“One day, your face will turn old, and your skin will wrinkle. But a sincere smile for the person you love will always be as fresh as the first day you met.”
Having someone to share the happy and the difficult moments in life with you is the best thing there is. Unfortunately, we often blame the people who are our biggest support for our personal dissatisfaction. If you think your partner is to blame for your life not going the way you want, think twice. Get moving and take your partner with you.
7 important things you need to do to keep your relationship fresh:
- Don’t decline together, improve together. If your life has been reduced only to work, home, and TV, you will eventually become very dissatisfied (and unhealthy). It will reflect on your partner and ruin your relationship. Stop whining and reading the bad news. Start going out together and hanging out with other people. Don’t spend the next few decades looking for your partner’s flaws and competing over who spent more time at the doctor’s office.
- Start exercising, and make sure to include your partner. You will both be healthier and happier. If only you are fit and feel great, how do you think your neglected partner will feel when she sees you? She/he will become even more frustrated and think “while you work on yourself, I work on everything else.” Being healthy and fit is great – stay healthy together.
- If your partner wants to educate herself or work on her personal growth in any way, be sure to support her. Don’t try to stop her by looking for a thousand reasons not to do so. Help her (him) to free up the necessary time – stay with kids, help her with the cooking, and so on. Don’t be selfish. When a person starts self-improving, she feels great. That radiates onto everyone around her, especially to her partner. Happy partner – happy you.
- Always make a plan for tomorrow, or better yet, for the whole week. Get a whiteboard and put it in the kitchen. Write down everything you need to do, and make sure you share responsibilities. That way, you will manage to complete everything in time and have more time for yourself.
- Associate good things with your partner; it is the main reason why you are together. Don’t associate your partner only with family obligations and problems. It will happen sooner or later if you talk only about these things. Maintain the good rituals you had when you first met, and introduce some new ones. That way you will always keep your relationship fresh.
- Eliminate fast food ordering and eating of sweets together. Bad habits love good company; food is the same way. No one eats pizza, cakes, or ice cream alone. But if you order fast food, and your partner decides she doesn’t want to eat that anymore, you’ll stop ordering junk food too. It hurts the most to watch yourself declining, while the one next to you is improving.
- When you feel like turning on the TV, spend time with your partner instead. Every minute wasted on TV takes away time from much more important things. Sit on your balcony and enjoy the evening together.
(Take the first step immediately. Start with my free audiobook, Fulfilling Life: A Matter of Personal Choice. Together with its accompanying checklists, it will help you start making changes.)
Flowers do not grow without watering. Don’t take your partner for granted. When you first met, you tried to do everything perfectly, and nothing was difficult, just to make her happy. Sometimes, over time, this can turn into a contest about who is more skillful at transferring as much work as possible to his partner. If you want a healthy and growing relationship, do your best.
Links:
- Free downloads: PDF and the audiobook Fulfilling Life: A matter of Personal Choice with all the accompanying checklists you need to get started
- Great Books for a Great Life – all the answers to your questions in one place
“In order to write about life, first you must live it.”– Ernest Hemingway