MARRIAGE FOR A LIFETIME (Love,and Marriage For Life Book 2)

One for Life

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That is the truth. But you never want to lose respect for your partner.

Once you lose respect you will never get it back. As we scanned through the hundreds of responses we received, my assistant and I began to notice an interesting trend. Talk about everything, even if it hurts. But we noticed that the thing people with marriages going on 20, 30, or even 40 years talked about most was respect. My sense is that these people, through sheer quantity of experience, have learned that communication, no matter how open, transparent and disciplined, will always break down at some point. Conflicts are ultimately unavoidable, and feelings will always be hurt.

You will judge their choices and encroach on their independence. You will feel the need to hide things from one another for fear of criticism. And this is when the cracks in the edifice begin to appear. Of course, this means showing respect, but that is too superficial. You have to feel it deep within you.

I deeply and genuinely respect him for his work ethic, his patience, his creativity, his intelligence, and his core values. From this respect comes everything else — trust, patience, perseverance because sometimes life is really hard and you both just have to persevere. I want to enable him to have some free time within our insanely busy lives because I respect his choices of how he spends his time and who he spends time with. And, really, what this mutual respect means is that we feel safe sharing our deepest, most intimate selves with each other.

You must also respect yourself. Because without that self-respect, you will not feel worthy of the respect afforded by your partner. You will be unwilling to accept it and you will find ways to undermine it. You will constantly feel the need to compensate and prove yourself worthy of love, which will just backfire. Respect for your partner and respect for yourself are intertwined.

2. Have Realistic Expectations About Relationships and Romance

Never talk badly to or about her. You chose her — live up to that choice.

Respect goes hand-in-hand with trust. And trust is the lifeblood of any relationship romantic or otherwise. Without trust, there can be no sense of intimacy or comfort. Without trust, your partner will become a liability in your mind, something to be avoided and analyzed, not a protective homebase for your heart and your mind. We have so many friends who are in marriages that are not working well and they tell me all about what is wrong. I receive hundreds of emails from readers each week asking for life advice.

A large percentage of these emails involve their struggling romantic relationships. A couple years ago, I discovered that I was answering the vast majority of these relationship emails with the exact same response. Then come back and ask again. This response became so common that I actually put it on my contact form on the site because I was so tired of copying and pasting it. If something bothers you in the relationship, you must be willing to say it.

Saying it builds trust and trust builds intimacy. It may hurt, but you still need to do it. No one else can fix your relationship for you. Nor should anyone else. Just as causing pain to your muscles allows them to grow back stronger, often introducing some pain into your relationship through vulnerability is the only way to make the relationship stronger.

Behind respect, trust was the most commonly mentioned trait for a healthy relationship. But trust goes much deeper than that. If you ended up with cancer tomorrow, would you trust your partner to stick with you and take care of you? Would you trust your partner to care for your child for a week by themselves? Do you trust them to handle your money or make sound decisions under pressure?

Do you trust them to not turn on you or blame you when you make mistakes? These are hard things to do. Trust at the beginning of a relationship is easy. But the deeper the commitment, the more intertwined your lives become, and the more you will have to trust your partner to act in your interest in your absence. What if she is hiding something herself? The key to fostering and maintaining trust in the relationship is for both partners to be completely transparent and vulnerable:. Trust is like a china plate. If you drop it and it breaks, you can put it back together with a lot of work and care.

If you drop it and break it a second time, it will split into twice as many pieces and it will require far more time and care to put back together again. But drop and break it enough times, and it will shatter into so many pieces that you will never be able to put it back together again, no matter what you do. Figure out as individuals what makes you happy as an individual, be happy yourself, then you each bring that to the relationship.

You are supposed to keep the relationship happy by consistently sacrificing yourself for your partner and their wants and needs. There is some truth to that. Every relationship requires each person to consciously choose to give something up at times. Just read that again. A healthy and happy relationship requires two healthy and happy individuals. This is the person you chose.

It will only backfire and make you both miserable. Have the courage to be who you are, and most importantly, let your partner be who they are. Those are the two people who fell in love with each other in the first place. But how does one do this? What do I mean? Have your own interests, your own friends, your own support network, and your own hobbies. Overlap where you can, but not being identical should give you something to talk about and expose one another to. Among the emails, one of the most popular themes was the importance of creating space and separation from one another.

People sung the praises of separate checking accounts, separate credit cards, having different friends and hobbies, taking separate vacations from one another each year this has been a big one in my own relationship. Some even went so far as to recommend separate bathrooms or even separate bedrooms. Some people are afraid to give their partner freedom and independence. BUT, more importantly, this inability to let our partners be who they are , is a subtle form of disrespect.

What does it say for your respect for yourself? Drives me nuts when I see women not let their husbands go out with the guys or are jealous of other women. We have changed faiths, political parties, numerous hair colors and styles, but we love each other and possibly even more.

Our grown kids constantly tell their friends what hopeless romantics we are. And the biggest thing that keeps us strong is not giving a fuck about what anyone else says about our relationship. I can get on board with that. Among major life changes people told me their marriages went through and survived: Amazingly, these couples survived because their respect for each other allowed them to adapt and allow each person to continue to flourish and grow.

You know who they are today, but you have no idea who this person is going to be in five years, ten years, and so on. You have to be prepared for the unexpected, and truly ask yourself if you admire this person regardless of the superficial or not-so-superficial details, because I promise almost all of them at some point are going to either change or go away.

