Dr. Romance's Top 5 ways to take your marriage from good to great.
1. Talk frequently and honestly to each other about your frustrations, about sex, about anger, about disappointment, about your appreciation of each other, about the meaning of life, about everything. No topic should be off limits. Learn to listen and communicate instead of fighting. Fighting is childish, and you want a grown-up relationship.
2. Strive to work together to solve anything that comes up: Be a team, create a partnership. Don't get stuck on who's right or wrong, instead focus on what will solve the problem. Strive to work together so both of you can have what you want. When you build a successful working partnership, each of you will feel supported and respected by the other. When each of you feels that the other has your best interests at heart, problems are solved not "my way" or "your way" but so that both are happy with the solution. The mutuality of this type of partnership creates an environment of love where deep trust grows. When trust, respect, responsibility and love feel mutual, that's when we feel secure in being loved.
3. Keep your connection going through communication, sex, affection, understanding and concern for one another. Nothing insures that your relationship will remain faithful better than a good, warm connection with great sex.
4. Have a sense of humor; give the benefit of the doubt, care about each other. Store up plenty of good times in your relationship reservoir to draw on in the hard times. Treat your partner like your best friend.
5. Create Good Will: Every kind or unkind word, every gesture of support or criticism, every honest or dishonest interaction between you, and every gesture of affection or coldness are stored in your memory. Store up good feelings, forgiveness, support, honesty, appreciation, caring and affection, and sexual and emotional intimacy, to build up a backlog of good will, affection and warm memories. Store up coldness, criticism, ingratitude, dishonesty, demands, and dissatisfaction; and you’ll have a reservoir of resentment and disdain. To face problems, separations, disagreements, illnesses, and stress, you will draw on your relationship reservoir. Memories of good feelings and goodwill let you cheerfully give what’s needed. Resentment and hurt feelings stifle generosity.
Wishing you a relationship full of Hope and Joy.
(adapted from How to Be Happy Partners: Working it out Together)
For low-cost counseling, email me at tina@tinatessina.com
Tina B. Tessina, Ph.D. is a licensed psychotherapist in S. California since 1978 with over 30 years experience in counseling individuals and couples and author of 13 books in 17 languages, including It Ends With You: Grow Up and Out of Dysfunction; The Unofficial Guide to Dating Again; Money, Sex and Kids: Stop Fighting About the Three Things That Can Ruin Your Marriage, The Commuter Marriage, and her newest, Love Styles: How to Celebrate Your Differences. She writes the “Dr. Romance” blog, and the “Happiness Tips from Tina” email newsletter.