Trust your hunches enough to check them out. If you suspect that something is wrong, for either of you, talk about it. Everyone makes up stories about small bits of barely noticed information — stories which may or may not be true.
If you let your hunch turn into a belief or conviction before you check it out, you may believe you have information when you really don’t. You may then do or say things you will later regret. On the other hand, your hunch might turn out to be an accurate early warning of a developing problem. Talk!
Your weekly assignment, should you choose to accept it:
Talk to each other about hunches you have had in the past. Try to remember if they turned out to be important warnings or just old fears stimulated by misunderstood experiences. If you have any current hunches, discuss these also.
This is an excerpt from Being Happy Together: How to Have a Fabulous Relationship With Your Life Partner in Less Than an Hour a Week, by Laurie Weiss, Ph.D.
written by Laurie Weiss
\\ tags: Communication, Relationship Advice
Support your partner by listening to him/her express feelings of sadness about a loss. You probably can’t fix the loss or solve the problem, but just being close will help the healing process.
You may feel uncomfortable just listening to a problem without trying to help your partner to fix it. You may even want to tell your partner to get over it instead of moping around and feeling bad. Neither of these approaches is nearly as helpful as just listening attentively.
Your weekly assignment, should you choose to accept it:
Talk about how you have helped each other manage losses in the past. Discuss how each of you felt in those situations and whether or not you need to try something new next time.
This is an excerpt from Being Happy Together: How to Have a Fabulous Relationship With Your Life Partner in Less Than an Hour a Week, by Laurie Weiss, Ph.D.
written by Laurie Weiss
\\ tags: Communication, Difficult Communication, Relationship Advice, Relationships
Attend classes and workshops together. Going through an adult education catalog and choosing what you would like to learn together is a good way to tune in to your partners interests.
Learning something new together will help you to keep the relationship alive and growing. Often, choosing something fun that neither of you know anything about, and that requires a minimum amount of time and/or money, is a good way to start.
Your weekly assignment, should you choose to accept it:
Get two copies of a local adult education catalog. (It could be a church bulletin.) Each of you independently mark classes that you are interested in attending. Compare your notes, and see if there is any overlap.
This is an excerpt from Being Happy Together: How to Have a Fabulous Relationship With Your Life Partner in Less Than an Hour a Week, by Laurie Weiss, Ph.D.
written by Laurie Weiss
\\ tags: Play, Relationship Advice, Relationships, Togetherness
Work together on something hard that will feel great when it’s done, like removing a dead tree stump or tearing down an old fence or wall. The sense of accomplishment helps you feel connected to each other.
Something hard can also be a creative project. It could be shopping for a piece of furniture or designing a new kitchen. It could even be organizing your important papers. The important thing is that it’s a finite task that you can do together and celebrate when you’ve completed it.
Your weekly assignment, should you choose to accept it:
Make a list of tasks that are challenging and that you could do together. Choose one of the tasks, and either do it or make a plan about how and when you will do it.
This is an excerpt from Being Happy Together: How to Have a Fabulous Relationship With Your Life Partner in Less Than an Hour a Week, by Laurie Weiss, Ph.D.
[tags]Relationship Advice, Tasks, Togetherness, Relationships[/tags]
written by Laurie Weiss
This story published by Steve Goodier of http://www.lifesupportsystem.com truly moved me. I thank Steve for his permission to share it with you.
TRUE LOVE
I’m not sure I can always tell love from passion. One father said of his teenaged son, “I don’t know if he’s in love or in heat!” What teenager would know? Besides, feelings of attraction can change more quickly than a pouty expression.
But love, in its truest form, is greater than feelings. It is as much a decision as it is a feeling.
Love is what Mr. and Mrs. Strauss shared. Mrs. Isadore Strauss was one of the few first class women passengers to go down with the Titanic in 1912, and she drowned because she could not bear to leave her husband.
They remained calm throughout the excitement of the sinking vessel. They both aided frightened women and children to find places aboard lifeboats. Finally, Mr. Strauss, who had repeatedly urged his wife to claim a spot safely aboard a lifeboat, forced her to enter one.
She was seated but a moment, however, when she sprang up and climbed back on deck before he could stop her. There, she caught his arm, snuggling it familiarly against her side, and exclaimed, “We have been long together for a great many years. We are old now. Where you go, I will go.”
Where you go, I will go. It is a decision to be together, come what may. I suspect she said something like that to him many times before. Maybe the words she used were different, but the meaning was the same. I want to be with you. Let’s do this together.
Where you go, I will go. It’s a decision to love. It is deciding to be there, wherever “there” may be. It is a decision to sacrifice, if sacrifice is needed. And it is choosing to re-decide it all over again tomorrow and the next day and the next.
As the ship sank beneath icy water on that cold and dark, April night, the Strausses merely re-made a decision they had made many times before throughout their life together. They decided on each other.
Where you go, I will go. At the heart of true love is often a decision, made again and again, to face the next day together … hand in hand.
– Steve Goodier
Now you can add your own comments to Life
Support.
http://stevegoodier.blogspot.com/
Visit our Personal Development Blog
[tags]Togetherness, Relationships, Care of Your Partner[/tags]
written by Laurie Weiss
I want to share something that Jonathan wrote (Jon has reclaimed his birth name) as we were developing material to let people know that we are actively offering couples counseling again.
It was a spontaneous statement of why couples should come to us for counseling. It didn’t quite fit into the webpage we were designing, but I think it’s a wonderful restatement of our lives together.
