Rebound relationships can be quite intense. It’s often the case that the longer the previous relationship, the more intense the rebound. Why does this happen?

Rebounds have a lot to do with our attachment makeup (based on early life development). To create a visual, imagine for a second that you have a bunch of strings coming out of you — each string representing a type of need based on our attachment type. When in a relationship, most or all of these strings are attached to our significant others (like a plug into an outlet). When we make this connection, our partner essentially soothes our attachment needs by being the recipient of these strings.

When going through a breakup, it’s a form of emotional crisis. Even if we weren’t happy in our relationship, there’s an overarching feeling of being grounded in the sense that our attachment needs are being soothed. The longer the relationship, the stronger the “strings” become, and the more unconsciously dependent they become on this other “object” (our partner) to maintain this connection. So, when the strings are suddenly pulled away from our mate, we suddenly end up with these emotional strings aimlessly flying around in the wind waiting to attach to someone. It can feel similar to breaking a long-term addiction all at once — there’s generally no weaning process in a breakup. (It has been said that love is a form of addiction).

A bed can be for more than just sleep and sex. It’s can also be a place and opportunity to increase the togetherness of your relationship. When managing the stresses of daily life, it can become easy to give up something seemingly simple, such as going to bed at the same time as your partner. Sometimes working at home may keep one partner up; or maybe one wants to watch something on tv while the other is tired and wants to go to bed; or maybe one just prefers to spend more time awake late at night reading or getting other things done while the other prefers an earlier bed time; and so on.

How bedtime is handled within a relationship can become symbolic of the overall nature of a relationship. It’s common for some couples who don’t go to bed together to feel out of sync in other areas of the relationship as well. This doesn’t mean that going to bed separately is the cause of other issues, but going to bed together can provide the opportunity to increase togetherness and actually repair some issues.

Sex in relationships is not always easy to maintain. Many things get in the way, from creating time for intimacy, to our own emotional issues that block intimacy, to issues in the relationship. It would take an entire book to discuss all the possible obstacles that could come between a couple and a healthy sex life, so rather than do this, let’s go right to some possible solutions.

There are many things couples can do to improve the state of their sexual relationship. The suggestions I’m presenting here are intended to cover a range of possible obstacles couples run into.

Here are seven suggestions to help get your sex life back on track:

The ability to  show appreciation to the important people in our lives is heavily underrated. When we feel under-appreciated, it can start eating away at our relationships. We may start to feel taken for granted, or taken advantage of, and get a sense that our partners, family, or friends don’t actually regard what they bring to our lives.

If you take the time to make someone a cup of coffee every day, and they never say ‘thank you’, and act as if it your job to do this, after a while you may start to become annoyed at the person. In our lives, we serve many figurative cups of coffee, and other people do the same for us, in whatever form this may actually take. Just like we want to be appreciated, so do others.

Here are seven ways to show appreciation.

It depends.

People respond to a partner’s affair in different ways, depending on personal values. Some may respond by immediately leaving the relationship without looking back. Some may believe in the concept of working through adversity together and seeing if they can make it through as a stronger couple. Some may believe that the family is paramount (especially when children are involved) and want to work things out for the sake of the family staying together. And so on.

No matter the personal value systems at play, a relationship can survive an affair only if both partners actively want it to. If only one partner is interested in fighting for the relationship, it will be a frustrating uphill battle that can have compounding negative effects (e.g. lowered self-esteem and self-worth).

It can be very hard to say “no” to people. It seems like it should be an easy thing to do; someone asks a question, we want to say “no,” but something stops us from actually letting the word out, or even speaking a comparable, more gentle variation. In many cases, we end up either saying “yes” when we don’t really want to, or we outright lie. But saying “no” is a necessary skill to have in our relationships with friends, family, and significant others.

What makes this so difficult?