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13 Ways to Get the Relationship You Want
Relationships
- Copy By: Josie Santi
- Feature Image By: Leah Flores | Stocksy
Whether you’re fully submerged in the dating world and swiping left and right on Tinder, or you’re in a committed LTR with a few hiccups and unnecessary fights here and there, we can all use a little room for improvement when it comes to our dating lives. In fact, your love life should not leave you exhausted, strained, or questioning like a particularly dramatic episode of Sex and the City. It should leave you happy, energized, and inspired. If it’s not, you have some work to do.
If you are single with no desire to settle down (though I utterly despise that saying), more power to you. You’ve achieved the life most of us wish we could, and this article is not for you. But if you’re currently in a relationship, or are looking for a relationship, here’s how to make it the happiest relationship of your life:
1.
I, too, am guilty of never internally taking the blame for setbacks in my dating life. It’s so much easier to complain with friends (“why are all boys so stupid!?”) or point out flaws in my partner that are “limiting us from achieving utter happiness!” But let’s get real — the only person in the world you can control is yourself. Once you realize that, and I don’t mean read it off of this article on The Everygirl, but I mean really realize that, you see the power in changing the way you think, instead of hoping the people around you change.
If you’re looking for a relationship, first know what you deserve, and don’t make any exceptions (more on that below). Also reflect on the patterns that might be limiting you from finding the right person — are you insecure and not really open to dating, or are you only considering the same type of person you know is wrong for you? If you are in a relationship, focus on what you can be doing to make the relationship stronger.
Often times, when we see the good in people, it brings out even more good. The same goes with your relationships — see the good, and the other person will be motivated to become better as well.
2. Brutal honesty is the best policy.
One of the best lessons I’ve learned from my current relationship is that the best relationships in the world have to have brutal honesty. If you don’t feel you can be totally transparent with the person you’re with — whether it’s out of worry that their feelings will be hurt/they’ll get mad, or that they will judge your true self — you might not be with the right person. You will feel pitfalls and doubts in even good relationships, and being able to talk through and work through the most hurtful doubts with your partner (with support and understanding) is what separates a long-lasting, happy relationship from a breakup.
If you’re dating, brutal honesty is key to finding the right relationship. Share your deepest fears and dreams early on.
If you don’t like Thai food or think football is boring, don’t pretend to like it to get someone else to like you. One day you’ll find someone who hates Pad Thai as much as you do, and would rather watch the Cooking Channel than NFL — and you’ll be so happy you never settled for less.
3. Know your deal breakers.
In order to get the relationship you want, you need to know the relationship you want. Think of the factors that are so deeply and utterly important to you that you wouldn’t be willing to compromise under any circumstances. This is not your list of “dream” traits. This is a list of non-negotiables. Think: doesn’t wants children, isn’t nice to servers, misogynistic, or doesn’t have a good sense of humor. Don’t consider someone who has any of your deal breakers, and if you’re in a relationship, trust that everyone has flaws — as long as all of your deal breakers are met, work on loving your person through their flaws and getting better together.
4.
Love being alone. It may sound counterintuitive since the point of this article is, indeed, how to successfully partner up. But more attractive to potential or current partners than the way you look is the confidence you exude. Plus, enjoying your alone time will ensure you’re in a relationship for the right reasons, and that you won’t settle for less than you want and deserve in order to stop being alone.
Be so in love with your own life that you’d rather be in a happy relationship with yourself than a toxic relationship with anyone else. Take yourself out to dinner, read a great book, or make yourself a nice bath at home. Also work on fulfilling your own needs — if you’re insecure, don’t expect your partner to make you feel better and get angry at them when they don’t know how to. In fact, don’t need anything from your partner at all. Enjoy them and let them make you a better person, but don’t expect them to fill any holes.
5. Fight the right way.
The honest truth, even in the dream relationship you’ve always wanted, is that you will fight. It’s about the way you fight that makes all the difference in the health and happiness of your relationship. Make requests instead of complaints, take turns talking, and know when to take a pause when the argument gets too heated. As a couple, work on improving the way you disagree as much as you work on the other aspects of your relationship, even when it isn’t necessarily romantic or fun.
