Love Letter: Secrets to Long-Term Relationship Success (9/27/23)
I’ve been hearing you all loud and clear – you want to see content for dating AND for relationships. Today’s Love Letter is my attempt at doing both – whether you’re dating or already in a committed relationship, today I’m sharing secrets to having a successful long-term relationship.
If you’re wondering if I have experience in this arena, I do 🙂 In addition to my 11 years of relationship coaching, Andrew and I are moving toward almost 10 years together. Our relationship is something that I’m so proud of, especially since before him, I never had a relationship that lasted longer than one year. (True story!)
That happened for a lot of reasons, but I think the biggest reasons was that I had no idea how to choose partners. It also happened because I had no idea how to weather the storms WITH someone. I had no idea how to recognize that a relationship was going to change and we were going to change over and over again.
I struggled with all of the things I am helping my clients with now – inner child work and learning how to be in a healthy relationship became the foundation for my life.
This is a big part of my “why” in my work with clients. My mission is clear – most of us weren’t taught how to love and be in relationships, but we can heal, and we can learn the skills to create conscious relationships.
The good news is that ANYONE can change their love life because we can choose to embody the mindsets and behaviors that make love work. I wanted to share some of my favorites around predicting relationship success so that this whole journey doesn’t have to seem so hard.
Your midweek mantra is, “I can choose to embody loving thoughts and loving behaviors. I love the power of my choice.”✨
Great relationships don’t require rocket science, and it doesn’t have to be so complicated.
I say love IS NOT complicated; we just make it so with our trauma, stories, dysfunction, fear, and unwillingness to learn the skills of love.
You don’t have to try so hard to “make something work” with someone.
You can tell fairly quickly whether or not something will work out. I empower my clients to spot the “keepers” and notice when they are engaging in their own fear-based patterns and behaving from their truth and empowerment.
These six predictors of relationship success are clear:
- You trust your partner to be reliable, dependable, and committed to your agreements.
- You bring out the best in each other and have compassion for one another when the difficult parts arise.
- You handle adversity in your lives as a team.
- Your communication lifts you up rather than brings you down.
- You handle conflict with respect, warmth, and kindness.
- You repair after conflict effectively.
Great partnership isn’t about perfection, but it does require warmth, respect, kindness, and commitment to always bringing out the best in each other and repairing in such a way that you feel closer after conflict rather than further away.
Trust is a funny thing – a lot of people trust blindly or say they have “trust issues.”
Trust is something that is SHOWN time and time again through emotional attunement, responsiveness, and keeping agreements.
You can relax into your being and show up the way you want when you are with a securely attached partner.
Being teammates is essential – it’s “US” against the world or the problem versus partners who end up being adversaries.
Additionally, it’s not one person trying to “save” the other person from their problems.
Individually, we tackle what is ours to tackle, and together, we handle what life brings to us.
The BEST NEWS is that we can learn the skills of dating and relating from an empowered place.
I work with individuals and couples who want to transform dysfunctional behavior into behavior that WORKS to create healthy love, who want to step into their power and experience a relationship with each person being able to bring the gifts of who they are to the table.
Check out The New Truth podcast episode from this week, “Do Ultimatums Work?” Learn why people give this last resort, what to do differently, and how to attract relationships that don’t need ultimatums.
I love you,
