🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

1. 8 Rules of Love gives you the tools you need to love yourself, love others and how to experience love everyday of your life.

2. The book teaches you way to keep/grow love while you’re in a relationship.

3. You also learn the importance of still being your own person, with your own interests while being in a relationship and not relying on your partner for everything.

🎨 Impressions

The book overall did a great job of outlining how to maintain a loving and growing relationship. It also talks about the importance of knowing yourself and loving your own time before you jump into a relationship. It also breaks down the common mistakes and misconceptions people have about love and relationships in our society. I like that Jay used old teachings from the Vedas and explained them in layman’s terms to describe the four stages one goes through with love. They go into sequential order, so you must go through one door before moving onto the next.

How I Discovered It

I found out about it when Jay Shetty mentioned it on his podcast.

Who Should Read It?

Anyone would benefit from reading this book. If you’re in a relationship, recently broken up or alone, you will gain value from this book.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

💡 How my life / behaviour / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book.

• It made me realize that I’m not broken because my relationship ended. Instead, the future I envisioned with that person is now gone. I was a person before the relationship and I’m still a person after it.

• Every relationship teaches us something and it’s up to us to use that karma to guide us to our next stage in life. It’s up to you to learn the lessons of your past relationships to find out what you truly want.

• It’s important to realize that it’s OK to have different people to turn to when you have different needs. It’s OK if your partner isn’t all of it. You go to different friends to enjoy hobbies or pastimes and your partner for other things. That’s totally fine.

• You and your partner are each other’s gurus. They don’t have all the answers but the goal is to continually grow together and live out your purpose. If each person is living through their purpose, the relationship has the best chance of thriving and staying good.

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

• “It’s important to put out the version of yourself that you think someone would be attracted to, as opposed to the version of yourself that you think someone would be attracted to.”

• “When you’re a part of each other’s growth, you don’t grow apart from each other.”

• “Your purpose has to come first for you, and your partner’s purpose has to come first for them.”

• “We may feel empty, lost, broken, and hurt but the soul is unbreakable.”

📒 Summary + Notes

The four stages or Asharams we must go through for love are

• Brahmacharya - Preparing for Love

• Grhastha - Practicing Love

• Vanaprastha - Protecting Love

• Sannyasa - Perfecting Love

In each stage, we learn more about ourselves which allows us to feel love every day and give love out to everyone.

Brahmacharya stage

Love is not what you see in the movies or what we’ve been told when we’re children. We take those misconceptions into our relationships and we get worried or upset if the relationship isn’t flowing like it used to. We have to work out the problems with our partner. It’s important to work through the differences with someone rather than just looking for the similarities.

But the first way to experience love is to learn how to love yourself. You need to know that you are worthy of love and that you’re totally capable of experiencing things by yourself. You don’t need another person by your side to feel that. Sometimes experiencing events alone allows us to feel the emotions more deeply and reflect more. For example, if you’re going to the museum, you can reflect and think about the art more deeply by yourself rather than going with someone else or a group of friends. Challenge yourself to do things you wouldn’t normally do by yourself like going to a restaurant alone, going to the movies alone, or sporting events. When you go alone, write down the thoughts that come to your head. How did you feel when you did it, was it as scary as you thought? Would you do it again? This time alone helps build your confidence and when we have high confidence or unshakeable confidence going into a relationship, we won’t be swayed by what our partners say to us. This time also helps you solidify your values. You also have the chance to ask yourself, Do the activities I’m doing line up with the person that I want to be/ will this nourish my life or make me feel worse? We start to understand what we need before expecting it from someone else so that when we choose to get into a relationship, our partner isn’t solely responsible for our emotional well-being. We should understand ourselves, so we get that love from within.

Another important step in this time alone is to focus on understanding your samskaras or impressions from when we were growing up. These impressions help us understand our thought process with relationships, for example, if you grew up with your parents fighting all the time, you might go into relationships being more avoidant to remove yourself from conflict. But we can mitigate those impressions by understanding them and learning from them to avoid making the same mistakes again.