6. Ask “how’s your day?” every day.
One of the simplest and most important things you could do to improve your relationship is to ask your partner “how was your day?” and actually care about the answer. Perfect the art of conversation — know how to make your partner feel heard, ask follow-up questions instead of just listening to what they have to say, and share your opinions or thoughts once they’re done sharing with you. When your partner feels like you care about more than you have to, and actually want to be a part of everything they do, it subconsciously creates a new level of teamwork, love, and intimacy.
7. Be more affectionate.
Speaking of intimacy, physical affection may not be the determining factor between a happy, life-long relationship and a short, toxic one (we all knew that on-again-off-again couple in high school that would make out by the lockers far too often), but it is what separates a close friendship from a lasting romance. You won’t always feel the “passion” you once did in the beginning of your relationship (and if you do, please DM me for your secrets), but a little bit goes a long way when keeping the spark alive. Hold hands, kiss outside of your routine (meaning more often than just to say “goodbye” or “goodnight”), and hug often.
8. Care more about the way your partner responds to conflict than the conflict itself.
Back to that “flaws” thing — everyone has them, and your relationship will always have them (yes, even if you follow this article’s advice). Everyone makes mistakes and everyone can be impacted by negative emotions or fears.
If your partner responds to your hurt feelings or anger with genuine support, understanding, and remorse, and cares more about your feelings than about being right, forgive them. Don’t bring up past fights or mistakes, and think about each disagreement like it’s you two against the problem (instead of you against them).
9. Learn each other’s stress patterns.
Even if you’re the two most compatible people on the planet, it’s likely that you deal with stress in different ways. And guess what — stress is not going away when you achieve that perfect relationship or find the perfect person. You’ll still come home from work angry about what your boss said at the meeting, and they’ll still get road rage when they’re running late in traffic. Knowing how the other person wants their stress to be handled makes all the difference. Communicate if you’d rather them listen when you vent, or if you want help fixing a problem. Also share how you’d feel most acknowledged in your moments of stress — even something simple will make you feel like you can lean on your partner, and vice versa.
10. Show love through your partner’s love language
So the ability to be loving is obviously crucial in a happy relationship, right? But what about the ability to be loving in not just your language, but in your partner’s? Yes, the good ol’ reliable love languages — my favorite relationship quiz of all time. If you haven’t heard of the life-changing love life phenomenon, learn about it here, and think of ways to show love to your partner that corresponds with their love language. If it’s Words of Affirmation, plan to randomly text them compliments throughout the week; if it’s Acts of Service, do their laundry before they get home. Showing love in the way that your partner feels it is one of the greatest secrets to relationship success.
11. Work on goals together.
Don’t just focus on making each other happy in the relationship — think of how to feel more fulfilled in all areas of life, and then pursue your goals together. Whether that’s brainstorming together for your new project at work or hitting the gym and eating better when your partner wants to be healthier, accomplish what you want out of life with their support, and be there however you can with what they’re trying to achieve.
Help each other become the best version of yourselves for a fulfilling life.
12. Say “thank you” every day.
Any relationship expert will tell you that gratitude is the secret to a happy relationship. In order to keep seeing the glass half full in your relationship (even when the kids are screaming, the bills are piling up, and the glass is so not full), make it a habit to wake up every day and think of three things you’re grateful for in your partner, and tell them those things. Say thank you often, whether it’s for out of the ordinary occurrences (like planning a date night) or part of the everyday routine you expect of them (like unloading the dishwasher or walking the dog so you get to sleep in an extra 10 minutes).
13. Create an intention by asking yourself what kind of person you want to be.
OK, so this sounds like a quote straight out of a self-help book, but hear me out — research has shown that this simple question could be a gateway to achieving the kind of love you want — more specifically, ask yourself what kind of partner you want to be.
