Love is more than a feeling; it's a state of mind. It's a confidence knowing the bond, trust, happiness and completeness of two hearts. True love holds the promise of being able to work through anything and is not self-serving.  Modern Cowgirls feels that one of the most important elements of love is understanding and in order to understand you have to communicate. Love is a continual process of learning and growing together, and there are no  boundaries as to how much your relationship can grow. If you find yourself in love and are in a healthy relationship, make sure you hold on tight, don't get stuck in a rut and work through any bumps. The more bumps you work through, the stronger your love becomes. There's nothing sweeter than a modern cowgirl who is happily in love!

Research has shown that one of the most common culprits for fighting with your spouse or significant other is money. In fact, money is the number one reason that people end their marriages with divorce. The merging of two lives should not be taken lightly and there are several discussions that should occur prior to merging your lives. In most cases, people have conversations about finances but don’t go into much detail. These conversations tend to be for general understanding purposes and there is no follow-up plan or intent to continue the conversation. If you want to be proactive and increase your chances for a successful relationship, Modern Cowgirls thinks that you should create a strategy to ensure that there is communication at least four times a year regarding your finances.

A good strategy for the first year is to have “budget nights.” Modern Cowgirls’ vision for a budget night is to stay in the house (possibly cook dinner), pull out receipts and/or online checking activities and determine where your money is going and whether there is anything you should or want to modify. For instance, if you tally up all your receipts for dinning out for the week and discover you spend a higher amount than you thought, you can start to cook more meals at your home. Budgets nights can take place weekly, monthly or quarterly –it all depends on your situation and how you want to prioritize your finances. Modern Cowgirls wants to remind you that just because you are talking about your finances, it doesn’t mean that fights won’t happen. In fact, you might have a fight during one of your budget nights because you disagree on purchases that the other has made. A good way to deal with conflicts is to ensure that you each have discretional spending budgets. Money has the power to tip the scale of your relationship out of balance – don’t stand by and wait for this to happen, or much worse, watch it happen.

Love is a work of art- it can be beautiful, subject to interpretation, abstract, contemporary, traditional or even edgy. Some works of art come easy while others require development over a period of time. Every artist’s goal is to create a masterpiece and as long as the creator is happy with it, other people’s opinions and interpretations don’t really matter…that is unless they are creating the piece to sell, but that’s another topic. The great thing about art is that you don’t have to know exactly where you are going – you can make a couple wrong strokes and it could actually add to the brilliance of the art or can be easily fixed. Love, like art has so many ways to be expressed and viewed. Don’t be afraid to pick up your paint brush, dip it in your favorite colors and let your heart run wild!