Also, this time helps you learn about potential gaps and gifts in how your parents raised you. If there is a gap in how you were raised you look to your partner to fill that, if there was a gift in how they raised you, you look to others to give you the same without thinking about it.

A potential gift would be your mom writing a note for you every time you went to school so you expect that level of effort from your partner. A potential gap would be not getting enough emotional support as a child.

Second Stage - Grhastha - Practicing Love

Once you’ve gotten comfortable with loving yourself and enjoying your company and feel like you’re ready to start dating and getting into a relationship, you’re entering the second stage Grhastha. This is all about helping you select the right partner to grow with.

Jay describes love in four phases: Attraction, Dreams, Struggle and Growth, and Trust

The attraction phase is when you see someone attractive and observe their looks. This is a baseline look but we don’t know anything about that person or what it would be like to date them. In order to get to the next step dreams we need to go on dates to understand their personality, values, and goals.

Jay calls it a three-date rule where you can peel back the onions and start to understand if this a person you would want to date long term. He called it three dates so you can see if you like their personality, respect their values and appreciate their dreams. These three dates can happen at any time and they don’t have to be sequential. But the goal for each date is to slowly peel back a layer of someone.

In the first date, you want to get an idea about their taste and preferences. So the basic dating questions about what they like, and don’t like.

Date two is about encouraging your date to share meaningful stories and details about their life.

Date three should happen when it feels natural to start sharing your ideas for the future.

During all these dates it’s important to remember that it shouldn’t feel like an interview, you both should be sharing and it should be a back-and-forth. It’s called Reciprocal Escalating Self Disclosure, which basically means the more our partner shares the more inclined we are to share and vice versa.

Once you start to like their personality, values, and goals you start to fantasize about a relationship with that person. You are now entering the dreams phase.

During the dreams phase, it’s important and healthy to set boundaries and expectations for each other. Boundaries can be as simple as how often you will see each other during the week, the time you spend alone, and how often you see their friends. How busy you typically are and when you will have actual time to call. By doing this you are laying everything out there and not having the other person assume you don’t have enough time for them and vice versa. It’s also important and it’s okay to turn to different people for your other hobbies or needs. Like going to them to enjoy certain music or play video games if your partner doesn’t like everything you do.

Struggle and Growth - Struggle will come with every relationship. There is never a rosy relationship and that’s fine. Conflict is good. And Jay says, “Love means that you value your partner enough to confront difficult areas.” Love will be challenging but by overcoming those challenges you can deepen and strengthen your love for someone and build a deep trust. You can accomplish this by having monthly check-ins with your partner. For example, asking what is and isn’t going well. What do we want to plan together for?

One of my favorite concepts Jay brings up during the growth phase is the idea that your partner is your guru. The idea is that you never stop learning and growing with your partner. A Guru compared to a master never judges or imposes their insecurities, timelines or goals on their partner. They let go of their ego and allow their partner to work at their own pace to achieve what they set out to achieve. It’s important to understand and know the goals your partner is trying to reach so you help support them along their journey.

During this time it’s also important to remember that you shouldn’t lose track of your purpose and that your partner isn’t your god. You are still writing your own story while you’re in this relationship together. Putting your purpose to the side and neglecting it will end up causing tension in the relationship. Because you will naturally blame the other person for stopping you from fulfilling your ultimate goal.

“Your purpose has to come first for you, and your partner’s purpose has to come first for them.”

Not knowing what this purpose is for you can cause you to feel empty or sad because we all want to live in a world where everyone is living the life they choose to live. But once you identified you can work with your partner on outlining the steps you need to take to achieve that and how they can help you in that process and vice versa.

“When you’re a part of each other’s growth, you don’t grow apart from each other.”

