Helpful Advice for Marriage – Part 1

Your marriage is a very precious relationship, which needs time and attention to enable it to grow. But it also needs the right advice . This article will share with you trustworthy advice for marriage, based on the extensive clinical  research of author John Gottman.

Key Advice for marriage: it’s about the friendship

The key to a good marriage, says Gottman, is not just about how you handle disagreements with your partner. It’s also about how you relate to each other when you’re not fighting. In other words, it’s about the quality of your friendship. If your friendship is strong, then your marriage will be, too. But if your friendship is weak, if you live parallel lives, and barely interact, then it’s no surprise that your marriage will be weak.

Click Here for a Definitive Guide on How to Save Your Marriage

Gottman uncovers seven principles that all happy couples seem to adhere to, with unhappy couples falling short of at a least one of them. This article will look at the first two principles.

Principle 1: Get to know each better

This is great advice for marriage. Happy couples are couples that know each other well, whereas couples on the verge of divorce usually have long since given up getting to know each other better. In fact, they barely tolerate each other, let alone show an active interest in their spouse.

So the point is this: get to know your spouse deeply. Be intimately familiar with all aspects of your spouse’s life: their likes and dislikes; their dreams and fears; their goals.

If you know each other well, then you’re able to treat each other in ways that you both appreciate, by depositing into each other’s ‘emotional bank account’ (you can read more about emotional bank accounts in marriage).

Without this detailed knowledge of your spouse, you can’t really know your spouse (at least not intimately). And if you don’t really know them, how can you love them?  On the other hand, if you do know them well, and understand them, then it’s easier to stay connected as life swirls around you.

There are many ways to get to know each other better. The important thing is to be deliberate about it. Why not take some time, (when you’re both feeling relatively relaxed), and ask each other questions about each others likes and dislikes; goals and dreams; fears; and memorable life events. Pretend you’re a reporter for a major news channel, and you’ve been asked to write a story on your spouse. This should help get you started!

Principle 2: Nurture fondness and admiration for your spouse

The next bit of advice for your marriage is this: be sure to nurture your fondness and admiration for your spouse.

Gottman found that if a couple has a reserve of positive feeling toward each other, then it acts like a buffer when times get tough. This is because positive feelings act like an antidote to contempt, which means that you’ll be less likely to slip into thoughts of divorce every time you have an argument.

Now if you’re marriage is in trouble, then you’ll unlikely have much fondess and admiration for each other. It may be buried deeply below other less positive memories. And so sometimes it helps to focus upon your past, those ‘good old days’, when perhaps you were dating. Remember how good it felt to be with your (now) spouse? How often did you think about them? What attracted you to them in the first place? What do you like about them now?

Once you have a list of things, be sure to share them with your spouse. This will help to fan the flame of positive feeling.

By reminding yourself of these positive qualities – even though you might struggle with other flaws – you can prevent a happy marriage from deteriorating (or start rebuilding a broken marriage).  Having these positive feelings will then make it easier to address problem areas in your marriage, and make some positive changes.

Conclusion

Hopefully you’ll be able to put this advice for your marriage into practice. Get to know your spouse. And nurture fondness and admiration for them. There’s some advice for a good marriage.

Click Here for a Definitive Guide on How to Save Your Marriage