TYPICAL SELF-ABSORBED advice from a rock star—50 percent of a relationship’s success is up to you. Which begs the question: Who are you?
That summer, I hardly knew. Was I the kid who’d left town at fifteen and never looked back? Or the exhausted thirty-year-old who crawled home to lick his wounds?
Was I the frontman of Howl, the rock star, the guy in the band? Or was I a budding solo artist?
Most of the time I didn’t even know which of those guys I wanted to be, so I focused on being Jeff the boyfriend. (Don’t do that. It’s stupid.)
You can’t define yourself by who you’re dating. But you can decide what’s important to you—the job, the mission, the message, the ethics, the people. And you can make your choices accordingly.
Does this really help you get your man—your person? I think it does. I think it’s important that the people in a relationship come to some kind of consensus on what the best version of themselves looks like.
Besides, this way, if the relationship ends prematurely, at least one of you will still like you when it’s over.