Together But Something Missing: How to create and sustain successful relationships

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When you and your partner were just starting out, you wanted to show the very best side of yourself to each other. You consistently thought about ways to make your partner feel special, be it leaving them love notes or planning extravagant dates for one another. When did that stop? Consider the fact that the success of your relationship works the exact same way as the success of your initial courtship. Remember what you did to win your partner over. How happy would your partner feel today if you took a few extra minutes to remind them that they are loved?

Understand that your connection will continue to strengthen and deepen if you innovate and make extraordinary efforts.


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As much as physical touching and thoughtfulness are key during a relationship, so are your words. Your words have incredible power. They can build your partner and your relationship up, or tear them both down. Remind yourself that this is a person you love and trust, and that your words affect them deeply. Instead, address the problem before it gets out of control — but find a way to make it fun instead of taxing.

When you were in high school you probably felt the world was about to end more than once, because you were dealing with many situations and emotions for the first time.

Together But Something Missing

When you find yourself descending into a fight with your partner, fast forward to the laughing part. Try getting angry about the problem while doing a ridiculous dance. By entering your information on the Tony Robbins website, you agree that we may collect and use your personal information for marketing, and for other purposes, as set forth in our Privacy Policy, which we encourage you to review. What can we help you find? It's one thing to say, "I wish my spouse were more into the arts, like I am.

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It's quite another to say, "This is intolerable. I need and deserve somebody who shares my core interests. It's possible to ask someone to go out more. It's not going to be well received to ask someone for a personality overhaul, notes Doherty, author of Take Back Your Marriage. No one is going to get all their needs met in a relationship, he insists. He urges fundamental acceptance of the person we choose and the one who chooses us. With parenting , we know that comes with the territory. With spouses, we say 'This is terrible. The culture, however, pushes us in the direction of discontent.

It's a package deal; the bad comes with the good. Further, he says, it's too simplistic an interpretation that your partner is the one who's wrong.

We were married. But there was no sexual attraction

We're fairly crude at processing some information. We tend not to think, 'Maybe I'm not giving her what she needs. Now in a long-term relationship, Toronto's Katz has come to believe that "Marriage is not about finding the right person. It's about becoming the right person. Many people feel they married the wrong person, but I've learned that it's truly about growing to become a better husband.

He's a traditional Christian, I'm an agnostic. He likes meat and potatoes, I like more adventurous food," says Sarah. So Mark heads off to church and Bible study every week, while Sarah takes a "Journeys" class that considers topics like the history of God in America. And she'll share her insights from her own class with him. But when Sarah wants to go to a music festival and Mark wants to stay home, "I just go," says Sarah.

It takes a comfortable sense of self and deliberate effort to make relationships commodious enough to tolerate such differences. What's striking about the Holdts is the time they take to share what goes on in their lives—and in their heads—when they are apart.

Skills for Healthy Romantic Relationships

Research shows that such "turning toward" each other and efforts at information exchange, even in routine matters, are crucial to maintaining the emotional connection between partners. Say one partner likes to travel and the other doesn't. If you can accept it, that's fine—provided you don't start living in two separate worlds. You start doing things you're not comfortable sharing with your mate. The available evidence suggests that women more than men bring some element of fantasy into a relationship. Women generally initiate more breakups and two-thirds of divorces, becoming more disillusioned than men.

They compare their mates with their friends much more than men do, says Doherty. He notes, "They tend to have a model or framework for what the relationship should be. They are more prone to the comparison between what they have and what they think they should have. Men tend to monitor the gap between what they have and what they think they deserve only in the sexual arena. They don't monitor the quality of their marriage on an everyday basis. To the extent that people have an ideal partner and an ideal relationship in their head, they are setting themselves up for disaster, says family expert Michelle Givertz, assistant professor of communication studies at California State University, Chico.

Relationship identities are negotiated between two individuals. Relationships are not static ideals; they are always works in progress. To enter a relationship with an idea of what it should look like or how it should evolve is too controlling, she contends. It takes two people to make a relationship. One person doesn't get to decide what it should be.

