7 tips for healthy and harmonious romantic relationships
1. Love
I know this is stating the obvious. Love. However, love, as in unconditional love. Without judgments or other moralistic implications of rightness or wrongness about yourself or your partner. Create space for understanding and leave judgments outside of
your house door.
2.Genuineness
Simply put: be open with your partner at all times, on all subjects. For a relationship to be considered healthy there should be genuineness between the two parties (or more partners, if you choose to have an open relationship). Being real in a relationship is when you do not hide anything from yourself and as a consequence you don’t hide anything from your spouse/partner. This level of intimacy with yourself and your counterpart promotes harmony and understanding between partners.
3. Honesty
Being an open book -very similar to genuineness- creates a clear space that makes it very difficult to have fights or misunderstandings. Honesty means taking full responsibility for our thoughts, for our actions and for our words.
4. Expressing your needs
Express your basic human needs to your partner to bring unequivocal clarity. Meeting at the level of basic human needs means finding our common human ground and makes misunderstandings nearly impossible. Basic human needs are, for example: self-expression, personal space, uniqueness, sharing, closeness, etc...You can go to this link for a clearer definition of needs.
5. Compassion
Accept yourself without chastising or judging yourself. Accept your partner without chastising or judging them. Creating this kind of emphatic space dissolves any potential conflict quickly.
6. Empathy
“Walk in someone else’s shoes”. In other words, try to relate, emotionally, to what is happening within your partner. Are they perhaps feeling disappointed right now? Can you just hold their emotional pain, be there for them? Being heard, accepted and seen are strong basic human needs for many of us. The simple fact of being able to “open up space” for your partner in this non-judgmental, caring way can create a deep and intense bond.
7. Paraphrase
I like to call it, jokingly, parroting...What can paraphrasing do for you? Most of us have what in psychology is referred to as a “mental filter”. We interpret our world based on our own individual, biased standards. The words we hear, the images we see, the sounds we hear, the smells we smell...we give each and everyone of these sensual experiences meaning in our brain. By extension, often we filter the words of the counterpart to mean something quite different to what they were intending. Paraphrasing, repeating to them in our own words what we just believe we heard removes entirely the possibility for misunderstandings. We use this definition for paraphrasing.
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