5 Ways to Keep Your Relationship Strong: The Advanced Version

We know that healthy relationships start with the essential ingredients of love, trust, respect, and shared values. Long relationships are filled with ups and downs.  We often need to move beyond the basics to keep the bond strong year after year. Want to know how? Here are some advanced tips:

• In happy unions, partners retain their own identities and support each other’s opportunities for personal growth. Happy people continue to invest in their own development. Good partners encourage each other to pursue interests, take on challenges, learn something new or work toward a goal.

• Relationships fare well when couples express themselves freely and honestly. Couples need to share the minutiae of day-to-day life to keep their home functioning but what really strengthens the relationship is the deeper conversations. Couples in thriving relationships engage in emotional self-disclosure.   They want to remain intimately connected to each other’s inner worlds.

• Partners in strong relationships pay less attention to attractive others. Of course, we notice beautiful people as they walk by, but wandering eyes and flirting give the impression of availability. People in happy relationships do not want to do anything that would make their union vulnerable or hurt their partner. They honor each other and the commitment they have made.

• Happy couples practice humility and compassion for themselves and each other. By keeping egos in check, couples are less likely to get into arguments about who is right and who is wrong. Humility and compassion are connected to forgiveness, the magic elixir in happy unions.

• Happy couples express gratitude:
  

   Feeling grateful is one thing, but telling your partner that you’re grateful is another. Sharing feelings of gratitude creates more positive feelings in the relationship. Also, when partners feel that they are valued, they are more willing to voice relationship concerns and work toward resolving conflict.

Maybe you read this and thought to yourself, “I already do all of these things in my relationship.”

If so, congrats! You rock!

If not, I hope these tips can be guideposts for you to follow to strengthen your relationship.