How To Protect Your Relationship From Stagnating

Posted: June 2nd, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Marriage help and advice | Tags: Relationship advice |

How To Protect Your Relationship From Stagnating

 

There are so many ways to stop your relationship from stagnating and an often overlooked way is through cooperation.  

 

Cooperation is when you and your partner work together for a mutual benefit.  You have shared goals and shared responsibilities and you both work together to achieve the outcome.  You are in effect a team and as a team you both make sure that what needs to be done gets done.

 

Now an often overlooked aspect of marriage is the idea that you and your partner are a team, and you pull together in the same direction.  Now there may be an unwritten rule that this is naturally going to happen once you’re both committed to each other, but I’ve never had a client yet, who sees herself and her husband as a team, and even if she did, he didn’t.

 

And this is a big problem because if you and your spouse aren’t working together, pulling in the same direction and having the same or similar priority for your relationship, then you will drift apart, and the excitement that is usually there at the beginning of a relationship will dissipate.   

 

Is your priority the same as your husbands?

 

Another often overlooked important aspect to building a great relationship is how high a priority is your relationship- it’s wellbeing, compared to your husbands?  What I mean is that if I asked you to score your level of priority from a zero to ten where 10 makes your relationship your top priority and zero it isn’t that important at all, where you would place your relationship?  2?  6?  10?

 

And if you were to ask your husband where he places it where would he say?  Would it be the same or similar as yours?

 

And even if you don’t ask him to tell you in numbers where  how high a priority  he places your relationship, what he does will also tell you. 

 

You see given that we spend time on what’s most important to us, despite what we may say, you can get an idea just how important your relationship is to you and your husband based on how much time and effort you both spend on your relationship where cooperating with each other is key.

 

Now let’s say that you say your relationship is a high priority, but when your partner wants you to go out with him somewhere you are tired or busy- or vice versa, this will tell you how much of a priority your relationship is in reality.  And the level of cooperation is also a very good indication of how high a priority your relationship really is.    

 

Priority and cooperation is important if your relationship is to thrive and not stagnate. 

 

How to tell if cooperation is or is not high in your relationship

 

·         You agree – in the main- what needs to be done and who should do it

·         You don’t continually make concessions so things get done

·         Things run smoothly not because one person is running ragged but because both of you are pulling your weight

·         One of you is complaining about the workload or lack of time

·         One of you is resisting stepping up to their part of the deal

·         One of you is reluctant to take the agreed action

·         You don’t agree on course of action to be taken and it becomes stalled

·         One of you agrees in principle but sabotages the outcome

·         You pay lip service to the agreed action by doing the barest minimum of effort you can get away with

 

You get the idea.

 

The aim here is to recognise that by cooperating you are both pulling in the same direction and that increases relationship intimacy, and togetherness.  And when you don’t it will pull you apart and the relationship will suffer.

 

This is easy to overcome as you can see- all it takes is for you and your partner to talk about where you both want your relationship to go and work toward that.  If, as it has been for most of my clients, that your partner doesn’t have a view of where he wants the relationship to go, then you decide.

 

And here’s the deal here.  If you are the one who is deciding on where your relationship is going then what you say goes.  In any team, if the responsibility has been left to one person because the other person doesn’t or can’t give input, then if it has been left to you, then they have to cooperate with what needs to be done to keep your relationship on track.

 

The reason I say this is because it’s very easy to criticise or resist what needs to be done as  that just adds tension to the relationship- so with just one person taking the responsibility the other person has to support.

 

Part of cooperation is being able to work together as a team, and we all have strengths in different aspects of our relationship. By thinking and talking this through, you can both work more effectively together as a couple if you both play to your strengths.

 

 Another aspect of it is also to be clear where you are both cooperating and where you are not and take the time to work on working together on this.  If by default you find that you are the one who is taking responsibility for the well being of your relationship, then make sure you communicate this well to your partner because their role then is to take direction and cooperate. 

 

Cooperation is an often overlooked aspect of keeping the spark alive in a relationship- so take on board the things we’ve talked about here and let me know of your progress.  

 

If you also want to know about the 7 key areas that cause the most uncooperative behaviour that can threaten to derail your relationship- and potential solutions for you, then leave me your questions below.

 

Until the next time….

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