Asking the question is not just about seeking out the right kind of partner, it actually gives you intention in navigating your relationships. It’s basically a vessel to self-connection, helping you criticize less and love more.
Have you tried any of these tips and tricks to get the relationship that you want?
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6 Healthy Relationship Habits Most People Think Are Toxic
Written ByMark Manson
Filed Under Dating Advice Relationships
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A while back I wrote a post titled 6 Signs You’re in a Toxic Relationship. In the months since I published it, the article has attracted a ton of comments—and you know it’s hit a nerve when big, grown-up websites who get paid to post smart grown-up things ask if they can copy/paste it, ostensibly to make a bunch of advertising money off people acting like assholes in their comment sections.
(I know, I’m such a sellout.)
But I think it’s helped a lot of people. Since writing it, I’ve received a staggering number of thank you emails, and around two dozen people told me that it had inspired them to end a relationship (or even in a few cases, a marriage). It seems it served as a kind of wake-up call to finally let go and accept that sometimes, relationships can gag you with a shit-spoon.
(So, I guess I’m a home-wrecker and a sellout. Sweet.)
But along with the praise, I also received a ton of questions like, “So if these habits ruin a relationship, what habits create a happy and healthy relationship?” and “Where’s an article on what makes a relationship great?” and “Mark, how did you get so handsome?”
These are important questions. And they deserve answers.
Granted, in my younger years I had far more experience screwing up relationships than making them work well, but in the years since I’ve started to get it more right than wrong (yes, Fernanda???), so I didn’t want to just write yet another “learn to communicate and cuddle and watch sunsets and play with puppies together” type post.
Honestly, those posts suck. If you love your partner, you shouldn’t have to be told to hold hands and watch sunsets together—it should be automatic.
I wanted to write something different. I wanted to write about issues that are important in relationships but are harder to face—things like the role of fighting, hurting each other’s feelings, dealing with dissatisfaction, or feeling the occasional attraction for other people. These are normal, everyday relationship issues that don’t get talked about because it’s far easier to talk about puppies and sunsets.
Puppies: The ultimate solution to all of your relationship problems.And so, I wrote this, that first article’s bizarro twin brother. That article explained that many of our culture’s tacitly accepted relationship habits secretly erode intimacy, trust, and happiness. This article explains how traits that don’t fit our traditional narrative for what love is and what love should be are actually necessary ingredients for lasting relationship success.
Enjoy.
There’s this guy by the name of John Gottman—he’s like the Michael Jordan of relationship research. Not only has he been studying intimate relationships for more than forty years, but he practically invented the field.
Gottman devised the process of “thin-slicing” relationships, a technique where he hooks couples up to a series of biometric devices and then records them having short conversations. Gottman then goes back and analyzes the conversation frame by frame, looking at biometric data, body language, tonality, and specific words chosen. He then combines all of this data together to predict whether your marriage sucks or not.
His “thin-slicing” process boasts a staggering 91% success rate in predicting whether newly-wed couples will divorce within 10 years—a staggeringly high result for any psychological research (Malcolm Gladwell discusses Gottman’s findings in his bestselling book, Blink.) Gottman’s seminars also report a 50% higher success rate of saving troubled marriages than traditional marriage counseling.
His research papers have won enough academic awards to fill the state of Delaware. And he’s written nine books on the subjects of intimate relationships, marital therapy, and the science of trust.
The point is, when it comes to understanding what makes long-term relationships succeed, John Gottman will slam-dunk in your face and then sneer at you afterwards.
And the first thing Gottman says in almost all of his books is:
In his research of thousands of happily married couples, some of whom have been married for forty plus years, he repeatedly found that most successful couples have persistent unresolved issues, issues that they’ve sometimes been fighting about for decades. Meanwhile, many of the unsuccessful couples insisted on resolving fucking everything because they believed that there should never be a disagreement between them. Pretty soon there was a void of a relationship, too.
People like to fantasize about “true love.” But if there is such a thing, it requires us to sometimes accept things we don’t like.
