When it comes to relationships, time is a currency - spend it wisely

A lot of the time love is defined by what we think it means when we watch box office rom/coms at home with a glass of wine, some salty tears and popcorn, but that’s all fiction.

I mean, I’m sure there are many people out there who will attempt to recreate singing Closing Time, flashmob style, at Grand Central station just to prove their love to you, but is that really all we want out of love?

The most spectacular, public gestures? Or is it being able to have someone to throw their arm around you, pass you the Kleenex box, and sit and listen to your whale-sobs about how your life isn’t going the way you thought it would?

Woah. Sorry. That was intense. Maybe it’s the time changes while I travel that’s wracking my brain into emotional havoc… But honestly, tell me I’m wrong?

The typical question asked when thinking about love is usually, “what do you look for in a partner?” But perhaps we should discard this.

Obviously there are things you look for, and want to have to team with your characteristics from another person’s, but maybe we should approach the question instead as: “In what ways do you want your potential partner to make you feel about yourself ?”

Life, in reality, is quite horrifying. It should not be looked on as shameful to need another person to walk through this journey with you. For even though you cannot take anyone or anything with you when you have to leave this beautiful earth, you can take yourself, and all the memories of the people you have spent time on.

If you’re only out there looking for someone to be with you to show you off publicly, bring you chocolates and flowers on Valentine’s Day, but then leave you when the sunshine washes away with the rain, perhaps you should consider reevaluating your perception about love, and how Hollywood might have brainwashed you a little too much.

Love is about balancing your needs with theirs; it’s about noticing their ticks that give away their feelings of distress, anxiety, or sadness, and being there for them to help them through it. Love is about supporting your partner unconditionally, and learning to have a whole lot of patience if you don’t have it already.

Love is about sticking around, not calling it quits when something traumatic happens; in which case, it’s about pulling together.

My parents have been married for nearly 20 years, and stuck together through their only daughter (me), going through cancer not once, but twice, and from that becoming a person with two physical disabilities, as well as some mental health issues.

If that’s not persistence and strength in love to stay together through such trauma, I don’t know what is.

Coming back, loosening your mind for a minute to run free with your own thoughts: what do you want out of this one and only shot at life? Even if you’re already in a relationship, married even, ask yourself.

Remember what I said in my last column? You are the only thing that is guaranteed in your life.

Now think about your partner (or the potential partner you’ve always dreamed up in your mind), does what you know about them match the kinds of things you want? I

f not, are you willing and wanting to spend time to know more about them through the terribly cliche of finding out their “hopes and dreams?”

Whatever time you spend either thinking about these things, or pursuing them, do so with enough surety that you’re spending your time well.

Time is a currency, and as Vance Joy has wisely sung: “where you spend your love, you spend your life.”