Hey, lovebirds! Ready to ditch those doomed New Year’s resolutions and lean into something better? I’m Crystal, and in this first episode of 2025—and my second season of Love Quirk—we’re talking about creating thriving, sparked relationships without the pressure of overnight overhauls. Here’s the deal: resolutions fail because you can’t magically transform overnight, and neither can your relationship. Instead, it’s about those small, meaningful actions that nudge you closer to the love space you want to create.
Think of your relationship as a masterpiece of “non finito,” or unfinished art. It’s not about reaching a “done” stage but embracing the joy of infinite love and endless growth. Whether it’s holding hands on a walk, laughing at dinner, or sending a sweet text, these tiny gestures help you lean toward each other. This year, forget perfection and grand gestures—let’s focus on kindfulness, connection, and building a universe of love together.
Mentioned Resources:
Dr Neff https://neurodivergentinsights.com/
About the Host:
Meet Crystal, your relationship and social health coach. Crystal is the founder of Sparked Forever Relationship & Singles coaching. She started her journey supporting the neurodiverse community in navigating this, sometimes frustrating, neurotypical social world. Lessons and inspiration from her earlier work drives Crystal’s passion for bringing couples and singles together through acceptance, understanding and big picture thinking to grow vibrant relationships. Crystal understands that the foundation for our social health and well-being starts with making connections to others. When Crystal is not working with couples, she loves to be out on adventures with her partner and bonus kids or spending time connecting with friends over good food and fun music.
Links:
https://www.instagram.com/sparkedforever/
https://www.instagram.com/sparkitsocial/
https://www.tiktok.com/@sparked_forever
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Welcome to our love space today, and to our first episode of 2025 and really, I'm just, I am so excited to say that this is also my first episode of my second season on doing this love Quirk. So I hope you've been enjoying it. I've just been having a great time, and I'm so excited to spend another year exploring, you know, really, how we make these a great foundation for our relationships, and how we really keep things, you know, sparked and moving forward, and just thinking about, you know, growing our love. So now I'm pretty sure that I don't know anyone that makes New Year's resolutions anymore, which is great, because we all know that they kind of don't really work, right? But why don't they work? I mean, lots of us going to jump the gun and, you know, we kind of get into, I guess, get, you know, in with the crowd, and be like, oh yeah. Resolution suck and and and we don't really think much about it, but they actually don't work, because you can't change your whole personality overnight, right? Surprise, I know it's probably not a surprise, but really think, if you think about like that, like December 31 you're a person who never goes to the gym, and January 1, you're suddenly someone who drinks green smoothies every day and goes to the gym five times a week. That is a hard to to even start right. Lots of us fail in just trying to start that, and that's hard to keep it up right, because it's hard to keep pretending to be that person where we're not right for the long term. And that's why a lot of couples can find sort of the same thing and find not a lot of success, because they start to do like a total relationship overhaul. And that just doesn't really work, because, just like yourself, you know, you start to slide back right into all of those patterns or bad habits or, you know, whatever hasn't been working in your relationship, perhaps, or what's not really bringing joy, we weirdly come sort of slide back into that. And that's because, like, you can't really change your personality overnight, you also can't really change your relationship overnight, right? And every relationship has what we call a baseline, so that's your set of behaviors, which is kind of a technical word for your set of actions, your habits, the things that you do without really thinking too much about it, and feel kind of comfortable and not comfortable as in, I'm living my best life, but comfortable as in, hey, this is my day today, and I get through it, and here we go, and I don't actually have to put that much effort in and that's what kind of makes our baseline so powerful, and why we often slip back to it, it, it's made from our learning history, right, over years and years of life and years of social interactions and, you know, years of doing something in it going well, or doing something and not going well, or something about it, you know, makes us feel like it's at least going okay, so we keep doing it. And it's actually, it's the easiest way for us to kind of get through life, is just coasting on our baseline. And actually, so this is what I was thinking about originally, with resolutions, and then just in opening up my emails all this week, you know, the first week on all my little email subscriptions, you get people who are sharing, you know, their first thoughts about the new year and like what they're looking forward to, or what they're wrapping up and things like that. And so one of my little email subscriptions I do is to Sue's Chadwick, who's wonderful, because, you know, as in doing this, in love quirks, and in doing sparked forever, and working with all you wonderful couples. There's a business side to that. So she's kind of like one of my business guru people that I love to follow. And she wrote a lovely little, you know, quick email about what she was thinking about, and she quoted Reagan Hillier, and who has some interesting ideas on manifesting and kind of breaking through to the places where you want to grow and you want to be. And the quote she brought out of that, I just thought was so poignant when me, when I was, you know, just kind of went aligned and magically serendipitously really aligned with when I was thinking of talking to you guys about baseline. So the quote is, every day you're manifesting your minimum standard. What you're living right now is what you are willing to tolerate. And I thought that was just so that really stuck with me as soon as I read it, and I know tolerate sounds a little bit harsh and uncomfortable. Maybe because when we think of tolerating, we think of something negative, right? But it's real, it's true. We really need to put that