Last night I had a moment where I reacted to a situation in an immature, emotional manner. It wasn’t cute and it most definitely didn’t reflect me in a way that I would want others to emulate.

Mr. Man had to sit by and watch it. After a very nice evening together, he saw me get bratty, and snappy, and not very graceful. Mr. Man is a very calm, practical, sweet human. And me, being not so calm, I am so grateful for his steady and level headedness. He definitely settles me down in the best of ways. But in that moment of being so immature, I felt self inflicted shame and embarassment and I found that self-berating statement brewing inside of me…..

“I don’t deserve you. You deserve better.”

But guess what? Here it is:

Relationship Rule #1: From here on out, I will never say “I don’t deserve you.”

Because even in my weak moments, that’s not fair to him. He deserves me standing up for myself and being the girl he DOES deserve. He doesn’t need someone who belittles herself and depends on him to reassure her that she’s a good person (even though he’s the sweetest and I know he’d do that if I wanted it and he’d never call me those names I mentioned above, unless I needed to hear it). But he doesn’t need to build me up, and fact is, I want to choose to be the woman he deserves every day. I want to be the woman I deserve to be every day.

Fact of the matter is that I reacted that way and wanted to say that I didn’t deserve him, not because I’m a bad person, not because I’m less than, not because I actually don’t deserve him, but because I was tired. Simple as that.

So, relationship rule for myself created and made right then and there, because I know the moment I say that statement outloud, even in a moment of weakness, I will let myself start to believe it. It spreads it’s way into your psyche like wildfire. So it’s a boundary. And I tell you all this because I hope you will create boundaries for yourself that protect you from believing such things about yourself. I hope you will allow yourself to be and have what you deserve, and to love someone and see them well enough to know that they deserve too.