Phase Three Vanaprastha - Protecting Love

This phase is all about learning to manage conflict and learning to go through life after a breakup

The first thing to remember is that every couple has fights and conflicts. It’s normal and it shouldn’t be seen as this crazy thing. Resolving the conflict can help us become closer and deepen our love.

The main mindset to have during a fight or conflict is approaching the fight as a team and the goal is to takedown the conflict as a team. You must drop your ego during conflict or do your best to do it to understand where the other person is coming from so you can get to the core root of the problem. One way to help understand where your partner is coming from during arguments is to understand their fight style.

Venting - They want to solve the conflict right now and find a solution

Hiding - Some people are not ready to discuss a conflict right away and instead want to wait till another time to solve it. They may go silent in the middle of the argument and refuse to talk because they can’t process everything happening to them at once.

Exploding - blaming it all on someone else. This is not a healthy way to fight since you explode and end up saying things you regret later on. You need to learn to manage your anger.

I’m a hiding fight style and knowing that is important so you can communicate with your partner before an argument takes place so they know that you going silent for example isn’t a sign of disinterest. This can help you work through conflict in a healthy way.

Try setting up times and locations to hash out the argument. Try to avoid intimate areas like the bedroom and instead try talking in common spaces like a living room or a kitchen. This helps both parties approach the conflict with a calmer head space.

Handling Breakups

One way relationships end is because the relationship isn’t taken care of. You need to put in the work to allow the relationship to grow and thrive. One of the ways you can do that is by generating high vibrational energy and conversations with your partner. You do this by living out shared experiences together. You bond through shared beliefs and a shared sense of mission not just over movies and tv shows.

Lower vibrational energy is gossiping and higher vibrational energy is talking through goals or long-term vision with each other. Another way of maintaining excitement and arousal in a relationship is by doing fun and new activities with each other. In the book, an example was given about a study that had two groups of men wearing a shock device. One group was told they would receive a high shock and the others would receive a mild shock. They did this while an attractive women entered the room. The men who anticipated a high shock experienced more arousal and attraction to the woman than the other group. The importance was that a small amount of stress can spur amorous feelings.

Going back to an earlier point, it’s also important to realize that your partner is not a one-stop fix-all for your problems. It’s important to build out a support system for yourself that you can turn to in times of need alongside your partner. Who do I turn to when I feel stressed, lack mental strength, need financial help, or have health-related needs? Write down who these people are that you turn to.

Also while helping your partner it’s important to understand that a quality that you would like for them to fix is something that draws you closer to them. For example, You like their people-pleasing tendencies for yourself but not with others.

This is the hard part but handling breakups. It’s important to know that you may feel broken, empty, and hurt but the soul is unbreakable.

You are not broken after a breakup, the expectations and future you thought you had with that person is broken. Remember that you were a whole person before you entered the relationship and that you’re a whole person after it. The person who broke up with you can’t help you heal. You must turn towards yourself and your support system for that. It sounds obvious in our head, but our brain tricks us into going to that person who broke up with us for a sense of comfort and calm.

When a relationship ends, it’s good to go through and understand what you gained from it. Every relationship was a gift in some way, what did that person help you realize about yourself? What did they teach you? You also want to separate the mind and intellect. The mind will cause you to wander into intrusive thoughts such as What is my ex up to? Are they seeing someone else? but the Intellect will come in and guard you against acting on those thoughts. The intellect will challenge you to ask yourself will knowing this information actually benefit your life, what will doing that accomplish?

You will get through it.

Phase Four - Sannyasa - Perfecting love

This phase is all about how you can experience love every day in your life and how you can live through it. Love doesn’t always have to be experienced romantically and with one person instead, you can stretch it and reach everyone around you.

If you focus on giving love, you can experience more love. This stage is the hardest to perfect and do on a daily basis. It takes a lot of practice but if you continue to create a loving environment in your heart, you can give it to everyone. Love holds no bounds.