And to the extent that he or she does, the other partner is not going to be happy. She isn't sure why, but she finds that such misplaced expectations are increasing. Or, as Doherty puts it, "A lot of the thinking about being married to the wrong mate is really self-delusion. Sometimes, however, we really do choose the wrong person—someone ultimately not interested in or capable of meeting our needs, for any of a number of possible reasons. At the top of the list of people who are generally wrong for anyone are substance abusers—whether the substance is alcohol, prescription drugs , or illicit drugs—who refuse to get help for the problem.

Those are the very qualities in a partner you need to lean on. People who cheated in one or more previous relationships are not great mate material. They destroy the trust and intimacy basic to building a relationship. It's possible to make a case for a partner who cheats once, against his own values, but not for one who compulsively and repeatedly strays.

Doherty considers such behavior among the "hard reasons" for relationship breakup, along with physical abuse and other forms of overcontrolling. But "drifting apart," "poor communication," and "we're just not compatible anymore" are in a completely different category. Such "soft reasons," he insists, are, by contrast, always two-way streets. In an ongoing marriage, he adds, "incompatibility is never the real reason for a divorce.

But when people say "she's a nice person but we're just not compatible," Doherty finds, something happened in which both were participants and allowed the relationship to deteriorate. It's a nice way to say you're not blaming your partner. The real reason is likely to be that neither attended to the relationship. Perhaps one or both partners threw themselves into parenting. They stopped doing the things that they did when dating and that couples need to do to thrive as a partnership—take time for conversation, talk about how their day went or what's on their mind.

Or perhaps the real love was undermined by the inability to handle conflict. Although there are no guarantees, there are stable personal characteristics that are generally good and generally bad for relationships. On the good side: On the maladaptive side: Situations, such as chronic exposure to nonmarital stress in either partner, also have the power to undermine relationships. In addition, there are people who are specifically wrong for you, because they don't share the values and goals you hold most dear.

Differences in core values often plague couples who marry young, before they've had enough life experience to discover who they really are.

Together But Something Missing, How to create and sustain successful relationships by Ben Renshaw

Most individuals are still developing their belief systems through their late teens and early 20s and still refining their lifestyle choices. Of course, you have to know what you hold most dear, and that can be a challenge for anyone at any age, not just the young. One of the most common reasons we choose the wrong partner is that we do not know who we are or what we really want.

It's hard to choose someone capable of understanding you and meeting your most guarded emotional needs and with whom your values are compatible when you don't know what your needs or values are or haven't developed the confidence to voice them unabashedly. It was never anything major, just little things. Carly confides that she lost respect for her chef-husband. I think this was more about not knowing myself well enough, and not knowing how being intellectually stimulated was important to me, and even worse how it would tie to that critical factor of respect.

It is a fact that like the other basic pillars of life, such as work and children, marriage is not always going to be a source of satisfaction. No one is loved perfectly; some part of our authentic self is never going to be met by a partner. Sure, you can always draw a curtain over your heart. But that is not the only or the best response. Disillusionment becomes an engine for growth because it forces us to discover our needs.

Knowing oneself, recognizing one's needs, and speaking up for them in a relationship are often acts of bravery, says Page. Most of us are guarded about our needs, because they are typically our areas of greatest sensitivity and vulnerability. Few of us are skilled at this essential process for creating passion and romance. At the same time, taking the risk to expose your inner life to your partner turns out to be the great opportunity for expanding intimacy and a sense of connection.

This is the great power of relationships: Creating intimacy is the crucible for growing into a fully autonomous human being while the process of becoming a fully realized person expands the possibility for intimacy and connection. This is also the work that transforms a partner into the right partner. Another crucial element of growth in relationships, says Givertz, is a transformation of motivation —away from self-centered preferences toward what is best for the relationship and its future. There is an intrapsychic change that sustains long-term relationships.

Underlying it is a broadening process in which response patterns subtly shift.