Crucial Behaviors That Keep Love Alive

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rediscovering-love/201906/10-crucial-behaviors-keep-love-alive

As relationship partners get to know each other better over time, they are usually given access to each other’s emotional nakedness. They have likely shared their most vulnerable experiences, thoughts, and feelings with each other. Those admissions, confessions, and disclosures, have often been shared in intimate moments and some have never been confessed to any other partner.

Knowing these potentially embarrassing feelings or past experiences render each partner vulnerable to being more susceptible to being wounded if they are used as ammunition during a conflict. Partners who have been given access to the other’s inner world know what expressions or behaviors can wound, and those that can heal.

No matter how compatible they might be, intimate partners often do not always share all of the same beliefs, desires, or opinions. Some of their thoughts and actions may be directly in conflict and successfully negotiated or accepted as they are.

Having respect for the other’s partner’s way of experiencing life is crucial to any quality relationship. Many people believe that successful partners must agree on everything that is important. But, even in quality relationships, there may be crucial differences that are not easily negotiable. Those situations are more difficult for relationship partners to weather and resolve. Listening, exploring, and stretching beyond biases and prejudices are absolutely necessary to ensure a good outcome.

But striving for either continuous individual or partnership happiness doesn’t always work in an ongoing relationship. Sometimes it is actually the other partner that is challenging the other’s well-being. Those discrepancies can easily lead to conflict and cause temporary estrangement.

Given, then, that all relationship partners are bound to struggle at times, it is more important to focus on how quickly they can resolve and recover from those disputes. That is what resiliency is.