In my experience, it can become easy to say “I love you” to a loved one without giving it a lot of thought. And when the other person says it first, we can feel it as an obligation to say it back. But if we love someone and if we want our words to really express that, I believe we would be better off taking a moment to think of a specific thing we are thankful for about that person and let them know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, when they do things for us, it would mean more to let them know we appreciate that they do things for us or that they think of us. We could even follow it with, “That’s one of the things I love about you.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But we don’t have to wait for the person we love to do something for us. They have probably been doing things all along that we benefit from. So at any time, we could think of an ongoing thing the person does for us and bring it up and let him or her know that we are thankful for them and for doing this thing, whatever it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe it could be, “I really appreciate that you always take care of buying the groceries. I know it’s a pain, but I’m so thankful that you do it.” Or it could be, “Thank you for your part in earning the money we live on.” In your world, there surely are a number of these things you could come up with. Find a way to let your loved one know that you don’t take those things for granted and you don’t take him or her for granted. Spend the time to make it clear that if you say “I love you” you really mean it. Make it clear that there are various things you love about the person; it’s not just an empty phrase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As we try to be more intentional and thoughtful about expressing our appreciation, we’ll bring more of the light of love into our relationship. And that is worth a lot to you and the other person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So let’s make the efforts to light up our relationships!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In my experience, it can become easy to say “I love you” to a loved one without giving it a lot of thought. And when the other person says it first, we can feel it as an obligation to say it back. But if we love someone and if we want our words to really […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[10,19,33,100,117,148,187],"class_list":["post-407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-human-relationshiips","tag-i-love-you","tag-appreciation","tag-caring","tag-intentional","tag-love","tag-relationship","tag-thoughtful"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lightwardbound.org\/Main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}