1.Making a mountain out of a molehill
Do you want to live in… peace with your beloved? Then, first, control yourself. Loosing your temper, showing frequent anger, shouting for pointless reasons is obviously very harmful.
Try to throw back quarrelsome, authoritarian attitudes: you can contain your reactions: stop being so sensible (or hypersensitive, if you prefer) at the slightest annoyance.
In particular, distrust your interpretations : immediately assigning a negative meaning to a sentence, a gesture, which you didn’t understand well leads to misunderstandings which, as the years go by, kills off your agreement.
Means # 1 to break your love relationship: aggressiveness and verbal violence.
2. Unjustified attacks of jealousy
Is your wife always attracting men’s attention? Faint flattering whisperings? Admiring (even if not always discreet) comments? Feel flattered! Keep smiling!
It is a tribute paid to you, one more proof of your good taste, of the good choice you have made. And, especially don’t hold it against her. Do not blame her for a ‘provocative’ attitude: charm and beauty reveal themselves, even in the most modest women’s behaviour.
As for you, Lady, if ‘he’ unconsciously turns his gaze to a passing young lady, do not take this gesture of innocent admiration as a harbinger of adultery! Do not ask him:
“Do you want her photo??” He wouldn’t understand you or would find you unfair.
Means # 2 to kill your love relationship: unmotivated jealousy.
3. Ignoring the omnipresent dangers of routine
Thanks to your steady efforts, you have seduced your beloved, you have ‘conquered’ him/her. One day, you decided to join your fates. Marvellous! At least, at the beginning…
Why would you take the risk of loosening the pressure? Of stopping your efforts? To persevere day after day in seducing them is The Key to your happiness! Never forget to continue: just as all you wish to see going on long enough (your house, your garden, your car, your friends…), you have to take care of your love.
Think frequently, each of you, of making small unforeseen pleasures to your beloved; to have some attentions for them, to express your tenderness, to break the daily rut by a touch of excitement. Among others, in your moments of intimacy.
Means # 3 to break your couple’s harmony: to let yourselves being trapped by routine!
4. Giving top priority to your work, over your couple and / or your family
This error is more usually a men’s one – and often unintentional. A way to solve this problem is to share activities and fields of interest with your beloved and both of you, with your children.
Another additional way is to fix appointments with your partner and to respect them. This way, you demonstrate the importance and the place you grant her / him in your life.
Customers, patients, students, shareholders, seniors colleagues, … according to your profession, do not always have to pass before your partner and children!
In order to live a long-lasting relationship, you have to remain available enough for them.
To work for living? Well, … yes: one too often needs to. But, to live for working?? NO : please, live to love, to bring moments of happiness to your beloved ones, to create!
Means # 4 to destroy your life as a couple: to forget your true priorities.
5. Letting dialogue fade; losing true communication
Many couples share the same bed, some of their meals, TV programs; they sometimes go out together. But, they’re not always lucky enough to share a purpose, fields of interest or higher values.
Therefore, each of them pursues their own life, their own personal fate, only attentive to their own concerns, preoccupations or interests.
By speaking less and less together they stop sharing. There are no more genuine exchanges.
Their roads, formerly convergent or parallel, eventually move apart. Without any more true communication, both partners imperceptibly lose any real contact.
Look at these old couples you see sometimes in restaurants: they’re facing each other but don’t look at each other anymore, don’t speak to each other anymore – what could they say? How cruel and distressing.
Means # 5 to disintegrate a couple: letting indifference get hold of your couple for having neglected communication and sharing.
6. To let yourself go to make comparisons
Obviously, your ex – or someone among your acquaintances – said or did certain things better; was more this; less that: – « (S)he, ‘at least’ !… »
Who is perfect on Earth? If you sometimes make a comparison, then only make positive ones. Otherwise keep for yourself your disappointed, bitter or disenchanted reflections.
Obviously, we agree you and me: gathering in the same person the tenderness and kindness of your N°1; the sensuality of your N°2; the ‘class’ of N° 3; the cheerfulness and practical intelligence of your office colleague,… would certainly be ideal : a truly delicious miracle.
Well! In fact, you can work this miracle – by setting the example !
You strongly appreciated these qualities or skills in the past, maybe in the frame of a previous relationship? By showing them yourself, you’ll discover a surprising mystery: they are contagious! “Give and thou will receive!”