“…we want to share what we’ve learned with you!
Why us?
There are hundreds of people offering relationship advice on the Internet, and thousands more offline. How are you going to know who to listen to, who to trust with the most important part of your life?
All these adviser have credentials; so do we. They have all probably talked to lots of different people; so have we.
So what’s different?
Very simple: we have been there AND we have applied our training, knowledge, theories, understandings, etc., to our own personal and business lives, and have lived to tell the tale.
We have been married (TO EACH OTHER) for over 48 years, and we have experienced, survived, and grown from almost everything that two people together will ever run into:
- Major and minor moves, career changes, failures and successes;
- Stagnation, new directions, changing roles;
- Separations, distance, infidelity;
- A stillborn child — our first;
- Births;
- Children growing, grown, moving out, succeeding, failing;
- Teenage runaways, drug abuse, and impressive achievements;
- The deaths of all four parents — long illnesses, nursing homes, suicide;
- Investment successes and miserable failures;
- Giving advice, getting advice, using advice, ignoring advice, regretting advice;
- Laughing, yelling, grieving, plodding, creating, committing, sharing;
- Getting older, loving it and hating it.
Sometimes we think that the only important experience we have missed is the rich learning of a divorce, but we have worked with plenty of people before, during, after, instead of, preventing it or encouraging it,
that we think we have some wisdom anyway.”
We have also made our CD of our talk with marriage counselors about relationship development available as an online audio. You can listen to it right now I’m your computer, or download it to listen later. You can get it at this link: http://tinyurl.com/53wvyh
(Jonathan’s words again) “Listen to some REAL experts talk about what REALLY happens in relationships, and how you can use the information to make a difference in yours.”
More about Laurie Weiss
[tags]Relationship Advice,About Relationships,Togetherness,Relationships[/tags]
written by Laurie Weiss
Spend time working on your relationship as well as living in the relationship. Good relationships don’t just happen; they need to be watered and weeded, just like a garden.
Working on your relationship means taking some time on a regular basis to assess how the relationship is going. Sometimes spending five minutes every day works very well. Some partners take a few hours every quarter, and others take a week once a year. Doing the homework assignments in this book also count as working on your relationship.
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it:
Talk about what working on your relationship means to each of you. It may mean talking about your mutual and individual goals. It may mean looking at what irritates you or what you need in order to enhance your growth within the relationship. Decide when and how you can best work on your relationship.
This is an excerpt from Being Happy Together: How to Have a Fabulous Relationship With Your Life Partner in Less Than an Hour a Week, by Laurie Weiss, Ph.D.
[tags]Togetherness, Relationships, Communication, Relationship Advice[/tags]
written by Laurie Weiss
Michele Weiner-Davis, MSW posted an excellent article on taking the time to make New Year’s Resolutions for your relationship together as well as separately on her Psychology Today blog.
She includes the suggestion that you ask yourself “What would be one or two small things that my partner and I could do this week that would make us both feel that we are on track to accomplishing our goal?” There are many suggestions of activities you can use posted throughout this blog.
I wish you a New Year filled with joy and connection with the people who are important to you!
More about Laurie Weiss
written by Laurie Weiss
Make clear agreements about which of you will do which parts of a complicated task, like arranging a vacation. Check each item off your joint list as it is completed. Posting the list on the bathroom mirror or the refrigerator door works well.
Keeping each other informed about progress eliminates lots of questioning and tension. It also eliminates unpleasant surprises like discovering that each one of you thought that the other was responsible for an important part of the task.
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it:
Choose a project to work with for practice. Together, using sticky notes, make a list of all the things that need to be done to complete the project. Write each task on a separate sticky note, and divide the tasks by arranging the notes into separate lists. Be creative and have fun.
This is an excerpt from Being Happy Together: How to Have a Fabulous Relationship With Your Life Partner in Less Than an Hour a Week, by Laurie Weiss, Ph.D.
[tags]Tasks, Togetherness, Relationships, Communication, Relationship Advice[tags]
written by Laurie Weiss
Recession-Proof Your Marriage
Disclaimer: No, I’m not a financial adviser, but you need to read this before you get any numbers.
The first thing you need to do is to tell the truth about how you feel. You’re probably scared. We’re all scared about what this means. I’m certainly scared, and I’ve been through a number of recessions.
Partly I’m scared about giving up the fantasy of safety. I’m also sort of angry about giving up the fantasy that I’m entitled to live the kind of life I have been enjoying.
The truth is we’ve all been participating in an illusion, and when we face the fact that it just isn’t going to be the way it was or the way we wanted to be, we may feel sad and angry as well as scared.
For lots of us, feeling angry isn’t OK. People do various things when they feel angry. It’s best to use it for energy to solve problems, but the problems of a recession are hard to pin down. So you might block the anger out altogether and get depressed instead — or you might let it out in destructive ways.
You could do lots of different things with angry feelings and most of them aren’t good for your marriage.
You could actually get angry at yourself or your spouse for overspending or under-earning. It’s always easier to say, “If it weren’t for you I/we wouldn’t be in this fix.” It feels relieving for a short time — and it may even be true — but it won’t do anything for your marriage if you stay stuck there.
Of course, being angry at yourself won’t help your marriage either. It will just give you an excuse to go and hide and feel like a victim. You might decide to do more for others because you don’t deserve any thing yourself. And then you’ll feel even worse. That won’t make you very attractive or supportive for your spouse.
You could try Continue reading »
written by Laurie Weiss
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