Successful couples accept and understand that some conflict is inevitable, that there will always be certain things they don’t like about their partner, or things they don’t agree with—all that’s fine. You shouldn’t need to feel the need to change somebody in order to love them. And you shouldn’t let some disagreements get in the way of what is otherwise a happy and healthy relationship.
Sometimes, trying to resolve a conflict can create more problems than it fixes. Some battles are simply not worth fighting. And sometimes, the most optimal relationship strategy is one of live and let live.
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My wife spends a lot of time in front of the mirror because she cares about how she looks.
Nights before we go out, she often comes out of the bathroom after an hour-long makeup/hair/clothes/whatever-women-do-in-there session and asks me how she looks. She’s usually gorgeous, but every once in a while she tries to do something new with her hair or is wearing a pair of boots that some flamboyant fashion designer from Milan thought were avant-garde. And it just doesn’t work.
When I tell her this, she usually gets pissed off. And as she marches back into the closet to redo everything and make us 30 minutes late, she spouts a bunch of four-letter words (fortunately, they’re in Portuguese) and sometimes even slings a few of them at me.
Men often lie in this situation to make their girlfriends/wives happy. But I don’t. Why? Because honesty in my relationship is more important to me than feeling good all of the time. The last person I should ever have to censor myself with is the woman I love.
Fortunately, I am married to a woman who agrees that we should always be honest.
She calls me out on my bullshit sometimes, and it’s one of the most important traits she offers me as a partner. Sure, my ego gets bruised and I bitch and complain and try to argue, but a few hours later I usually come sulking back and admit that she was right and holy crap she makes me a better person even though I hated hearing her truth-telling at the time.
When our highest priority is to always make ourselves feel good, or to always make our partner feel good, then more often than not nobody ends up feeling good. And our relationships fall apart without us even knowing it.
It’s important to make something more important in your relationship than merely making each other feel good all of the time. The feeling-good—the sunsets and puppies—they happen when you get the important stuff figured out: values, needs and trust.
If I feel smothered and want more time alone, I need to be capable of saying that without blaming her and she needs to be capable of hearing it without blaming me, despite the unpleasant feelings it may cause.
If she feels that I’m cold and unresponsive to her, she needs to be capable of saying it without blaming me and I need to be capable of hearing it without blaming her, despite the unpleasant feelings it may generate.
These conversations are crucial if we want we maintain a healthy relationship, one that meets both people’s needs. Without them, we lose track of one another.
Romantic sacrifice is idealized in our culture. Show me almost any movie with romance at its center and it’s bound to feature a desperate and needy character who treats themselves like dog shit for the sake of being in love with someone.
The truth is our standards for what a “successful relationship” should be are pretty screwed up. If a relationship ends and someone’s not dead, then we view it as a failure, regardless of the emotional or practical circumstances present in the person’s lives. And that’s kind of insane.
Romeo and Juliet was originally written as satire to represent everything that’s wrong with young, romantic love and how irrational beliefs about relationships can make you do stupid shit like drink poison because your parents don’t like some girl’s parents.
But somehow, we’ve come to think of the play as a romance. It’s this kind of irrational idealization that leads people to stay with partners who treat them like shit, to give up on their own needs and identities, to make themselves into martyrs who are perpetually miserable, to suppress their own pain and suffering in the name of maintaining a relationship “until death do us part.”
Sometimes the only thing that can make a relationship successful is ending it at the necessary time, before it becomes too damaging. And the willingness to do that allows us to establish the necessary boundaries to help ourselves and our partner grow together.
Shoot myself to love you; if I loved myself I’d be shooting you.
—Marilyn Manson
“Until death do us part” is romantic and everything, but when we worship our relationship as something more important than ourselves—more important than our values, than our needs and everything else in our lives—we create a sick dynamic where there’s no accountability.
We have no reason to work on ourselves and grow because our partner has to be there no matter what. And our partner has no reason to work on themselves and grow because we’re going to be there no matter what. This all invites stagnation and stagnation equals misery.
One of the mental tyrannies we face in a non-honest relationship is the situation where any mildly emotional or sexual thought not involving your partner amounts to high treason.