into perspective, because if I am willing to tolerate a relationship that is fizzling, a relationship that is just at baseline, so. And is a five out of 10. You know, a five out of 10 feels okay, right, that we can slip into that, becoming our baseline for our relationship, a four or five out of 10. And it's really not till it gets to like a three that lots of us think of going and getting support, or going and working on working on it, which, you know, I hate, going and putting energy into it, right, going and getting support and talking to someone. And you know, that is, why are we waiting till it slips down there, right? So if you're okay at having, you know, an okay relationship, or maybe even a mediocre relationship, that can be tolerable, so, you know. But is that what you want for the next one year, two years, five years, 10 years, 19 years, I don't know. Come up with some random numbers, 57 years, right? Maybe some of you want to live till you know you're 104 is that what you want for these next years is tolerable? What you want until your time is done? Here? I would say no, right? My mom always used to say to me growing up, and she still says to me, but not as much, but whenever, you know, as a teenager, like frustrated or whatever, she'd often say, you only have one life. You only have one life. My mom always used to say that to me, and that has really stuck with me. Now that doesn't mean whenever you get to a four or five out of 10, then we throw everything away, right? What it means is that, you know, and I think this is an and it even says, like, you know, on Reagan's little website right up, that we need to disrupt that vision, right, that that is normal. We need to disrupt that man or Okay, or tolerating it or getting by, is is going to be our normal? It can be. It is for a lot of people, but it doesn't have to be for us. Why are we accepting that? Right? So let's make a new vision for 2025 let's make a new vision for 2025 where we lean into our relationships with our energy and our kindfulness. And there's actually an Italian word for works of art, where the artist kind of feels like they're never complete. And if you look this up on the internet, there's all sorts of, like, you know, kind of quirky, funny stories of artists like trying to, even after their art is on exhibit, that they try to, you know, sneak in and add some extra things to their paintings and stuff. And that is this kind of art where the artist feels it's actually not complete, despite whether we've put it on or not, on exhibit or not. Is called non finito. It's an Italian word non finito, which really, really kind of directly translates to,
like, not finished or unfinished, right? And I believe, like in art history, they call it art that's undone, but, yeah, I want you to think about that, right? Why don't we commit to each other that we don't have love that's complete in our relationship. Like, it's complete in a way, but it's not complete, like we get there and it's done, right? Our love should really be non finito, right? So our because our love is infinite, right? It doesn't have to have an end, right? It's a renewable resource, right? I came across an another wonderful quote when I was kind of, you know, going down a rabbit hole into this idea of our love being unfinished, right? And that is maybe what the standard we want to go for. So this one says we are the source of infinite love, infinite joy and infinite happiness. We are the source, okay, but we spend our whole life looking for love, joy and happiness. How foolish is this? Right? That's brilliant. So it's not like you know when we commit to each other, when we get married that we go, Hey, this is it. This is this is the love we have. We've created it. We we're framing it, we're putting it up on the wall. And never shall this be this love be touched again? No, it is infinite. It's renewable, right? We don't have to look for it when we're in a wonderful relationship with the love of our life. We don't have to look for our love and our joy and our happiness. We get to create it together, right? We can use our foundation of communication and affection and kindfulness and energy, right? We can use those as the foundation and the source for us creating more love with each other. Right for us, creating more passion with each other? Right for us, creating more of what we want in our teamwork, collaboration, right? And it's kind of. Our teamwork, collaboration, that is creating the love space around us, right? And I don't mean the love space as just in your living room, right? I mean your love space as in the world with you and the love of your life, right? You are creating a universe, right? People nowadays love universe creation. I don't know if you've dove into that at all, but we love it, right? Look at what they're doing down in Universal Studios Florida. If you're not a theme park person, let me bring you into the fold here. I think they have, oh, I can't remember what it's called, but they're creating a whole bunch of new areas in the park that they're calling universes. They're creating like a multiverse at Universal Studios and and people want to be immersed, like, look at Harry Potter land. People want to walk in there, and they want to feel like they're in this special, wonderful universe. Well, news flash for 2025 and onward. You and your LOL, right? You and the love of your life are creating your own universe together, and your love and your joy and your happiness are infinite within the two of you, right? You can renew them and create them infinitely on your foundation, right? On your foundation of communication, affection, kindfulness and the energy that you are creating and directing to each other and to your love space. And I think an important piece with that again, coming kind of drawing us back to this idea of resolutions and newness and change for the new year, for 2025 I think you know, like that quote said, We don't want to get stuck in our baseline, but we also all know that resolutions don't work because we cannot change ourself overnight, right? We can't change our personality overnight. That doesn't you know we do change personalities, because we do grow and change over time. So I'm not saying people don't grow and change, but we can't go from being one person that thinks this way one day to 100 like a 180 the next day. Okay? That takes time, that takes tweaks, right? That takes all of these little baby steps that we normally talk about on here, where everything is like, you know, I'm always giving you just like simple things to do, right? And you're