There are three top tips to having a great relationship that you can put to use in your love life today. Put the following tips into effect in your own way and your relationship will be enhanced starting now.

Tip Number One is Play. You got in your relationship in the first place to play, to have fun. Then over time the play can begin to disappear so that even sex seems like work. However, the more play you have with your mate, the less fighting you will have as well. And it is easy to start playing more with your mate.

So do you both make time to play together on a regular basis? Do you have a date night at least once a week?

Tip Number Two is Work Towards Healthy Conflict. Obviously, we all tend to fight from time to time in long term relationships. How you behave during and after the conflict seriously impacts the quality of your relationship. For example, expressing scorn or contempt during an argument has been shown to cause long term damage to a marriage.

As you will be arguing with your love from time to time anyway, it is good to start now to take some time to learn how to deal with conflict in healthy ways. One simple method is to learn to attack less during a fight and use “I” statements rather than “you” statements to discuss how you feel.

Tip #3: Minimize Mind Reading. We often tend to think our partners should just know what we want. This is a faulty assumption, and it can be a fatal one. Rather than think your mate should know what you want and give it to you, be proactive instead. Ask for what you want. If you need a hug, ask for it. If you need to be heard rather than given advice ask your mate to just listen.

By asking for what you need, you can prevent a lot of fights and sulking. And encourage your mate to ask for what they need when they seem unhappy as well. that’s being a good partner.

There are entire books that can be written about each of these three topics, so this is obviously just an introduction, but these are a great place to start to improve your love relationship today.

Posted under Marriage

You know, a big problem with infidelity is that after it occurs and you have kicked out your ex, you often want and need them back. You feel hurt and untrusting, but for your own sake and maybe that of your kids you want them back in your life.

Is there a way to get them back and yet stop infidelity from occurring again? Is there a way to get them back and keep your dignity? After all, they cheated on you, so if you just take them back you can end up dealing with the same problem just down the road. You want them back, but you don’t want any more infidelity.

What can you do? Well, there are a few very powerful steps you can take to get your ex back and keep them from cheating on you again. The first step is to have a short, special conversation with them where you set them up to listen to you. You do this by assuring them that you arent going to attack or fight with them, so they just need to listen, not argue or defend or attack.

Once you have got your mate to promise to listen without arguing, you then vent your feelings about how their infidelity made you feel. You do this by using what are called I Statements. I feel very hurt and sad about what you did. I feel like you betrayed us and I don’t know how I can ever trust you anymore…

The important thing is to vent your hurt feelings using I Statements directly to your ex and try to make sure you feel heard. If you get your hurt feelings off your chest you create room for forgiveness and a stronger relationship in the future.

After you have vented some, you check with your partner to see if they listened and heard what you said. If they have empathized with you rather than argued or tried to defend themselves, you will likely feel much more able to begin to forgive. The key is to feel heard and understood when you vent your hurt feelings. If you do, you then take the next step, which is to ask them if they can promise not to do it again. If they can, you can feel much better about taking them back.

So the critical point is to not attack your ex, but create a short period of time where they can listen to the pain they caused you. This is much more important than trying to attack or harangue them about what they did. When they can listen to you vent, you will begin to feel better and more able to forgive.

There is a lot more to this, but just observing these few steps will help you to resolve some of your negative feelings and move back towards forgiveness and love. With some additional emotional intelligence, you can eventually make your relationship even stronger than before!

Posted under Relationships

Infidelity is the cause of many relationship break ups. The reason is obvious. When one partner cheats, the other will usually feel like “I can’t trust you ever again.”

That is a common refrain when cheating occurs. Trust is essential to close, intimate, real love. When it is broken, we feel like there is no hope for getting it back. Even if we loved much about our mate, if they cheated on us, we dont see how we could ever be happy again with them, how could we trust them after such a sense of betrayal.

For this reason trust is one of the largest problems in break ups. Your ex is wondering if they can ever truly trust you not to cheat on them again. Why get back together if there is just going to be more cheating? So when break ups happen due to cheating, on of the big issue on your ex’s mind is

Can I ever feel that I can trust you after this?

I mean, if they rejected you because of some problem behavior, like cheating, or fighting, or not communicating with them, then they need to know BEFORE they let you come back that you wont keep doing the thing they left you about.

But the feeling of broken trust is one of the hardest things for an ex to get over. After all, we usually feel like trust gets built over a long time. Emotionally, we believe when trust is broken that our relationship can’t be fixed, right?

Broekn trust is a huge betrayal in the heart. Broken trust feels immediately like distance and separation, the very opposite of intimacy. So you have almost ZERO CHANCE of getting back with your mate until you deal with the feeling of broken trust.

It is crucial for you to understand this if you want to get back with your ex. You must deal with their feelings of distance and betrayal and lack of trust or you can’t expect to get back with your ex. Even if you get “lucky” and they give you a second chance, without trust it probably won’t last. That’s because the love and intimacy we all want to feel can’t be felt when there is no trust.

So how can you deal with and repair trust issues? This is a large subject, but one thing that is easy to see is that in most break ups, we all try to avoid blame. So we tend to try to lay the blame elsewhere. We say things like “I cheated because I drank too much!” Or, “I cheated because you were cold and distant!” The natural way we react when big issues like cheating come up is to try to avoid the blame.

Give those excuses to your ex and shell think youre a weak idiot. She may take you back, but it wont last, there will be real distance, because those excuses dont allow her to trust you. What if you get drunk again? What if she is cold to you a month from now? What if a pretty skirt tempts you tomorrow when youre walking down the street? So one of the first powerful things you can do is accept blame. Take full responsibility. Dont offer weak or lame excuses.

You can own up to it by saying something along the lines of “I cheated on you and betrayed you. I apologize and I I’m sure I caused you to feel like you can’t ever trust me again…”

That is a powerful start to repairing the trust. If you got cheated on hearing that can help you to begin to deal with the infidelity. Its like when you have kids and they screw up and you catch them and they try to lie or blame someone else it makes you much angrier. But if they own up to it you can forgive them much more easily.

There are several other steps you must follow before you can resolve the issue, but owning up to your infidelity is a powerful first step!

Posted under Relationships