It is difficult to react emotionally if you are truly listening and have to communicate understanding before you get a chance to react. Part 3 of this series, Making Your Marriage Work, offers additional techniques and suggestions for increasing the probability of maintaining a long-term intimate relationship. You can improve or beat the odds of having your relationship or marriage end in dissolution. With practice and patience you can become a world-class partner. These additional suggestions and techniques for improving your relationship based on over three decades of working with couples in clinical practice.
Couples often go into marriage with idealistic notions of what marriage is all about.
These ideas are handed down from generation to generation or gleaned from popular magazines, TV shows, or simply conjured from their own fantasies of what they would like. Each individual should make clear what their explicit and implicit expectations are and clarify these expectations such that they are clearly understood by one another. Where there are discrepancies, a mutually satisfying compromise must be reached. Do Not Take One Another For Granted. This can be a killer for a relationship.