Understand Your Relationship and Keep Love Alive

After those first wonderful few months at the beginning of floating on air, filled with love, looking radiant and having someone love everything about us we look back and say what happened?

Relationships change of course but the one factor we ignore is that when we are blinded by love we do not see possible flaws in the other person and vice versa. This is completely natural and when we can understand this and work out how to deal with the small hiccups that come our way we will seal that beautiful relationship full of respect and love that we all desire.

The language we first used when we were getting to know our partner is the language we must continue to use and adapt it to our changing circumstances. The eye glances, certain luring bodily positions that caused excitement, small touches to the arm, or a whisper in the ear. Ask yourself if you feel comfortable doing any of these things now or is your relationship filled with disappointment and resentment that it feels completely unfeasible to even think about going there?

We have to put things in perspective. The flaws which we see now were always there and when we say those famous words, “you’ve changed,” it’s actually not 100% accurate and it can be the fastest way to destroy the relationship permanently. No one really wants a relationship to fail unless they really can’t stand their partner but as life becomes more complicated with stress from all sorts of other sources it’s often easy to neglect the one thing that is the most important. We think they should understand what we are going through, support us all the way, be there all the time etc. The reality is that we have to make more of an effort to secure and nurture our relationship and show them that they are very important and without their support it would be extremely difficult to deal with outside challenges. Here are two examples of what is said and what should be said. Sadly the first one is always top on the list.

“You don’t understand me, you are not being supportive, Have you any idea what I am going through right now?”

“Sorry to be so miserable and self consumed right now but I do love you and having you by my side is the most important thing in my life so please bear with me.”

Understandably it is very difficult to keep communication open when we are having challenges in our lives but if we get it right the security, love and genuine respect our partners will have for us will be truly amazing.

We must take time out to talk to ourselves and even draw up a list of what we like and dislike about our partners and most importantly how we felt at the beginning. We must be totally honest with ourselves and see whether we are being unreasonable. If we feel the relationship has become stale then probably our partner does as well so it’s a very good idea to get them to draw up the same list. When it comes to talking it’s extremely important not to be aggressive. It will be difficult to have the conversation without getting heated up but you have to remind each other that if you didn’t care about each other you wouldn’t be having this talk so it’s a huge step in the right direction. Once you have done this once you will find that it will be much easier to talk in the future.

Now here is the key. There isn’t going to be a right or wrong in what you discuss because both of you have a different reality of how things should be. When you hear what your faults may be, be calm and take them on board unless you really feel that you are in the right and you can totally exonerate yourself. Compromise may feel like a dirty word but if you both make an effort to do your best and understand what it is that both of you want from each other it will instantly make the atmosphere better and make room for more communication in a positive way.