You’re even going to wake up some morning and think, “Ugh, you’re still here….” That’s normal! And more importantly, sticking it out is totally worth it, because. No! There will be days, or weeks, or maybe even longer, when you aren’t all mushy-gushy in-love. Then, the instant they realize they aren’t ‘gaga’ anymore, they think the relationship is broken and over, and they need to get out. They go into relationships with these unrealistic expectations. You are absolutely not going to be gaga over each other every single day for the rest of your lives, and all this ‘happily ever after’ bullshit is just setting people up for failure. Have Realistic Expectations About Relationships and Romance By itself, love is never enough to sustain a relationship.Ģ. It is something that can be both healthy or unhealthy, helpful or harmful, depending on why and how you love someone else and are loved by someone else. We’ll get more into codependence later, but for now, it’s useful to point out that love, itself, is neutral. This desire to use the love of someone else to soothe your own emotional problems inevitably leads to codependence, an unhealthy and damaging dynamic between two people where there exists a tacit agreement to use each other’s love as a distraction from one’s own self-loathing. The other “wrong” reason to enter into a relationship is, like Greg said, to “fix” yourself. Without that mutual admiration, everything else will unravel. Being young and naive and hopelessly in love and thinking that love would solve everything.Įverything that makes a relationship “work” (and by work, I mean that it is happy and sustainable for both people involved) requires a genuine, deep-level admiration for each other.Being together for image-because the relationship looked good on paper (or in photos), not because the two people actually admired each other.Feeling like a “loser” because they were single and settling for the first person that came along.When I sent out my request to readers for advice, I asked people who were on their second or third (or fourth) marriages what they did wrong the first few times.īy far, the most common answer was “being with the person for the wrong reasons.” Took me three tries to figure out what should have been obvious from the beginning, the only reason you should ever be with the person you’re with is because you simply love being around them. I got married the second time because I was miserable and lonely and thought having a loving wife would fix everything for me. I got married the first time because I was raised Catholic and that’s what you were supposed to do. and they work:īefore we even get into what you should do in your relationship, let’s start with what not to do.ĭon’t ever be with someone because someone else pressured you to. Which means that those dozen or so things must be pretty damn important. and yet they were all saying pretty much the same dozen things.

The answers came from smart and well-spoken people from all walks of life, from around the world, each with their own histories, tragedies, mistakes, and triumphs. That’s not an insult-actually, it’s the opposite, not to mention, a relief. It took weeks to comb through them all, but what I found stunned me.įor a start, they were all incredibly repetitive. Almost 1,500 people got back to me, many of whom sent replies measured in pages, not paragraphs.

what lessons would you pass down to others if you could? What is working for you and your partner? Also, to people who are divorced, what didn’t work previously? This is what I asked: anyone who has been married for 10+ years, and is still happy in their relationship. Why not crowdsource THE ULTIMATE RELATIONSHIP GUIDE TO END ALL RELATIONSHIP GUIDES™ from the sea of smart and savvy partners and lovers who come to ? Why not consult my readers? Why not ask them for their best relationship/marriage advice? Why not synthesize all of their wisdom and experience into something straightforward and applicable to any relationship, no matter who you are? I think a lot of newlyweds do this-ask for relationship advice, I mean, not shit the same bed-especially after a few cocktails from the open bar they just paid for.īut then I figured that with access to hundreds of thousands of smart, amazing people through my website, I could go one step further. When I got married nearly three years ago, at the wedding reception I asked some of the older and wiser folks who were attending for a few words of advice from their own relationships to make sure my wife and I didn’t shit the (same) bed.

A sweet paragraph for my boyfriend