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.

Once upon a time, there was this decade known as the 1950′s. In this time, women were mostly viewed as housewives. Husbands went to work, and wives stayed at home, raised the children, and kept the house up — laundry, cleaning, cooking, running the necessary errands, etc.

The clear gender roles were that the man works at a paying job and provides financially for the family, and the woman stays at home and makes sure everything in the home and with the children is taken care of. This was the “societal norm” at the time. However this setup tended to devalue the capabilities of women, and empower men, which set up a power hierarchy in the family (based on income).

Fast-forward to the present, and we have a world where a one-income family is rare, both parents generally work, the children are commonly cared for by nannies or other forms of child care, and the home is kept whenever there is time to make it happen, or by hiring outside help.

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.

Is your relationship feeling stagnant recently? Do you feel like you’re caught in a routine, ignoring each other, too busy to give time to your relationship, or just simply neglecting your relationship?

It can be easy to become complacent in our relationships, especially when living together on a daily basis. Life happens around us –we work, possibly have children to care for, keep up a home, try to see friends and family, deal with issues that come up, and so on. Things end up getting pushed to the front in our lives, while our relationships with our significant others are pushed to the back.

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.

How many times have you heard someone refer to a person’s personality or character, saying, “He’s a strong man”, or , “She’s a strong woman”? In managing our relationship with ourselves and interpersonal relationships, it is important to understand emotions, associated behaviors, and overall character traits that hurt us more than they help us. These traits we carry or see in others impact how we view and treat ourselves, how we present ourselves to others, and how we view and regard others.

One problematic stereotype is what people generally regard as a “strong” person. It’s problematic because there is often an inaccuracy of how people label “strength” — which impacts the qualities we admire or idealize in others, as well the traits that we want to develop and emphasize in ourselves. When people refer to a “strong” person, the traits that are being pointed to as “strong” are often closer to grandiosity, contempt, rigidity, stubbornness, aggressiveness, and desire to control others. All of these traits hold similarities to bullying.

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.