Relationship: Ten Strategies to Improve your Relationship
Relationship Strategy No.1: Appreciate your Partners
Differences
- Due to your upbringing, family background, cultural heritage
and psychological makeup, you and your partner approach life
from completely different perspectives.
- By accepting that fact, you can begin to appreciate the value
that your partner brings to the relationship. A balanced
relationship requires Ying and Yang, the male and the female to
flourish. Differing viewpoints make for a rich and rewarding
relationship.
Relationship Strategy No.2: Understand the Nature of Love
- Has the hot, heady romantic passion subsided in your
relationship? Has the infatuation faded? Good! Now you are ready
to move on to the mature stage of love. You have moved past the
first flush of romantic love where your feelings are in a
constant flutter and your emotions are running high.
- Now you can develop a more mature and realistic approach to
your relationship. Work, family, children, friends, as well as
your relationship, are all part of a much bigger picture. This
is the natural progression and does not mean that you are no
longer in love. It just means that reality has taken over from
unrealistic expectations.
Relationship Strategy No.3: Accept Your Partners Values and
Beliefs
- Do not expect your partner to agree with everything you value
and believe.
- You can expect to fundamentally disagree about most things. If
you can accept that your partner has a different opinion to
yours, then you can agree to disagree. This need not impact on
your emotional agreement. You can still love your partner even
if you don't agree with their opinion.
Relationship Strategy No.4: Accept that you and your partner
have conflicting interests
- You like may like pop music, your partner may like soul
music. You like football, your partner prefers tennis. You like
drama, your partner prefers comedies. You like X, your partner
prefers Y.
- Just because you have different interests does not mean that
there is anything wrong with your relationship.
- If you experience conflict and stress as a result of engaging
in activities that you don't really like, then you should
consider giving them up.
Relationship Strategy No.5: Learn How to Argue
Constructively
- Disagreements arise in every relationship. This need not be a
problem.
- When you argue, keep to the issue. Do not verbally attack your
partner personally.
- Ask for time to calm down if you are emotionally upset.
- Don't put your entire relationship on the line for the sake of
winning an argument.
- Try to achieve emotional balance after expressing your opinion.
Relationship Strategy No.6: Learn to Control Your Feelings
- Avoid attacks on the self worth of your partner during
arguments. This is potentially destructive and may not represent
how you truly feel.
- If you are emotionally out of control, it might be best to
leave the room for a while, go for a run, do some exercise or
find other ways to relieve the tension you feel.
- Avoid saying things in the heat of the moment that you might
regret later when you have clamed down.
Relationship Strategy No.7: Remember to Maintain an Intimate
Relationship
- It is so easy to drift into lazy habits. Watching T.V. late
into the night so that you are too tired for intimacy.
Overeating or over drinking so that you are incapable of quality
time together. Allowing yourself to get out of condition or
becoming slovenly in your habits. These all impact on sexual
desire and performance.
- Recapture some of the romance of courtship with flowers,
candlelight and dinners for two. Rekindle the flame of sexual
desire by taking the time to be intimate. Maintain the physical
comfort of touching, caressing and holding hands.
Relationship Strategy No.8: Accept your Partners
Weaknesses
- Your partner may be less than perfect but then so are you.
Accept your partner's weaknesses. If they were perfect then they
wouldn't need you, would they?
- Focus on your partner's strengths. Make a list of all the
things you like about them and concentrate your attention on
those.
- Providing your partner's behaviour is not abusive or
destructive then you can learn to overlook it and learn to
compensate for them. Remember you are two halves of one whole.
Relationship Strategy No.9: Accept the Unique Qualities of
your Relationship
- Every relationship is different. What you accept in your
relationship others may think is objectionable. What you think
is objectionable in the relationship of others, they may think
is tolerable.
- Just be yourselves and find your own level of acceptable
behaviour within your relationship. Do not allow yourselves to
be judged by anyone else's so-called standards of acceptable
behaviour.
- Everyone expresses love in their own unique way. The
underlying feelings are genuine and real, however they are
expressed.
Relationship Strategy No.10: Accept Responsibility for the
Relationship
- If you want the relationship to change then start by changing
your own behaviour or attitudes.
- You cannot expect your partner to change just because you are
unhappy about their behaviour or their attitudes.
- Accept the responsibility of changing your own approach, use
new techniques, adopt new strategies.