Marriage is sometimes entered into lightly, but the reality is that it’s a commitment which needs nurturing and patience in order to be successful. The secrets to a long and happy marriage are not really secrets at all, just knowing how to retain the love and friendship which brought you together in the first place.

1. If you get married thinking you can change your partner into someone else, forget it! You were undoubtedly attracted to them in the first place because of who they were, so why should you want them to change? Adapt yourself to fit in with your spouse if you want your marriage to succeed.
2. Whatever happens, don’t stop talking to each other. A problem shared is a problem halved so the saying goes, and it is definitely true in a marriage. Whatever your difficulties they can be sorted out together rather than apart.
3. Don’t stop being intimate with one another. Love and affection are so important in order to keep the spark alive in a marriage. Sex is important, but so is holding each other and considering the other’s needs and desires in a sexual relationship.
4. No-one is perfect, not even you! You should already know some of your spouse’s so called flaws before you marry, but sometimes in a domestic situation they can suddenly seem to have blown out of proportion. Learn to accept them, or subtly try to point them out, but never let them become a barrier in your relationship.
5. The worst thing anyone can do to someone close to them is to totally ignore them. The feeling of worthlessness this creates can cause a multitude of problems. In order for your marriage to remain a happy one, you must always appreciate the other’s point of view and make allowances.
6. Arguing is all part and parcel of living with someone. You can’t always agree no matter how close you are to one another. Don’t let the arguments get out of hand though, and don’t let them fester.
7. It’s important to retain the part of yourself which is outside of the marriage. So don’t let your friends disappear, keep up your relationships and spend time with them. It will also give you things to talk about when you get home.
8. Don’t take each other for granted. Don’t expect your spouse to automatically always do the chores or to accept your bad moods. Consider their feelings, and their daily tasks, and offer to help out.
9. Try to have time to yourselves when you can sit in a romantic setting and enjoy each other’s company as you did before you were married. It will remind you of why you got together in the first place, and will also help to create a deep friendship.
10. Whatever problems you encounter, and however awful they may seem at times, try to find it in your heart to forgive each other. A long and happy marriage is often built on the art of being able to forgive.

Technorati Tags: love, Marriage, marriage advice, marriage help, relationship, relationship advice, relationship help

My daughter was recently in her school’s performance of Fiddler On TheRoof. She was one of the daughters. If you don’t know the story, it focuses on the changing culture of marriage, from one where the marriage is arrainged by family and community to one based on mutual attraction.

In one of the songs, the main character asks his wife if she loves him. She replies that for 25 years, she has shared his bed, made his meals, tended his house, raised his children — so what kind of question is that? The point is that in their relationship, love wasn’t even a question or consideration. But after some back-and-forth, they decide that, indeed, they love each other.

This led me to think about what I know about marriage. And here is what I think about the question of love and marriage: we fall in love to get together, then spend the rest of our lives learning to love the other.

You see, the initial attraction is really about “I.” “I” feel a certain way, so I know I am “in love.” But that part of the relationship is driven by my need to feel that way, my need to be with the other person, my need to have my needs met. My needs are fueled by my desire to feel the intense emotion of “being in love.”

But in reality, love is a verb, something I do for the other. So, it takes the rest of my life to learn how to attend to my spouse’s needs. From my desire to be with my spouse comes my desire to meet my spouse’s love needs.

We are “fooled” into commitment by the overwhelming feeling of attraction, and then we have to put forth effort to create a sustained relationship. I say “fooled” because our culture has us believing that this love is the foundation of a relationship. It is not. It is merely a temporary starting point. It is not the destination. It is just a part of the journey to a lifetime relationship.

Those intense feelings will calm over time. The overwhelming need to be with someone that marks the infatuation portion of a relationship is not sustainable on its own. It’s like placing a flame in a bottle. Eventually, the flame will burn all the oxygen in the bottle and be extinguished.

So, there has to be some “fueling of the fire.” This is “love,” the verb. When I act in loving ways, I fuel the fire and keep it burning. If I stop tending to the other’s needs because I don’t feel that infatuation, the relationship will slowly (or not so slowly) die away.

When we continue to believe that “love” (infatuation) is the heart of a relationship, when that feeling is gone, we believe we are no longer in love. That is not the case; we have just failed to fuel the fire.

Reality TV has proven that any two people, given the right circumstances and settings, can fall into love (chemistry of infatuation). But story after story shows that it is harder to make the switch to “true love” that comes from action. Choose action, and don’t be fooled by chemistry.

By acting on love, by making love a verb and not an emotion, we keep the emotional fire stoked. And that is the great irony: if we depend on the feeling of being in love to keep us together, it will fail. But if we set that aside and focus on being loving, the feeling of being in love is sustained. Mature love is a verb, not an emotion.

Technorati Tags: love, Marriage, Restore Love

Married couples tend to disregard the importance of counseling, not knowing how essential counseling is when trying to save a marriage. Couples who experience problems with their union wait too long before seeking the help of a marriage counselor. Counseling has many benefits, such as giving space for people in a relationship to discover the cause of their conflicts in order to find the solutions to these problems. Lots of couples think that succumbing to counseling is just like admitting that their marriage is becoming a failure, and they don’t want that.

In order to save a marriage, you must look at what counseling can do to save your marital woes. To make counseling work, both partners must be fully committed to the cause saving the relationship. Counseling will not help if one of you is just going through it half-heartedly. A councilor will be of great help especially if you as a couple decided to seek advice earlier, before the damage have been truly done. To save a marriage, a couple must communicate openly and must be aware of even the subtle changes in the relationship. Being aware of such nuances can help contain issues before they become too difficult for counseling to solve.