As much as we’d like to believe that we only have eyes for our partner, biology says otherwise. Once we get past the honeymoon phase of starry eyes and oxytocin, the novelty of our partner can wear off a bit. And unfortunately, human sexuality is partially wired around novelty. I get emails all the time from people in happy marriages/relationships who get blindsided by finding someone else attractive and they feel like horrible people because of it. But the truth is, not only are we capable of finding multiple people attractive and interesting at the same time, it’s a biological inevitability.
What isn’t an inevitability is our decision to act on the attraction or not. Most of us, most of the time, choose to not act on those feelings. And like waves, they pass through us and leave us with our partner very much the same way they found us.
This triggers a lot of guilt in some people and a lot of irrational jealousy in others. Our cultural scripts tell us that once we’re in love, that’s supposed to be the end of the story. And if someone flirts with us and we enjoy it, or if we catch ourselves having an occasional errant sexy-time fantasy, there must be something wrong with us or our relationship.
But that’s simply not the case. In fact, it’s healthier to allow oneself to experience these feelings and then let them go.
When you suppress these feelings, you give them power over you, you let them dictate your behavior for you (suppression) rather than dictating your behavior for yourself (via feeling them and yet choosing not to do anything).
People who suppress these urges are often the ones who eventually succumb to them and suddenly find themselves screwing the secretary in the broom closet and having no idea how they got there and come to deeply regret it about twenty-two seconds later.
People who suppress these urges are often the ones who project them onto their partner and become blindingly jealous, attempting to control their partner’s every thought, corralling all of their partner’s attention and affection onto themselves.
People who suppress these urges are often the ones who wake up one day disgruntled and frustrated with no conscious understanding of why, wondering where all of the days went and saying things like, “remember how in love we used to be??
Looking at attractive people is pleasurable. Speaking to attractive people is pleasurable. Thinking about attractive people is pleasurable. That’s not going to change because of our Facebook relationship status. And when you dampen these impulses towards other people, you dampen them towards your partner as well.
You’re killing a part of yourself, and it ultimately only comes back to harm your relationship.
When I meet a beautiful woman now, I enjoy it, as any man would. But it also reminds me why, out of all of the beautiful women I’ve ever met and dated, I chose to be with my wife. I see in the attractive women everything my wife has and most women lack.
And while I appreciate the attention or even flirtation, the experience only strengthens my commitment. Attractiveness is everywhere. Real intimacy is not.
When we commit to a person, we are not committing our thoughts, feelings or perceptions to them. We can’t control our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions most of the time, so how could we ever make that commitment?
What we can control are our actions. And what we commit to that special person are those actions. Let everything else come and go, as it inevitably will.
We all have that friend who mysteriously ceased to exist as soon as they got into their relationship.
You see it all the time: the man who meets someone and stops playing basketball and hanging out with his friends, or the woman who suddenly decides she loves every comic book and video game her partner likes even though she doesn’t know how to correctly hold the XBox controller. And it’s troubling, not just for us but for them.
(Side note: if either of those sounds like you or someone you know, it might be a good idea to get a handle on your attachment style.)
When we fall in love we develop irrational beliefs and desires. One of these desires is to allow our lives to be consumed by the person with whom we’re infatuated. This feels great—it’s intoxicating in much of the same way cocaine is intoxicating (no, really). The problem only arises when this desire becomes reality.
The problem with allowing your identity to be consumed by a romantic relationship is that as you change to be closer to the person you love, you cease to be the person they fell in love with in the first place.
It’s important to occasionally get some distance from your partner, assert your independence, maintain some hobbies or interests that are yours alone. Have some separate friends; take an occasional trip somewhere by yourself; remember what made you you and what drew you to your partner in the first place.
Without this oxygen to breathe, the fire between the two of you will die out and what were once sparks will become only friction.
In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera says there are two types of womanizers: 1) men who are looking for the perfect woman and can never find her, and 2) men who convince themselves that every woman they meet is already perfect.
