How to be happy in a relationship? How to have a happy marriage? What makes a happy marriage? Perhaps love in its own right, the mutual feeling of never wanting to be with anyone else but the person you are currently with, being ready to do anything for them and not expect anything in return. Well, love is certainly a generous feeling, but it transforms with time, not into indifference, if we’re lucky, but into a different and even more beautiful version of itself. Here are the pillars on which any happy relationship rests.
1. Honesty
You can’t sustain a long-term relationship without being honest with each other. Romcoms where the characters lie to make themselves look better to the other one always end with a breakup over the lies followed by forgiveness and people starting to tell each other the truth. That’s one of the few things these movies get right – telling the truth is important.
Of course, this doesn’t mean pointing out every little thing that you don’t like about your significant other, just making sure he is aware that you don’t like it. Prioritise. Don’t hold back your delight at something he has done for you, express your appreciation; and by the same measure, don’t hold back your frustration with, for example, him overworking himself.
2. Trust
You’re going nowhere if you don’t trust each other. Jealousy and nagging suspicion are like a disease for any relationship, as well as for the person who’s having these feelings. However, it’s easy to succumb to them if you’ve been hurt and cheated on in the past.
If such is the case, remember that people are different and just because one of them has cheated on you, this doesn’t mean everyone will.
Do not ignore the obvious and do not imagine things. If you have a caring, loving partner, give your doubts and suspicions a rest. Besides, there’s a thing called woman’s intuition and, believe us, it rarely gets things wrong, especially when it’s let to work together with your common sense. Trusting someone else besides yourself and your parents maybe is a great feeling, and it makes love even stronger.
3. Intimacy
Yes, we knew you knew we were getting there. Intimacy is one of the important ingredients of a happy relationship. This, however, does not mean that pros have the happiest relationships. It means that if you have honesty and trust, you can also have a great time in the bedroom. Experts are unanimous: the best lovemaking is in long-term relationships. That’s because you and your partner know each other well enough to be aware of what you like in bed.
Plus, you can tell each other what you like without being shy about it, something much more unlikely in a one-night stand setting. Then there’s the level of importance that each of you assigns to intimacy. If it’s matching, you’ll be one happy couple. If, however, there’s a discrepancy, the relationship may not come to last, because one of you will feel frustrated that their needs are not being met.
4. One direction
There’s a saying that goes: ‘It’s not important that you look into each other’s eyes, it’s important that you look in the same direction’.
Looking into each other’s eyes is what invariably happens at the initial stages of any relationship, but if you want it to last, you need to have some things in common, such as your general outlook on life and essential values. You can’t be happy with someone who believes that money is the highest value, while you yourself believe that family is more important than anything else. You need to be both into money or family in order to make it work.
Also, you shouldn’t stand in each other’s way, and this is also about direction, this time your individual direction of development. If you want, for example, to undertake a radical career change, you’ll need all the support your significant other can offer. If he’s against this change, however, you won’t get any and you’ll probably quit your plans. In a happy relationship, this support is more or less a given.
5. Compromise
Love is not all roses and sunny days, unfortunately. Since any relationship involves two individual human beings, unique each in their own way, there will be moments when your differences will cause a friction between you.
A friction or a conflict does not have to mean an all-out shouting war or anything like that, it just means a serious clash of views on some subject. Psychologists have identified a number of ways of dealing with a conflict, but these can be loosely divided into two groups: resolving it and ignoring it. Ignoring the conflict may not be the best idea, especially if it has caused feelings of unhappiness in either of you.
These feelings tend to accumulate and then there’s an inevitable burst that can drown your relationship. This is where compromise comes in. It is a form of conflict resolution, when one of the arguing sides or, better still, both, give up some of their “demands” to restore the peace. You need to make sure you take turns, however, because if only one of you is always making the compromise, your relationship is off balance and someone is unhappy.
Try to look at things from your partner’s perspective, that should help you restore the balance.
How to be happy in a relationship? What are your best tips?
Stay happy!