Take advantage of it to explain to your beloved what would please you: think to express your expectations, without vain shyness. Speak to your beloved about your wishes, your desires.
Keep in mind that you’ve chosen your partner; the qualities they’re missing (or not showing) are most probably compensated by others. Your tenderness, your encouragements, your frequent concern to value her / him, will round angles, making these comparisons soon become useless.
Means # 6 to make ‘creak the springs’ of your relationship: not being able to refrain from comparing (at least aloud).
7 Calling your children to witness
All couples sometimes face difficult moments, arguing occasionally, exchanging reproaches – in all or in part justified. These are adults’ concerns!
Even unintentionally involving your children in your conflicts hurts them. Besides, this is the easy way to raise bit by bit a wall of incomprehension, of un-love and often of hatred: inside your couple and later between you or one of you and your children: unwilling witnesses of situations or facts, the implications, the origin or the motive of which they cannot understand, how could your children judge them clearly? You certainly feel it, this is not a good way to manage a healthy couple’s relationship.
Means # 7 to break up your couple: directly or indirectly blackening the image of their other parent in the eyes of your children, letting them be witnesses of your conflicts.
8. A quite inopportune haste
If you have acknowledged the happiness and privilege to live a passionate relationship (at least at the beginning…), you will remember these delicious moments during which you both of you were active and which both of you loved to prolong.
Alas, time passes; concerns accumulate; your children, your work, your various responsibilities ‘devour’ every minute of your time.
Soon, these embraces which, since always, have plunged those who love each other in shared delights, are abbreviated and become less frequent.
It even happens to these lovers, to forget to take time for the after tenderness-cuddle !
They don’t take time anymore to give each other some compliments, some words of love; to exchange small positive messages in order to remind themselves how much they love each other, how much they value their relationship, how much they appreciate each other’s presence.
Fulfilling embraces are an essential food for your tenderness and a good means to stay in love. However, – you know it – to make love the nice way, taking plenty of time is essential. To hurry at these moments is hurrying the outbreak of tensions.
Means # 8 to slide on the slippery slope of a break-up: « Hurry ! »
9. Being too often untidy-looking
Hygiene and body care dashed off, a constant untidiness, indifferent dress sense, weight excess perfectly disdained… : there are so many ways of letting your partner guess that you hardly care to please them.
Heavy error: carelessness marks a lack of consideration to your better half and this can hurt them deeply. Respecting oneself and the Other also involves slight concessions connected to one’s own look: the image which one gives of oneself has to be positive.
This quality not only has to be considered a female one. Men often lose sight that women too like to be at the arm or in the company of a man of whom they feel legitimately proud. To have got married and settled down doesn’t guarantee fidelity for life ; to believe it would be giving evidence of naivety.
Means # 9 for enticing your partner to imperceptibly begin to look around – becoming more vulnerable to temptation: making no effort anymore to look neat for them.
10. Show yourself possessive
Living as a couple can’t be a chain.
You want to continue to feel well together for a long time? Then, think of it: your beloved is not a child anymore; give them a free rein, rely on them !
Each partner of a relationship must preserve at least a part of their personal life, of their opinions, of their tastes – of their autonomy. Always imposing on your partner your own way of life is a constraint which is not acceptable anymore in our time.
Living together never means surrendering one’s own personality; having to comply in all with the desires and requirements of the other is on the contrary, a very effective way to awaken feelings of rebellion. This leads one to become secretive; it leads to lies and unfaithfulness.
Important decisions imperatively have to be taken together. (In the West at least, we can take this luck for – theoretically – granted.)
To live a harmonious relationship naturally involves common activities and relations, sharing a social life, an ideal, a fulfilling tenderness, a purpose, showing solidarity to meet responsibilities and chores etc.
From that point to never losing sight of your better half, to keeping a constant watch on them – even if it is sometimes unconscious – there is a big step! It’s essential not to cross that line.
Your better half is a whole human person. As such, (s)he appreciates to be with you, – not to you. At least, in current daily life.
Means # 10 to ruin your relationship: completely restrain their independence, keep them ‘under your heel’.
You can take my word for it: implementing these suggestions will lead your couple toward harmony and preserve it from a lot of nuisance.
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