Improving your relationship or bettering your bond with your partner can feel unachievable when life is happening. However, there are little things that you can do daily to improve your relationships over time.
Arguments and misunderstandings are normal, and can even be considered necessary ingredients to get the wheels of your relationship turning, so don’t lose hope just yet or simply because you seem to be experiencing a rough patch at the moment.
Ever so often, if you want to improve your relationship, here are a couple of tips that will help you do so.
How To Greatly Improve Your Relationship
#1. Become An Expert In Empathy:
One of the earliest lessons that we learned growing up is to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes because it introduces you to the concept of empathy. Now, empathy is about more than just acknowledging someone’s feelings, it’s also about trying to understand how these feelings are influencing their actions.
The truth is it has become easy to lose sight of empathy, especially in the heat of an argument because the mild assumption is, your partner’s point of view stands in the way of yours, and what you know or think, and if only you could make them see things your way, then you know the argument would be over. True as it may be, this kind of thought pattern may seem right to you but would actually stop you from showing empathy because it tries to simply position your partner as an obstacle and the crisis might worsen cause you would begin to question why they’re actually pushing back and not just agreeing with you.
It’s public knowledge that when someone feels listened to and empathized with, they’re more likely to continue to open up and to share more, which leads to more intimacy and closeness overall than when a person feels shut down and like they’re never listened to.
Lack of empathy could make them shut down over time and can chip away at a relationship resulting in superficial communication and increased emotional separation over time.
#2. Identify Your Emotional Triggers:
Emotional triggers is something everyone has, it’s therefore advisable to not push people’s buttons in an argument.
Personally, we all have or know that one topic that when raised in an argument can launch us into complete insanity, into an irrational stratosphere of anger in a matter of seconds.
The reason that these things hit so differently is that it is likely tied to past hurt or trauma that perhaps you may have experienced. For instance, say you grew up with an abusive parent who took advantage of the other working parent if you feel like your partner has stopped contributing to the housework recently, you may become disproportionately mad and if they don’t clear the table after dinner you may suddenly flare up for something relatively insignificant; like an unclean table, turning it into a launchpad for a major fight.
Learning to identify your emotional triggers and more importantly, why you react to them will help you become a better communicator.
Self-reflection and some introspection are key to anyone’s emotional growth because the more you can understand your reactions, the more productive and open your conversations would be.
Once you come to understand what’s really going on with you, you can begin to explain to your partner why such things trigger you so much and so easily.
Moving forward, you can both then find a solution to whatever the problem is, together in a loving, reassuring way
#3. Know When To Yield :
One of the hardest things to do during a conflict is to stop and redirect focus. Without fuss, we’ve all said wrong things that we wished we could take back after we weren’t so angry like earlier.
A perfect example is perhaps a scenario where you have drafted that strongly worded message to address the frustration you are feeling or felt but after calming down, maybe you took some of the venom out of that message before hitting the send button.
It is never easy, but being able to break down, shift, and reassess your feelings is a good way to maintain a healthy social connection.
If you’re in an argument with your partner that seems to be getting a little too heated, see if there’s an opportunity for you to hit the pause button.
- You can walk out of the room, or go for a walk.
- Revisit the issue only when both of you have had a chance to breathe to settle or calm down.
- Never utter words you haven’t given yourself ample time to think about, you know words spoken can never be taken back easily.
#4. Be Curious
Let’s be honest, your partner is a pretty special person, otherwise, you wouldn’t have chosen to be with them, right?
You would likely have been drawn to the qualities in them that made them intriguing.
Being intimate with someone means staying interested in it, being ever curious about who they are and how they think. This kind of curiosity and interest can be amplified during communication.
Now, while it may be tough to do so during a fight, you can take some time afterward to connect with your partner and objectively explore the choices they’ve made and allow them to explore your thought process as well. Sometimes exploring how best communication should be devolved can navigate your choices the next time that you guys have a conversation.
#5. Read Between The Lines
Naturally, an argument between two strangers is largely two-dimensional because you know you don’t know them, and they don’t know you so one person hurls an insult, and the other person may give back double without precision. Everything eventually fizzles out, everybody goes their way.
Sadly, this usually isn’t the case for romantic partners who can bring years of baggage, expectations, resentment, and history to these quarrels.
Often with couples, what they’re arguing about on the surface isn’t exactly what they’re actually fighting about, most of these arguments are actually about an unmet need.
This is often when one or both parties feel like, they’re not being taken care of in some way. In order to truly identify what’s happening under the surface, couples need to think deeply about what they’re really asking for and make sure they communicate that.
You know, sometimes the arguments and the anger is deeper than what they did today, it’s not just about leaving the coffee mug on the table. It’s way deeper than that, and sometimes you need to dig a little deeper and ask a few more questions to be able to get to the bottom of what’s really ticking them off.
#6. Be Slow To Anger and Quick To Listen.
A heated argument can sometimes feel like going to war so during a spat, tempers flare, egos inflate, and the battle gets underway. However, as we rush to fortify our defenses, and deploy secret weapons, the question we should ask ourselves is; are we stopping to actually hear our partners out?
When having a fight, it’s easy to fall back on old mistakes or use your partners’ past behavior against them. One might even get mad all over again when we think back to their past actions. The problem is that we allow our anger to cloud our partner’s past into the present and even if it is true that they may have acted selfishly in the past, it doesn’t mean that selfishness is what is driving them right now, or driving them today.
The truth is, when we don’t listen to our partners, we deny them the opportunity to be validated and feel loved. Your relationship cannot move into the future if you’re still fighting someone from the past, and this is something that a lot of people do.
As soon as there’s an argument, you go and take up something that happened 2000 years ago and remind them of how they did this to you and how you will never forget.
There’s no way that a relationship can proceed or continue to grow if they’re continuous references to past failures or past faults. If you really want to see growth in relationships, you’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that your partner let you down at some point but came back and was willing to make amends.
You really need to get past that point to where you’re willing to accept that they came back, made amends, and never looked back, or else you will never be able to heal properly and grow from there.
#7 Anticipate Their Needs.
In order for a relationship to heal, both partners need to actively want to work towards improving their relationship.
Doing the work is hard but it’s a hardship that you must frame as a positive challenge, otherwise, you’ll likely be less motivated to keep working when the relationship hits a speed bump.
You must try challenging yourself by anticipating what their needs are and what they may need from you in the future. If you know your partner is going into a challenging work week, for example, you can prepare yourself to be extra supportive during that time. In fact, a 2018 study showed that “when a partner was able to explain a stressful situation to an attentive listening partner, they were more likely to report high levels of satisfaction with their relationship.”
Finally, if you want to strengthen your relationship, don’t just passively listen to your partner. Let them actually know that they’re being heard. Reach out to them in ways that nobody else can. The fact is, you know them that well, so use it to your advantage. Don’t let them use perfect strangers at work; colleagues and friends as sounding boards, you would immediately be at a disadvantage.
As their partner, you know them better than everybody else, and so you should always attempt to be miles ahead in terms of treating them right and making them feel good. Don’t take your partner for granted!
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