It has taken me years to come to terms with one of the most obvious truths about intimate relationships: that there is labour in love.
We have all heard that you can’t change a person, and that loving someone is accepting them as they are. These ideals sound great in theory, but let’s face it, none of us actually practices this with others or even ourselves.
Perhaps like me, you added some fine print:
“I accept you wholeheartedly, except when you do precisely the thing that annoys me the most, after I have very patiently explained a hundred times how you should do it differently”.