Photography by: Sarah Warden Photography

I feel like I’ve been learning a lot about myself lately, every corner I turn I’m faced with either a reality that  should have been obvious or something I had never even considered about myself. These revelations have been both good things and bad things and a lot of things that don’t really categorize as either, but one thing that has proven true is most of these revelations come in relation to Chris.

He’s marrying me, so obviously he pays a lot of attention to me, in some ways he pays more attention to me than I pay to myself. He catches small mood changes that hardly register in my mind. He notices repeated habits that are so normal to me I don’t even realize I’m doing them. He speaks on them a lot, pointing them out or asking what’s wrong. It makes me realize how much of my everyday life and being I dismiss because they’re normal to me. That doesn’t make them any less a part of me though, in fact, maybe it makes them a bigger part of me than the intrusive acts or emotions. Maybe these small things, are the foundation on which my personality is laid.

Now, most of these things are neutral acts or positive acts, they aren’t things I feel the need to change, rather they just make me think, but that doesn’t mean that the act of loving someone doesn’t make you notice your flaws. Love may be blind, but it sure opens your eyes to yourself.

You see love makes you want to be a better person for the person you love, and in my case, it has made me critical on some aspects of myself. It’s not negative and I don’t mean it to sound that way. Seeing these flaws are a good thing, because it gives me the chance to approve upon myself, for both him and me. It’s room for growth, which we all desperately need no matter how good we already are.

A lot of these flaws I would have continued to happily over look if I was single, and it wouldn’t really be on purpose. It wouldn’t be because I didn’t want to improve myself, but rather because these flaws wouldn’t become so glaringly obvious had I not gotten this close to someone and seen how they effect them or how they effect me in relation to them.

So it’s true, loving someone does teach you a lot about yourself. It opens your eyes to things other people see and adore about you and it opens your eyes to those things you want to fix so you can be a better person, both for them and for yourself. It’s amazing how used to ourselves we grow and how much we learn to overlook. It’s also amazing about how little our flaws seem until it’s possible that they effect someone we love, in which case they seem to double.

Learning about ourselves is a positive experience, even when it comes to the negative parts. It give us room to grow and it exposes ourselves to our inner workings. Knowing yourself truly and faithfully is perhaps one of the most beautiful gifts our lives bring… second to love, so it’s no wonder these two feed off each other.