probably like crystal these are too simple. We need such something much more complicated, right? We want to make life over complicated, because that's where a little weird human brains go. But we actually don't, and there is a you know, and think about these resolutions and how they don't work, okay, but what does work, right? You know, I we can say, Ah, this doesn't work. This doesn't work. This doesn't work. But then where I'm wasting your time if I don't tell you what could work, right? So again, and going through all my little emails, a little inspiration from Dr Neff. And if you are neuro spicy or have a neuro spicy partner, Dr Neff has, and I'll put her little link in the in the show notes, but she has some wonderful She's so great for you know, everything neurodivergent, neuro spicy life. She is neurodivergent herself and her little welcome email. Welcome to 2025 email really focused on this idea of, you know, that resolutions don't work. Also, like she is kind of like at, you know, but her thought was she wanted to simplify, and this is exactly to where my brain was going with this is we want to simplify things now, usually I talk maybe about intentions or or something like that. But we're going to even we're going to simplify it even more toward whether we are leaning toward what we want for our love, space in our universe, or are we leaning away from it? Okay, so if your actions are leaning towards what you want for your relationship, right, then fantastic, right? We don't need to make a whole resolution of, I'm always going to do this. I'm always going to do that just huh, is what I'm doing right now. Is that moving me forward? Is that moving me toward the love space I want, or is that moving me away from the love space I want? Or even, is that because we're talking about baseline, we're talking just being at that even keel, steady, boring, blah, four or five out of 10. Is this just keeping me stuck in that four or five out of 10 with no movement either toward or away, right? And we want, we want to choose things that move us towards what we want. Now, I think sometimes we can also get a little caught up in goal setting, right? And I actually don't like relationship goals. I. I actually think that they can get us stuck too much in thinking about this end piece, right? Just like I said, Our love is not a finished painting that we frame and hang up on the wall and never touch again, right? Our love is, you know, is never ending, right? What was that the term non in non finito, right? Gets non finito right? So why we can kind of have goals, but goals sometimes get our mind too fixed on something that it could be finito. My Italian is not that good, so I don't know if you can use it like that, but right to work to move towards something that seems fixed and like an end. But what I want us to do is to reframe that. I want us to stop thinking about the idea of relationship goals, and I want us to turn it into the idea of a thriving relationship, right, a sparked relationship being a value, right, being a value to you as a team. Right? To your teamwork, collaboration, one of your values is a thriving, sparked relationship, right? If we direct our energy and our joint love towards that value, right? If our actions are directed towards that value of what moves us closer to a thriving, sparked relationship, rather than what keeps us here stuck or what moves us further away, then the change is going to be easier than we are going to be tweaking our baseline actions, right? We're going to be changing our baseline we're going to be making those small changes just in our everyday, you know, little routines, which is where we need them, right? Right? Because it's, it's the grand gestures are not, are not where we find all of the love and the joy, right? It's often just our little everyday, tiny moments that are really filling up our emotional cup. If we think about like, if we hold hands while we walk, and to me, this seems like such a silly thing, but you know, if we hold hands while we walk, is that an ick or does that mean that we're leaning towards a thriving relationship,
if we decide to go on a walk together or go to the gym together, instead of always doing a separate thing because we're having a busy week and otherwise we won't get to see each other. Does that lean and move me towards a thriving relationship or way, right? If I prioritize the mega moments of love over maybe, you know, some other events that I may have to decide between, right? Does that lean away from my love of life and creating a thriving love space for us, or does that lean toward it and toward more love? Right? If we eat together, chat more together, laugh more together, does that move us towards each other or away from each other? And I know these are all like, you're like, right? These are all very great leaning questions. 100% I understand, but it really helps us picture like, are we leaning towards or away? Our part to our partners? Are we leaning towards or away from this universe we want to create, right? Are we leaning towards or away? Our opportunities for teamwork, collaboration? Are we leaning towards or away, our moments for physical affection? Right? So I think that if we keep in the back of our minds for 2025 rather than a resolution, rather than a big overhaul, rather than a big change. But hey, what are these small actions? Right? When I have a moment to pause and think like, oh, you know, should, should I text them that, you know, I'm thinking about them? Ah, does that move me toward or away? Well, I think if you send a texting I'm thinking of you, right? Or, you know, whatever you want, like the way you looked this morning when you left for work, thinking about giving you a big hug or kiss when I get home, anything like that. Super excited that I don't have to cook dinner tonight. Can't wait to see what we're going to eat. I don't know what you're going to order in I don't know we all have busy lives, but it's those moments. It's those small, tiny decisions that are going to start to tweak and build up new habits for you that are going to seem more easy and effortless, and that are going to start to bring our baseline up to more of a seven out of 10 or an eight out of 10, right? And again, the wonderful thing with this is that we can keep moving and growing. It's non finito, right? So this is my wish. No new year's resolutions, right? No new year's new solutions are. Big Guiding Light. Our big got big, big picture guiding idea for 2025 is, let's start moving towards each other. Let's start leaning into each other and be sparked.