I love this observation and believe it applies to not just womanizers, but just about anyone who consistently finds themselves in dysfunctional relationships. They either try to make their partner be perfect by “fixing” them or changing them, or they delude themselves into thinking that their partner is already perfect.
This is one of those things that is not nearly as complicated as it appears. Let’s break it down:
- Every person has flaws and imperfections.
- You can’t ever force a person to change.
- Therefore: You must date somebody who has flaws you can live with or even appreciate.
The most accurate metric for your love of somebody is how you feel about their flaws. If you accept them and even adore some of their shortcomings—her obsessive cleanliness, his awkward social ticks—and they can accept and even adore some of your shortcomings, well, that’s a sign of true intimacy.
One of the best (and earliest!) expressions of this idea came from Plato in the form of a myth. In his Symposium, Plato wrote that humans were originally androgynous and whole. They felt no lack, no uncertainty, and they were powerful, so powerful that they rose up and challenged the gods themselves.
This posed a problem for the gods. They didn’t want to completely wipe out the human race as they’d have no one to rule over, but they also had to do something to humble and distract humanity.
So, Zeus split each human into two, a man and a woman (or a man and a man, or a woman and a woman) and doomed them to spend their brief mortal existence wandering the world looking for their other half, the half that would make them feel whole and powerful again. And this wholeness would come not from two perfections meeting, but two imperfections meeting, two imperfections that both complemented and compensated for one another’s shortcomings.
The artist Alex Grey once said that, “True love is when two people’s pathologies complement one another’s.” Love is, by definition, crazy and irrational. And the best love works when our irrationalities complement one another, and our flaws enamor one another.
It may be our perfections that attract one another in the first place. But it’s our imperfections that decide whether or not we stay together.
"I want a serious relationship, but he does not"
Many women, and men too, face anxieties about a serious relationship.
This month I have already answered a question that I see as similar to yours. The anxiety of the author of that question, it would seem, is different, but they have much in common with yours.
Let's try to figure out together what your fear is connected with. And it is he who makes you give up happiness. It is fear that leads to thoughts of possible failure. They, in turn, generate more fear. This closes one alarm cycle and starts a new one. Over time, fear grows like a snowball.
Looking ahead, I will say that the basic rule of anxiety and fear psychotherapy is: “if you are afraid, do it!” Scientists have proven that the easiest way to cope with fear is to live it and understand that the consequences of our actions or inactions, as a rule, are not as terrible as we imagined at the beginning of the journey.
The negative experience of a serious relationship, especially such as divorce, leaves an indelible mark on the memory. Meeting after a divorce a person of interest to us, falling in love with him, we remember that this was the case the last time.
And how did it end? Right. Divorce. If we have a child with a man with whom the relationship is completed, then this exacerbates anxiety about the future.
If our parting did not happen on our initiative, this adds one more fear. Questions arise:
- What is wrong with me?
- Can I be happy at all?
- Is there anything to love me for?
- Will they accept me with a child, wouldn't that be a problem?
It happens that even when we feel the love and attention of a new chosen one, we ask ourselves questions: “Will he become a good father to my child?”, “Will he regret his choice?” And the final question: “Suddenly everything will end like last time?” This is followed by fear and thoughts: “I won’t survive this!”
We can't know without trying what will come of our venture. This applies to new relationships, and new work, and moving to a new place. We do not know how our children will grow up, whether we will be good parents to them.
We can only try to grow, develop, gain new experience, learn from the experience of other people and adjust our lives taking into account the totality of our knowledge.
I want to draw your attention to the fact that you have an advantage in the form of experience. You have already been married, you have a child, you know from your own experience how it happens. You know what kind of wife you were, what kind of mother you are. You can analyze everything. Highlight your mistakes that you have made in the past. Highlight your merits. Explore today's self. And taking advantage of the totality of knowledge, make a decision. To do this, it may be useful to answer yourself the following questions:
- How do I see my life now?
- What do I want to change about it?
- Am I ready for a serious relationship?
