. So so that would be something that I really appreciate and that makes my life better, and that I would share with my partner 100% you know, do they tell you you're doing a good job, or do they tell you you're going to make it through, or that you can do this hard thing, or that they're there for you doing this hard thing? You know, however there support you, however they make your life better? Let them know. Let them no, because that's another thing where we might think about it. We might probably even tell other people at work about, you know, or our friends, oh, it's so wonderful when they do this for us. Or they're the best because of blah blah. And sometimes we forget to actually tell the person that they're the best because of blah blah blah, right? So let's do it. Let's tell them all right, we're gonna also, lastly, this is my last one for you. Today. We're going to tell them about what you want to keep sharing with them. Yes, yes, this is, this is probably one of the most important. And I don't think lots of people do this. We can sometimes do this, you know, more like for people who have gone through the wedding and marriage process and doing vows to each other, I feel this is the time where this kind of thing gets expressed like, Oh, I'm we're going to spend the rest of our lives together doing this and this and this, and I promise to always do this with you and blah, with you and and but once that marriage process is over, once that wedding day is done, sometimes beyond that big day, right beyond that time, we can get a little lost in remembering that. Like, hey, I actually love sharing these things with you, and I want to share more of them. I don't want this to end so you know, like, are you excited to share more travel adventures with each other? Are you excited for more quiet nights on the deck with with a glass of wine or a glass of whatever, or a snack? Or maybe, maybe you're not food, put things in your mouth, person like I am, obviously with my example, then you want to just sit there and, you know, take in the sunset. You know, do you want to keep sharing more morning coffees together over breakfast or watching more kids soccer games together? Right? What going to more dance recitals? I don't know what you're doing. Uh, trying new hobbies together. Right? When your time comes to an end, I hate, and I hate bringing this, and it almost makes me a little emotional, okay, when your time comes to a close with the love of your life, however, that might end up like, you know, it's like when you see clips of like elderly people on Tiktok or whatever, and people are asking them like, What do you miss most about your partner? What what to miss most about being a window? And you know, they often talk about those little daily things, like, I miss walking into the kitchen and seeing that person every morning. I miss. You know, waking up beside them and hearing their morning snore, right? Maybe you've, maybe you've habituated to it, and you've fallen asleep with it all night. But you know, once you kind of wake up and you see that you hear their little snore, or their loud, horrible snore, or their whatever you know that you have, those are the things that you're going to miss so much, right? It's those little everyday things that we end up missing about that person when they're not there. So obviously, while they're still here, where they're still with us, what do you want to keep doing together? Let them know that's so important, right? If you haven't let them know since your wedding, if you haven't let them know since you first started dating, if you haven't let them know since your 10th anniversary. Now we're on year 17. Let them know what you want to keep doing together. Okay, so we have chatted about why writing can be such a special way to communicate our affection to our special person. And don't forget all of these. Actually, I'm just gonna put a little pin in that for a second. Don't forget that all of these ideas can be used with your besties, like I think I mentioned that first when I was describing what national love note day was. But don't forget that these can all be used with your besties. These can be used with your close family members, the family members you're really connected with right. These can be used with all of the people in your life that you love and that you share your life with. Right? Sharing affection out to all of these people is so important to our souls. So don't forget that you can do that. Don't forget that you can make that a part of your social health practice. I mean, I know I'm asking a lot, right? Add this to your add this to your romantic relationship, and add this to your friend, right? I get it, I understand. But if it occurs to you to do it, if you have a moment right here, and you're like, Yeah, you know what? I could text my bestie, do it. Put something in writing. There's your PSA on, spreading the affection out. So now we know why writing is special, and we have some ideas of what we can say. So again, I am challenging you to try it. Okay, maybe write something on a sticky note for kind of your noobs, your newbies, your beginners out there. Write something on a sticky note for your LOL, to find you don't even have to be there. It doesn't have to be awkward. Maybe, you're ready to level it up from there, and you're going to write, like, a little bit more of a note. Maybe it's going to be a few sentences, right? Maybe you're going to even get them a card that you think is funny or kindful or whatever, even just like the picture of it, it has a cat. You both like cats. Go for it. Maybe you're going to write your own add your own words into that card and give it to them, or, you know, crazy if you want to go all out, really all out, write on that full letter, that full romantic letter, mail it, put a stamp on it. Go for it. Do it okay. So challenge yourself to try out a love note and be sparked.