Keeping Your Relationship Strong By Being Friends

I was thinking about whether my husband and I are friends. And the truth is, he is my best friend. I know I have other friends in my life and the husband actually goes by a lot of different names like, “partner,” “mate,” “better half,” etc.. But when I thought about whether we are friends, I could find no other answer than, “Yes, of course!”

I like being with him. I like doing things with him. Now that doesn’t mean I don’t have other friends that I enjoy being with, but realizing that the two of us have built a beautiful friendship is something I feel really happy about.

If you are human, you have felt jealous. You might even have some early memories of really feeling the pain of jealousy when you were young. I like to think it’s pretty common for all of us as we grow up to experience the hurt associated with being jealous.

But why do we keep feeling it and how to do we deal with it when we grow up and are in what we consider an adult relationship? Why is it we often still get re-injured or we re-injure our mate and it always centers around jealousy?

As a couple counselor I work with people in relationships. Often the difficult issues surround feelings of jealousy. So let’s talk about it and understand what happens to us and our partner when we feel it.

By the time we are in a relationship most of us are pretty good at navigating life. We have probably achieved some sort of successes with school or jobs and just the ability to accomplish things in life.

So when we finally connect to the person we fall in love with, why is it that so many of us feel as if we can’t figure out how to fix simple things, like misunderstandings and disagreements? If we as humans are good at other things in our lives; taking care of people, working, going to class, why do we fail at simple things like getting along with another person?

For many of us, having expectations is a way of life. As people we often think about things we want or experiences we would like to have and then we just expect them to happen. We might not even think about how many times we just expect things to go the way our head tells us they should.

But in a relationship it’s easy to see when those expectations don’t materialize, because every time that happens we are probably ready to tell the person we love how disappointed we are in them. We have come to expect things in our relationships too. And that can be challenging.

I'm retired.

Monthly Archives: June 2015

Keeping Your Relationship Strong By Being Friends

How Jealousy in a Relationship Divides Us

It’s Never Too Late to Improve Your Relationship

How Unrealistic Expectations in Relationships Disappoint Us