Counseling will not work if one of you has already detached himself completely with the other. There is only so much that outside help can do to save a marriage. Full cooperation is needed to make counseling work for you. If the problem is already a bit complex, individual counseling can be done, especially if one partner is not comfortable spilling his guts out in the presence of the spouse.

Aside from counseling, there are other things that you can do to help save a marriage. One can seek the help of family and friends, provided that they are not biased towards one of you. People around you should be willing to recognize the faults and shortcomings of both partners in order to come up with fair advice.

Seeking the help of a marriage counselor can clear up the common problems that married couples face. These problems include infidelity, compatibility issues and communication problems. Counseling can even help individuals who let past experiences or relationships affect their marriage.

To save a marriage, both partners must be willing to do everything it takes to make the relationship work. Love must still be in the equation in order to make counseling work. Issues can become more complicated when certain factors are involved, such as children and financial problems. But a good counselor knows how to solve these problems. What’s good to know is that most marriages can be saved with good counseling, and both partners should have enough courage to face their problems and deal with the necessary in steps in order to restore the harmony in their union and save a marriage. Good counseling is easy to find; there are lots of counselors out there who are willing to do what they can to salvage what’s left of your marriage.

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Learning that your spouse had an affair is indeed painful and makes you feel victimized. It causes suffering not only for you but for your children as well. Trying to revive an affair-stricken marriage is one of the hardest things you will ever do. It takes courage on the part of the cheated spouse and time to heal the wounds caused by the affair.

You will definitely need determination to save a marriage damaged by a third-party affair. Divorce is an option chosen by many but a few are still willing to take the risk and try to repair the marriage despite the feelings of betrayal and emotional turmoil.

Saving your marriage after an affair is a long and tedious process that will take time. Those who have undergone the same experience could wish to just be able to tuck away the bad memory but unfortunately, it is not as easy as that. The first thing you have to do after confronting your spouse and learning that he or she indeed carried an affair is to accept that it happened and it was not your fault. You need to immerse yourself in feelings of grief and anger before you could move on, if that is what you really want.

A number of couples have grown stronger in marriage after an affair but this does not happen all the time. In some cases, the cheating party tends to repeat their mistakes over and over again. This is one important consideration if you are seeking to save a marriage.

If you had been the one cheated on by your spouse, it is understandable that you would feel like you would never be able to trust him or her again. There is no need to rush. And if your partner really regrets what happened, he will surely understand this. Even if the affair was just considered a “meaningless fling” by your partner, it would help if he or she would keep assuring you that he or she really is sorry for hurting you and betraying your trust.

Now if you are the one who cheated on your spouse, you should be the exerting more effort to save your marriage. You are going to have to repair the emotional damage you caused, which will surely prove to be quite a challenge.

Remember that your partner is going through a very tough time. After admitting your mistake, you need to assure your spouse daily how sorry you really are. Express your guilt, do not hold anything back. Above all, be ready to face the consequences of your actions. You might be feeling guilty and bad for the suffering of your partner, which sure is far greater than your own.

Working on rebuilding trust between married couples after an affair is a long and tedious process. Occasionally, the cheated party will be suspicious of everything the partner who had an affair does. The spouse who cheated must be willing to face these hardships as a result of his or her affair. He or she needs to work hard to regain the lost trust to save a marriage.

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Love is essential in order for a marriage to work, because most marriages are based on the love felt by partners for each other. Unless a marriage is just based on convenience, a union usually dissolves when love is already gone. To save a marriage means restoring love between the couple. It’s an unfortunate thing when love fizzles out of a marriage. In order to restore a healthy relationship it’s necessary to rekindle the love that you felt for your partner when you first got hitched.

To rekindle the love and passion in your relationship, you should first remember the things that you do for each other during the first stages of your relationship. Remember the times that you served breakfast in bed for your spouse, or the time you ordered a hundred roses just for your anniversary? Those little things are very important when it comes to maintaining the love in a relationship, and you need to bring them back if you want to save a marriage.

An effective way to tell if a marriage is in the doldrums is if the intensity of the sex has dwindled too. Couples who have been together for the longest time usually experience a lackluster period in their intimate life. More often that not, sex will become a bit stale at some point in a couple’s relationship. One way to save a marriage is to bring back the sizzle in your sex life. To resolve this problem, make a supreme effort to spend more time with each other. Make love like you once did when your relationship was still young. Remember the passion that the two of you had back then? Passion like that should never wane even when you’ve been together for many years now. Bring back the sizzle in your relationship by going on a vacation, just the two of you and have a second honeymoon. Take time off from your jobs and the kids and focus on getting to know each other intimately all over again.

Any relationship will have its own share of arguments and bitterness. The important thing however is to learn how to overcome them. Hiding resentment from your partner is a surefire way to dampen the love and passion that you have for your spouse. Learn how to talk things over and always strive to come into resolution. Get over your resentments. . To save a marriage, it is necessary to extend more understanding towards your mate.

Jealousy is a staple in every relationship. It can damage relationships, but it can actually put the love back in your union if experienced in healthy doses. As long as nothing destructive happens as a result of intense jealousy, a little bit of it can help you express how important your partner is to you.

Perhaps the most important thing of all is to remember to tell your spouse how much you love him or her. Knowing that your partner loves you back is essential to save a marriage. Do not say “I love you” on just special occasions; learn how to say it everyday, every chance you get. Being loved and knowing it is the most precious feeling in the world.

Technorati Tags: how to save a marriage, to save a marriage