Search Results for: blog relationship dynamics enhancing your listening skills

Empathy is Crucial

When it comes to marriage, empathy is a crucial ingredient. You need empathy to help you be a better listener. We’ve discussed listening in this blog before. Active listeners are people who not only listen to their partner, but they hear them. They try not to color the words of their partner with their own emotions or suppositions. This is also referred to as listening without judgment. Complain Without Judgment When you can complain to your spouse and not have them yell at you for your thoughts or try to adjust how you are thinking or even repair what it … Continue reading →

Marriage Advice: Different Styles of Discipline in Your Marriage

How you discipline your children or how you plan to discipline your children are not likely topics of discussion for two people planning to get married. If you did talk about this prior to getting married and worked out a number of these issues ahead of time, my hat is off to you. My husband and I were together for many years before we were married and our daughter arrived just shortly after our first anniversary. As an infant, discipline wasn’t really an issue – discipline doesn’t really start until your children are older. Discipline Can Make Your Marriage Bumpy … Continue reading →

New Wives Tales: Your Weight & Your Sex Life

Diminishing sexual appetites and a distinct lack of interest in sex can put a strain on even the happiest of marriages. There is an old saying that when a couple has sex, it’s only about 10% of their marriage, when they have no sex, it becomes 90% of their marriage. But for some women the underlying cause of their lack of interest is directly related to their own personal weight. Please, Hear Me Out Ladies, we all look in the mirror and if we don’t see that super-model body or at least the lean, gentle figure that we all possessed … Continue reading →

You Don’t Want a Divorce, But Your Spouse Does

The truth is, no relationship is 100% perfect and no relationship works out exactly the way you want it too. This doesn’t mean you can’t have a great relationship that lasts the rest of your life and it doesn’t mean you can’t have a relationship fail or become so difficult that one partner or the other elects to abandon that relationship. But if your spouse wants a divorce and you don’t – how you behave and cope with it is going to have a very real impact. Don’t Push Them Away When things go wrong though, we are more likely … Continue reading →

How Casual Are You?

When it comes to relationships your attitude will have a distinct impact on the success or the failure of it. The person who is very casual about his or her own relationship often gives off the sense of not being very involved in your own relationship. It could indicate to your partner that you don’t care enough to really invest yourself in that relationship. You can be casual when something happens in another place or to other people, but you can’t be casual about it in your own backyard. You have to respond to your own life and your own … Continue reading →

Is Marriage ‘the’ Key to a Better Society?

If you were to take the complexity of the problems in our world today, it would take days and days to tackle the breakdown of poverty, the ‘growing’ underclass and the lack of cohesiveness in our society today. I’ve even seen papers written about the fact that the breakdown of our person-to-person relations is in direct proportion to our growing technologies. It began, in essence, with the industrial revolution as we abandoned small town ties and the bonds created by sharing traditions and needs with rural communities. The transition from rural to urban diminished those ties and the transition from … Continue reading →

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell – In Marriage?

Okay, this is a hard topic for me to write about and I’ll be honest about why – there’s an old saying – everybody lies. We all keep little things from each other whether it’s to avoid a fight or a hurt feeling or because the perception of one person is that the information is inconsequential and therefore easily forgotten. But how can a don’t ask, don’t tell policy benefit your marriage? If You’re Feeling More Than a Little Skeptical At the Moment, Then We’re on the Same Page Do you hide any shopping trips from your spouse? Do you … Continue reading →

Marriage Tips: Assume Good Intentions

I love that phrase: assume good intentions. I have loved it for years. I heard it for the first time from my husband in the few months after we first met. You can say that at the time, I was something of a cynic. I suppose I still am, yet because of this one phrase, I’m a great deal more optimistic than I used to be. But let’s think about the phrase: assume good intentions. What does it mean? When you assume good intentions, you don’t automatically presume that someone forgot something because they just didn’t care enough about it … Continue reading →

Marriage Exercises – Couple Toons

This is the second in a series on marriage exercises today. The first, Let’s Play a Game, introduced the idea of playing detective like Sherlock Holmes in order to effect greater understanding between you and your spouse. This exercise is called couple toons and it offers you and your partner some humorous ways to reconnect, even in the light of a harsh disagreement. How Does It Work? Imagine a recent argument you and your spouse have had. The argument may have been over money, over housework or even over who forgot to go the grocery store. As you think about … Continue reading →

Marriage Tips: Couples Don’t Have to Discuss Everything

Marriage means you shouldn’t keep secrets, right? So is not keeping secrets – telling each other absolutely everything? Not necessarily. There is a fine line between disclosure and privacy. Every couple has a subject or subjects that are considered taboo. The subjects may be taboo because they have either collectively decided to not discuss them or simply left them untouched. The simple fact is conversation and disclosures are two different things. For example, when you are dating and getting to know each other, you are very likely to share humorous anecdotes and tales of your past. You might talk about … Continue reading →