Whether you’re dating or in a long-term relationship, how do you develop that spark that makes you irresistible?

Hej! God eftermiddag! Jeg hedder Brian og jeg lære dansk.

“Hi, good afternoon. My name is Brian and I am learning Danish.”

One of my quarantine hobbies has been learning Danish (as you may have gathered). It’s been a long-time goal of mine and with more time + being stuck at home, now is finally the time that it’s happening!

As I’ve been doing that, I realized that there’s a connection between learning Danish and having a healthy fulfilling relationship. But don’t worry, you don’t have to learn Danish.

In this article, I’m going share the connections I’ve been making between hobbies (in my case, language learning) and relationships so that you can find your own way to apply those principles to your life to make yourself a better partner and to make your relationship more fun and fulfilling.

When lock down started, I thought, like many others, “Okay I gotta do something to pass the time since my whole life has become up-ended.”

As I’ve been doing learning Danish, it reminded me of a crucial component of every relationship. And that’s me (or that’s you).

Relationships are made up of people.

And so in order to like be in a relationship, you’ve gotta like, you gotta be a person and your partner has gotta be a person and then you come together, and you make this relationship together.

So often in relationships, there is this sort of like merging that happens and we lose ourselves in our partners. And there is like something really exciting — it can even be like erotic — about like getting to know another person and closing that distance between the two of us.

That’s what a relationship is, right? To see someone else and to be seen fully and to build a life together.

But what can happen is, you can lose sense of yourself or I can lose sense of myself and I’ve seen this over and over again, with have friends and clients where as they get like deeper and deeper into a relationship they begin to lose part of their identity and they become more of a unit.

This merging is really romanticized in our culture, but it ultimately leads to relationships that end up being unfulfilling.

A key component of any successful relationship is to continue cultivating yourself and things about yourself and personality and your own interests.

My partner, Peter, is really into running and I run with him sometimes. And that’s like a fun thing that we can do together and I get to share in his interests and he knows that I care about him and I support him and I definitely go to most of his races to cheer him on. So that is something that we do together sometimes, but by and large, like running is his thing that he does on his own time, that he’s self motivated around. He has his own group of like running buddies that he runs with and follows on Strava and like running is his thing.

And he also is a singer, he sings in a choir like that’s his thing.

I realized recently that “my thing” is mostly work and YouTube. And I wanted to have some more hobbies of my own. So as I’ve been learning Danish!

It’s been fun to like rediscover a sense of myself. And then it becomes this thing that I get to share with him sometimes. I can tell him about what I’m learning. Sometimes I say things to him in Danish. I’ve learned how to say ‘I like you a lot,’ and ‘you’re really cute’ in Danish. So I do that with him sometimes.

We continue to be interesting people that the other one wants to date and wants to be in a relationship with.

It’s not just like you find someone and then you lock them down. And then like, you stop wooing each other, you stop courting each other, you stop falling in love with each other.

So whether that’s learning a language or running or singing or something else altogether, I encourage you to have things that are just for you, that cultivate your own sense of identity, of self worth, of interest. Develop that. And that’s gonna be good for you whether you’re in relationship or you’re single, knowing yourself and having things about yourself that you like and enjoy. And being able to spend time alone by yourself is healthy no matter what your relationship status is.

If you are in a relationship now or in the future, it gives your partner something to fall in love with all over again.

Find something, maybe it’s something in your past that you’ve like let slide maybe it’s something you’ve always wanted to do, but you’ve never really given the time of day. And cultivate something just for yourself, and it doesn’t have to be something that you do with your partner. You don’t have to involve your partner. Do it just for you.

I would love to hear what that thing is for you. Let me know in the comments down below. If you’re doing something publicly, drop links so that that we can check it out. I would love to see it.