1,500 People Give All the Relationship Advice You’ll Ever Need

Much like the body and muscles, it cannot get stronger without stress and challenge. You have to fight. You have to hash things out. Obstacles make the marriage. John Gottman is a hot-shit psychologist and researcher who has spent over 30 years analyzing married couples and looking for keys to why they stick together and why they break up. What Gottman does is he gets married couples in a room, puts some cameras on them, and then he asks them to have a fight. He asks them to fight. Successful couples, like unsuccessful couples, he found, fight consistently. And some of them fight furiously.

He has been able to narrow down four characteristics of a couple that tend to lead to divorces or breakups. The reader emails back this up as well.

1. Be Together For the Right Reasons

Out of the 1,some-odd emails, almost every single one referenced the importance of dealing with conflicts well. But all of this takes for granted another important point: Be willing to have the fights. Say the ugly things and get it all out in the open. This was a constant theme from the divorced readers.

There were times when I saw huge red flags. Instead of trying to figure out what in the world was wrong, I just plowed ahead. And instead of saying something, I ignored all of the signals. You can be right and be quiet at the same time. In fact, his findings were completely backwards from what most people actually expect: To me, like everything else, this comes back to the respect thing.

Compromise is bullshit, because it leaves both sides unsatisfied, losing little pieces of themselves in an effort to get along. Conflict becomes much easier to navigate because you see more of the context. A similar concept seems to be true in relationships: But how do you get good at forgiving?

What does that actually mean? Again, some advice from the readers:. And finally, pick your battles wisely. You and your partner only have so many fucks to give , make sure you both are saving them for the real things that matter. One piece of advice that comes to mind: Some things matter, worth getting upset about. Like Chinese water torture: Is it worth the cost of arguing? Eventually your kids grow up, your obnoxious brother-in-law will join a monastery and your parents will die. You got it… Mr. You and your partner need to be the eye of the hurricane.

Even cleaning up when you accidentally pee on the toilet seat seriously, someone said that — these things all matter and add up over the long run. This seems to become particularly important once kids enter the picture. The big message I heard hundreds of times about kids: Parents are expected to sacrifice everything for them. But the best way to raise healthy and happy kids is to maintain a healthy and happy marriage. A good marriage makes good kids. So keep your marriage the top priority. Make time for it. Sex starts to slide.

No other test required. I still remember back in college, it was one of my first relationships with a cute little redhead.

We were young and naive and crazy about each other. And, because we happened to live in the same dorm, we were banging like rabbits. We fought more often, found ourselves getting annoyed with each other, and suddenly our multiple-times-per-day habit magically dried up. To my surprised adolescent male mind, it was actually possible to have sex available to you yet not want it.

It was almost, like, sex was connected to emotions. For a dumb year-old, this was a complete shocker. That was the first time I discovered a truth about relationships: If the relationship is good, the sex will be good. You both will be wanting it and enjoying it. When the relationship is bad — when there are unresolved problems and unaddressed negative emotions — then the sex will often be the first thing to go out the window. This was reiterated to me hundreds of times in the emails.

The nature of the sex itself varied quite a bit among couples — some couples take sexual experimentation seriously, others are staunch believers in frequency, others get way into fantasies — but the underlying principle was the same everywhere: But sex not only keeps the relationship healthy, many readers suggested that they use it to heal their relationships.

That when things are a bit frigid between them or that they have some problems going on, a lot of stress, or other issues i. A few people even said that when things start to feel stale in the relationship, they agree to have sex every day for a week. Then, as if by magic, by the next week, they feel great again.

The sooner everyone accepts that, the happier everyone is. We all have things we like to do and hate to do; we all have things we are good at and not so good at.

TALK to your partner about those things when it comes to dividing and conquering all the crap that has to get done in life. Everyone has an image in their mind of how a relationship should work. Both people share responsibilities. Both people manage to finely balance their time together with the time for themselves. Both pursue engaging and invigorating interests on their own and then share the benefits together. Both take turns cleaning the toilet and blowing each other and cooking gourmet lasagna for the extended family at Thanksgiving although not all at the same time.

The fact is relationships are imperfect, messy affairs. Well, maybe if you had been listening, asshole. The common theme of the advice here was be pragmatic. If the wife is a lawyer and spends 50 hours at the office every week, and the husband is an artist and can work from home most days, it makes more sense for him to handle most of the day-to-day parenting duties. My wife loves cleaning no, seriously , but she hates smelly stuff.

So guess who gets dishes and garbage duty? Stevens has been a pastor and marriage counselor for all of four decades. Midway in his profession, he turned to serious writing including some of what seemed like hopeless marriage cases that he counseled with success. These practical, spiritual, and physical promptings have helped hundreds of couples to put new commitment, life, and meaning into, or back into, their marriages. Stevens uses a very practical, often humorous down to earth approach in sharing with his readers.

All of his sure-fire tips are wrapped in strong biblical wisdom that cuts divorce rates and saves children from broken homes. Over the years many couples will attest to his wise council. Yes, you can save a broken marriage! To your Successful marriage and to those you share this book with, www. Are you an author?

Help us improve our Author Pages by updating your bibliography and submitting a new or current image and biography. Learn more at Author Central. Popularity Popularity Featured Price: Low to High Price: High to Low Avg. Available for download now. Catching a Second Wind Jan 06, Stevens , Dr David R. Only 1 left in stock more on the way. Available to ship in days. Temporarily out of stock. Marriage Dec 01, Usually ships within 1 to 3 months. Provide feedback about this page.

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