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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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).

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