Relationships tend to be the most balanced when the foundation is strong. If you can get the basics down, you’re much more likely to have a long-lasting and happy marriage.

Here are nine steps to a happy marriage (or non-married relationship):

1. Worry about your own relationship. Couples can make the mistake of paying too much attention to what’s going on in the relationships around them, and making comparisons to how other people’s relationships function. What works for their relationship may not work for yours, and vice versa. Stick to what works for you and your partner, even if it seems to go against the grain of others.

Many individuals and couples come into therapy with a similar relationship complaint: being married isn’t what they expected. More specifically, the reality of marriage is not aligned with their fantasies of marriage.

It’s nice to have fantasies. They give us goals, the drive to achieve, hope, desire, and more. However, when we expect that reality is going to match our fantasies, disappointment results when the picture we painted in our minds doesn’t come true. If our fantasies are unrealistic, even good, positively-functioning relationships can be experienced as bad, negative, and disappointing.

How many times have we heard the cliche, “The grass is always greener on the other side?” While the overuse of this phrase has mostly dulled its impact, people who experience the “grass is greener syndrome” endure a significant struggle with commitment.

What causes this issue?

The hallmark of the “grass is greener syndrome” is the idea that there is always something better that we are missing. So rather than experiencing stability, security, and satisfaction in the present environment, the feeling is there is more and better elsewhere, and anything less than ideal won’t do. Whether it’s with relationships, careers, or where you live, there is always one foot out the door.

Everybody in a relationship has moments of feeling frustrated, aggravated, or angry at their partner. While this is common, unleashing emotions towards our partners is not a healthy behavior, and repeated arguments can be corrosive for a relationship.

When you feel angry at your partner, here are some ways to calm yourself before it gets out of hand:

Stress is rarely something experienced as enjoyable, even if some people thrive on it. Unfortunately, stress is nearly inevitable, especially in today’s world. What people often don’t realize is that we have all the resources we need to be able to reduce stress. The challenge is to learn how to identify and use these resources.

Before being able to implement stress reduction techniques, we have to be able to recognize signs of stress. Some symptoms are more obvious than others. The more specifically we can understand our triggers — for example, not just knowing that work causes stress, but knowing what specifically in our work causes stress — the more we can do to prepare for stress, and ultimately reduce or prevent it altogether.

What is your New Year’s resolution?

This is one of the fun points of turning the calendar — reflecting on the past year and considering our goals for the next 365 (or 366) days. I have heard many well-intentioned resolutions for healthy personal improvements: make new friends, eat less dessert foods, quit smoking, conquer a phobia, pay more attention to partners and loved ones, spend more time with children, go to the gym, increase dating life, save more money, spend money (for chronic savers), balance personal vs. career life, improve stress management, etc.

It’s a lot of work raising a human being from scratch. You’re handed a baby with a blank slate and are left to fill it with a world of knowledge, skills, emotions, and much more. The current trend in parenting has leaned towards encouraging the emotionally self-aware and self-determined child. Self-awareness and self-determination are important tools to develop as a person becomes a part of the world. But, unless we’re looking to raise self-centered and self-focused people, filling a clean slate requires much more than this.

This post is about a common relationship issue: gift-giving anxiety. With the Hallmark holidays constantly expanding (and now that it’s November), men and women in any significant relationship — girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, wives — are all in the same boat of constantly looking for new ways to make their significant other feel special on a gift-giving occasion. But what isn’t always discussed is the anxiety that many people feel in having to generate new ideas and still have them be meaningful.

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.

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.