3 Relationship Rules to Live By

As a relationship guide, I spend a lot of time simplifying the most important elements that make a good relationship. The more I teach, the more concise it gets. And I think I have it boiled down to just three parts, three important ingredients to help your relationship thrive.

While they are few in number, the steps might be considered challenging as they require a lot of thought, patience, and trust. The thought part is you thinking about the parts and actually deciding to make yourself do the work. The patience is not expecting to get things right all at once, to be able to allow yourself to develop new positive behaviors in the time it takes. The trust is so you will believe in yourself when you doubt your progress and remind yourself that you can indeed do this.

It happens to all of us. We hold on to our thoughts and don’t say them because we are afraid of hurting the other person’s feelings. We stuff them down inside and just stay silent. We may grouse about them later with someone else, but most of the time a lot of us don’t speak up.

If this sounds like you, you are not alone. This is one of the most common themes I come across while helping people in counseling. Most people are aware they do this, and they are not sure how to change it because it’s something they have always done…put their feelings aside and take care of the other person first.

Many people struggle with taking responsibility in a relationship. They feel victimized, they blame, and they feel miserable. It doesn’t have to be this way.

One of the hardest things I see couples struggle with is the idea that each person in the relationship is responsible for his or her own part of the problems that surround them. It’s not uncommon for people to want to blame the other person for how they feel as if the partner did something to cause the upset. Something bad happens and people start pointing fingers at the other person.

Some of us in relationships at times feel like we are missing something from our partner. We are waiting to feel more intensity from the person we love. I have personally felt this experience and I know the couples I counsel often talk about it.

This may sound strange, but I believe this occurs in most relationships, even the most loving of relationships and between people who say they have a great relationship.

By the time we are grown up almost all of us have figured out how to get what we want in life and how to get things that we don’t like to stop. We usually learn these skills when we are very young, starting with our first empowering word: “NO.”

As an adult we find out partner and then we use these same skills to continue the process of getting what we want and stopping what we don’t want.

But for many couples the habits and skills we bring into a relationship often create difficulty with our beloved…

I was thinking about acceptance the other day and was realizing that this is a practice that might take a long time to get good at, especially when we are talking about relationships. You see, all of us pretty much like who we are. We like how we think, how we behave and act. We like our ways.

And many of us get really perturbed when our partner doesn’t agree with us. They might do something different than what we learned growing up. Or they might like something arranged differently then how we prefer. They might even say things we would never say.

I was listening to a friend of mine talk about her family situation the other day. She was saying that when her grandson’s mother got sick, she and the mother’s best friend took care of the boy. Now that the mother is well the boy is going back to live with her. But the mother’s recovery was slow and the people parenting the child grew attached. So when the convalescence was over, and the child was about to rejoin his mother the other two temporary care-givers struggled with their own sense of loss.

My friend kept saying that everything is working out really well because all the adults involved kept asking the same question, “What is the best for the boy?” She said every time she asked herself the question she knew exactly what to do.

What if we applied this approach…to our relationships?

I was listening to someone talk about feeling lonely in their relationship the other day and I realized that sometimes I feel the same thing. It isn’t as often as it used to be, but sometimes it’s there; that wonder if my partner really loves me, or loves me in this moment or if my mate is thinking about me even though I can’t feel it.

I think it’s common for people who are close to another to sometimes feel this. I know over the years the wonder or worry has decreased. But earlier in my relationship I often wondered if my beloved loved me when I couldn’t feel it.

So many relationship challenges have a common root.

As individuals we learn a lot about how to be humans. It starts from our early days in our family. We learn how to talk and walk and feed ourselves, go to school and play with others. We are taught everywhere; parents, teachers, laws, religion, family, friends, everyone is a teacher.

We get good at interacting with life. We learn how to rely on ourselves to get our homework done, to babysit siblings or neighbors, to make our own food, to clean our rooms and to be a functioning member in a family system.

But do we learn how to be good partners?

Wondering how to stop arguing with your spouse? You’re not alone.

Couples often tell me they are so tired of having continuous arguments about the same thing with the person they love. They say those arguments always end up the same way, both people exhausted and nothing gets resolved. They want to fix the problem but they just don’t know how.

This is a very common problem for people in relationships and marriages. So why does this pattern occur? Let me explain.

I'm retired.

Tag Archives: communication

3 Relationship Rules to Live By

Open Communication for Getting Your Needs Met

How Taking Responsibility in a Relationship Brings Peace

Differences & Feeling Empty in a Relationship

Gentle Requests – On Communication in Relationships

Accepting Differences Between You and Your Partner

Putting Your Relationship First

Why We End Up Feeling Lonely in a Relationship

The Universal Relationship Challenge: Being a Good Partner

How to Stop Arguing with Your Spouse or Partner