Relationship Tips, Advice, and Mistakes
Relationships tips and advice help us avoid mistakes we make in our everyday romantic lives. Life gets hectic all the time, so we start to put certain things on cruise control. When you put your marriage or relationship on cruise control enough, your partnership starts to grow stale and boring, and the two of you start to drift apart.
I've decided the break our discussion into three distinct parts: relationship tips, relationship advice and relationship mistakes. The tips section gives you a few things you can do to add spark to your romance. The advice section gives you two tools for repairing your relationship: one outside the relationship and one inside yourself.
The mistakes section is for really broken marriages and relationships. It discusses what we should do when our relationship partner simply refuses to behave himself or herself. Relationship tips and advice are great for repairing relationships where both people love and respect one another, but all the great suggestions in the world can't help a relationship, if one person is incapable of either love or respect.
But let's start with the relationships that can be fixed, often with just a little tender love and care.
Relationship Tips
Let's start with a few relationship tips, to make your overall romance better. Keep these things in mind, if your relationship has begun to get boring. If it's boring, it's as much your fault as the other person's. Start getting creative.
Good Old Days
Try to recapture the spirit of the good old days by reestablishing old traditions or going back to the way it was when you first met. Start over with compliments and flirtation. Avoid looking for faults.
Go to the restaurant you went to on your first date. Relive the first date. These aren't sustainable over the long haul, but they can help in reclaiming the magic. Focus on your relationship as it was, then find common ground for moving ahead into the future.
Avoid the Predictable
If that doesn't work, then go in the exact opposite. Maybe your relationship has gotten too predictable. Be willing to try new things. Go anywhere that is going to be a new setting or activity.
Stimulate yourself. Relationships grow stale after a time, because the two of you can predict exactly what the other is going to say and do. This is comforting for some and exasperating for others.
Studies show that people who try new things and do new things have heightened brain activity. Like your muscles when you try a new workout, your brain has to work harder and it comes to life. That's a good thing, because once your neurons are firing quicker, you'll start to realise the good things in the old, predictable life.
Talk about this and decide on something the two of you would never do. Take a trip. Go skydiving. Take a class together. Join a civic organization together. Do anything together that you haven't done before and see if it stimulates your romance.
Communicate and Listen
Set aside time with each other specifically for communication. Decide on limits when one of you must talk and the other must listen. Couples tend to talk past one another, never really listening to what each other is trying to say.
If your conversations are about waiting for the other to stop talking, so you can say what you're going to say, then you might as well not be talking to one another. If your relationship is a constant stream of interruptions of one another, that's not good communication, either.
Set aside time to talk...and to listen.
Night of Passion
Also, set aside time for another form of communication: sex. Make this special by changing the setting.
Have a romantic dinner in a romantic spot. Go to a special location. Have a walk. Give one another the spa treatment. Add a little bit of kink to the proceedings.
The fact is, if the bedroom has gotten predictable, sex together is going to seem old and stale. Break out of this. You don't have to get too crazy; just adding one or two new stimuli at a time makes things better and different.
Once again, set aside special time for this. Try to seduce one another again. A big part of the healing process is intimacy with one another.
Relationship Advice
For those who have deeper issues than boredom and minor annoyances, you may need deeper relationship advice. The first relationship suggestion is to get a third party, preferably a trained and experienced third party, to help facilitate the healing.
Go to a Marriage Counselor
A marriage counselor is trained to spot problems in a relationship and to help couples work through those problems. A marriage therapist teaches the two of you the tools you need to make your marriage better. If you need to master a job, you get training. Why not train to become a better spouse?
Focus on Them
Stop worrying about how you feel and start worrying about how your husband or wife feels. Put yourself in their place and try to empathize with how they perceive you, the relationship and life.
Back in college, one of my fellow classmates made the mistake of saying that people from different backgrounds couldn't understand one another, because they couldn't get inside each other's head and read each other's mind. My professor, a philosophy professor, mind you, replied, "God gave me human being's a gift: imagination. With imagination, I have the power to imagine what it's like to be in your place. I have the ability to imagine what it's like to be you and to empathize with your thoughts, hopes and fears. It's what we make us human."
Now I'm paraphrasing this old philosopher, but those words hit home to a self-involved, solipsistic youth. Imagination and empathy are two gifts humans have, if they choose to use them. That's why communication and listening is so important between couples, because when you listen, you can use your imagination to put yourself in your partner's position and empathize with their cares, concerns and worries.
So focus on your partner more and your own selfish needs less. Do that enough and it becomes a habit. Hopefully, when you need someone there for you, they do the same.
Relationship Mistakes
Many relationship mistakes happen when you let someone else dictate the terms of the relationship to you. A person who is controlling or abusive in a relationship has emotional issues of their own, and you shouldn't let their emotional problems become your emotional problems. If you let your partner do any of the following, you'll never be able to have a healthy relationship.
While there are many love mistakes that couples make, I wanted to highlight certain behaviors that are unacceptable and should never be allowed to stand. You're mistaken, if you think the following types of behavior are acts of love.
Acting Obsessive or Jealous - If you're boyfriend or girlfriend is always jealous of you when you speak to the opposite sex, when you do things with your friend or when you interact with your family, that isn't healthy behavior. If this person isn't mature enough to trust you and let you make your own decisions as an adult, they can't be in a mature relationship. If you let them control you by consenting to their jealous patterns of behavior, you are setting the tone for the future of the relationship.
It might feel good at first to have someone obsess about you or be jealous over you. That is a boost to our vanity. But an obsessive personality is not going to be able to give you the kind of varied, fulfilling relationship that you could have with a romantic partner who lets you have friends and family around. If there's no reason for them to be jealous of your friendships, they are being immature.
No Slaps - Pushes - Hits - Kicks
Anytime a person puts their hands on you in a threatening or harmful way, you must not let them. This only encourages them to violent again, and to become increasingly more violent as time goes by. If a man hits you or tries to use his superior strength to coerce you into any form of behavior, from "shutting up" to sex, he has no right and you need to get out of that relationship. Having boundaries is about having respect, and if this man can't respect you, he's not worth being around.
Threats and Yelling
Neither implied threats nor explicit threats are allowing. Don't let him yell and scream at you. This is ultimately treating you like a child to be talked down to, so you shouldn't let this behavior go unchallenged. If he refuses to treat you respectfully, walk away from the relationship.
Refuses to Let You Break Up
This shows the person has no respect for you. It also shows they can't cope with reality. When a person breaks up, that's it. It's their choice. It's your choice.
Makes You Feel Guilty
Guilt trips might not sound so bad, but this is an attempt to control your actions, by trying to make you feel guilty. Ask yourself whether you've done something wrong. Be honest with yourself.
Ask family and friends their opinion, but give a truthful, accurate account of the circumstances. If you're blameless, this person is trying to control your behavior by acting wronged or withholding affection. That's wrong.
Calls You Names - Attempts to Make You Feel Stupid
Someone in love with you should give you strength and confidence. A person who tries to make you feel stupid and worthless by calling you names isn't trying to love and respect you, no matter what they say the rest of the time. Instead, this person is trying to control you by damaging your self-esteem.
This person knows that the worse you feel about yourself, the less likely you are to challenge them or get out of the relationship. They want you to think you're so worthless that no one else could ever love you. That's wrong. You are worthy of real love and affection, and this person is terrified you're going to leave him or her. That's why he's trying to control you.