If you are bickering with your spouse a lot, odds are that you get on edge fairly frequently.
Traffic is horrible, and you’re yelling in your car at the jerk who pulled right in front of you. You hate your f#$&%@$ job, and your boss is such a jerk. Then you get home, hoping to find some peace and rest. Not today. Here we go again and the fight starts, usually for some utterly unimportant reason.
Then your son comes with a request.
But the poor kid isn’t aware what’s going on. So he feels your wrath too as you snap at him.
So what do you do?
Well, I don’t know about you but I go out. Or to my office, where I do unimportant stuff on the computer. Too stressed to do anything important.
How about my wife? Bathtub! The ultimate refuge. Sometimes it seems like the only place to escape the madness. It feels so good to ignore the mess out there.
The thing is, the longer this lasts and the more frequent such situations occur, the stronger the separation and disconnect between partners becomes.
Of course, not every marriage turns out like that.
But you know from experience that if you aren’t getting along with your spouse, the rest of your life does not have that same luster as when things are good.
How to Break The Pattern
Dr. John Gottman, one of the few living legends in marital therapy, conducted a series of interviews and recordings with hundreds of couples. He found an interesting commonality among successful couples.
Every day, every week, every month, these couples are having pleasant conversations with no tension, no arguing. It immediately becomes obvious that big gestures of affection cannot replace this, no matter how pleasant they might be.
They are simply not frequent enough. There’s only one Valentines’ day in a year, and one day when it’s your loved one’s birthday. There’s just one day when you celebrate your wedding anniversary, right?
The Love Account
When my wife and I were at the peak of our problems it was exactly this treasure chest of good memories (positive interactions) from the early days of our relationship that helped save our butts. It gave us strength to push through the stormy times, try new things, and finally start crumbling the walls around our hearts that we’d built over the years.
Think of it like making small deposits of money to your savings account every day. The same goes for your relationship only in this case it’s your emotional account.
We call it The Love Account.
Your main goal should be to do everything in your power to keep adding deposits to your spouse’s Love Account, no matter what. When they see your effort, it is only natural that they will try to do the same thing for you. That’s where the magic happens.
How do I know that?
Because my wife and I achieved that, and now we’re protecting it more than anything.
When you get this positive quid pro quo occurring, a certain playfulness starts to emerge in the relationship. Flirting and genuinely caring about one another becomes easy. You feed off the energy of the other. A connection is maintained and you could say that you are just…happy to be with your spouse.
What Can You Do Today?
If you want to start adding to your Love Account today, then this might be a good fit for you. It’s an awesome new marriage event created by my friends Dustin & Bethany Riechmann over at Engaged Marriage.
(UPDATE: The best part is that it’s currently still FREE for members of our community.)
Here’s just a taste of what you’ll learn:
- How to make dramatic improvements in your communication, sex, and intimacy in just 15 minutes
- The 2-minute romance technique you can use immediately to make your spouse say “WOW” (without them even realizing you did it)
- How to make real progress towards living your Dream Marriage over the next 28 days, even when life is super busy
- Exactly how to get started this week with a step-by-step plan that ensures you see quick results in your marriage… WITHOUT sacrificing all your precious family time
They have multiple times available to ensure you have an opportunity that best meets your busy schedule!
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