Radical Acceptance Might Be the Most Romantic Thing We Never Talk About

 

One of the greatest gifts we can give the people we love is permission to tell us the truth. I am not saying this because the truth is always comfortable, but because it is always real.

So many couples unknowingly begin protecting each other from discomfort. One partner holds back their feelings because they don't want the other to be upset. The other senses something is wrong but doesn't know what, but they never talk about it. Slowly, intimacy is replaced with guessing, assumptions, and resentment. s where radical acceptance changes everything.

Radical acceptance isn't saying, "Whatever happens is okay." It is also accepting that your emotions belong to you, and their emotions belong to them. You cannot control how your honesty hits someone else. They may be disappointed, they may feel frustrated with a boundary, and that isn't due to your honesty, as long as you were honest with kindness. As well, you cannot control when your vulnerability scares someone. What you can control is the core of speaking your truth without intent to harm.  

Healthy love isn't built by avoiding difficult emotions, and that is a hard truth to accept. Healthy love is built by trusting that your relationship is strong enough to hold them. When we spend our energy trying to manage another person's feelings, we slowly lose ourselves. We become editors of ourselves instead of partners. You never want to start asking  how to share your feelings with honesty, compassion and respect, because the other side of that coin becomes how do I keep them from getting upset. In that case either you are dealing with someone who has some underlying issues that need to be addressed, or you do. Sometimes it is both.  

Radical acceptance invites us to stop resisting reality. Reality is that sometimes you partner is going to feel hurt, and there will be times when you disagree, and space is not rejection just something that we need sometimes. None of these realities are the enemy, but avoiding them is. Love isn't measured by how little conflict exists, it is measured by how safely two people can tell the truth, repair after rupture, and choose one another again. Real intimacy begins the moment we stop trying to protect each other from being human.