Your Relationship is in Trouble: Has Your Partner Changed or Just Your View of Then Vs. Now?

The title of a great and popular old Off-Broadway play captures one of the most common sentiments I’ve seen when working with distressed couples: I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change.

If you have discovered that for some reason you and your partner are no longer growing together as a couple, it might be useful to look at why you actually got together in the first place, and how the things that originally attracted you to each other may look different once that initial attraction is gone. For example, if initially you loved that your partner had a great sense of humor, after some time you may see this same trait as obnoxious. If you were once attracted by the fact that your partner was “a lot of fun”, you may now believe that he or she cannot be serious. Take a look at this chart to see what may have changed in how you perceive your partner:

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Your Best Mantra for 2014

If you were to ask me what one thing the vast majority of the thousands of clients I’ve seen in my clinical psychology practice over the last 38 years have had in common, the answer might shock you. Almost without exception, what brings people to my office is what turns out to be a disconnect between the life they are living and the life they could be living if only they were empowered by their own choices.

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4 Reasons You May Be Thriving in One-sided Love Affairs

When your involvement in a relationship is not mutual, the result can be painful for both of you, but especially for the one who is more committed to the relationship. Unrequited love —one of the most popular movie and novel themes—has indeed been known to trigger extremely painful emotions. Sometimes just the recognition that your relationship comes under this category is all that is needed to help you make some necessary choices. Sometimes it’s to stay in a relationship that most would define as “unworkable“, but more often, it means getting out. Most people I’ve seen as a psychologist over the years, start by demanding change in the other person that will—at last—make involvement in their relationship mutual. Occasionally, they do get what they want. But changing your partner’s attitude toward you without his or her consent is the only route that’s truly impossible.

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Give the Rules That Govern Your Relationship a Makeover

Most relationships have a set of “built in” rules. These rules define your relationship “default position”; such as, what can and cannot take place between you and your partner (and others in your life) and what constitutes that which is normal. When you “break” those rules, you and your partner are likely to come into conflict. Generally the rules fit into three different categories: rules that are spoken, rules that are unspoken, and those that are automatic.

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Customizing Your Relationship

One key to avoiding the doldrums in your long-term relationship is to honor its uniqueness.  The best relationships are custom jobs, which take the distinctive traits, needs, concerns and idiosyncrasies of each partner into consideration. For example, some couples need to work on ways to spend more time together, while for others spending less together time will optimize their relationship. For some couples, taking a nice vacation together will do wonders, while for others, taking separate vacations sometimes can be a relationship saver.

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Don’t Be Ambivalent about Ambivalence

Ambivalence is a feeling that we all have experienced at one time or another in some important aspect of our lives—I know I certainly have.  But if you’re ambivalent often or in a lot of areas of your life, the feeling of ambivalence itself can actually destroy your quality of life more than you know.  Theoretically, if you had everything you could possibly want going for you, but were ambivalent about the decisions you make—particularly with respect to your life direction—no matter what you did have going for you, no matter what you choose to do, you could be dwelling on the fact that you should be doing something else.  Thus, no matter what kind of life you have made for yourself, being chronically ambivalent could ruin the quality of it all!

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