- Do I want to start a new family or will I choose a relationship in the form of rare meetings?
Or you can ask yourself an open question: “What do I lack for happiness now?” And then follow your desires.
You wrote that you feel the need for love. Long after the divorce, you have met a free man who suits you, who takes care of your child. Your assumptions that you are not in the plans of a man are also based on fear.
Without talking to him, you will not get answers to your questions about what you mean to him. How does he see your further joint future. Or he doesn't see it. In this case, knowing the man's answers to your questions to him is power. This will either allow you to become closer, or will be a reason for parting.
Is it scary that a man is not ready for a serious relationship with you? On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, you will feel free and able to enter into other relationships where you will be desired and loved. The need for love can only be satisfied with someone who reciprocates. This is how we are arranged by nature when it comes to creating relationships.
Relationships are a couple. Or it may be that a man wants a closer relationship with you, but he feels fear no less, and maybe more than yours.
Believe my many years of experience and the experience of my colleagues, men are subject to fears similar to yours, no less.
Now let's go back to the beginning of my answer. I remind you the basic rule of psychotherapy of anxiety and fears - "if you are afraid - do it!" This is the shortest path to happiness. Or to freedom. Freedom from anxiety, for sure. I want you to answer all your questions. Get answers from a man close to you. And decide where you're going next. Together or apart. In any case, I wish you to go along the path of satisfying your need for love. Be loved and happy!
How to go from easy relationships to serious ones?
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Man and womanPractices how to
You need to understand what factors make a man fall in love. Many women suffer because their relationship remains in the "no commitment" stage and they don't understand what's wrong. The reason is not that men are "afraid of commitment." It’s just that these women fail to arouse affection in a partner on an emotional level.
A purely physical attraction to a partner weakens over time, and a deep emotional connection is more important for the future of relationships. Here are 5 tips to help you fall in love with a man without resorting to unethical manipulation.
1. Appreciate his current strengths, not his potential. Everyone wants to be accepted and loved for who he is, but many start dating a man thinking first of all about his potential - about what he might become in five years with their help.
But a man is not your project. If you expect him to change, he will feel that you do not appreciate him for who he is now. Some may become ashamed of themselves: it turns out that they are not good enough. If a man feels this attitude at the beginning of the novel, he will run away.
When a man mentions that it is easy to communicate with a woman, it means that he is ready to tell her something that he will not tell another
they often responded with something like, "She never tried to change me.
" Decide what qualities are important to you in a man, and look for a partner who already meets your requirements right now.
2. Make him feel emotionally secure. What is it? This means that a man knows that he can freely share his thoughts, feelings and desires with you without fear of judgment. When a man mentions that a woman is "easy to talk to", it means that he is ready to tell her something that he will not tell anyone else, because he is sure that she will not judge or criticize.
The next time your partner is having a hard day and wants to complain about colleagues or share something personal with you, try to listen without judgment or criticism. You need to understand when to solve a problem, offer help, and when to listen. Sometimes a person does not want to deal with problems now, he needs to speak out.
3. Keep the relationship light and fun. Memories of others are linked to what we have experienced together.
If you are constantly interesting and having fun, you will be associated with this person with these pleasant feelings.
Men and women would often prefer to develop relationships at different paces. Status is usually important for women, so they are in a hurry to move into the “serious relationship” phase, skipping the first period of dating - the most cheerful and positive. Men, on the other hand, most often prefer to take their time and give themselves time to decide if they want to develop the relationship further. Therefore, it is important to maintain a light, playful and positive atmosphere at the beginning of the acquaintance. Remember that for a man, even if he really liked you, you are still just dating.
4. Don't be afraid to be vulnerable. The secret to emotional intimacy is to open up, to allow yourself to be vulnerable. When you reveal to him the real you, without embellishment, you give him the key to all the intimate corners of your soul.
And that is responsibility. Imagine what it's like to earn someone's complete, undivided trust. Incredible, right? By exposing your vulnerability and insecurity, you create a sense of emotional security for a man, and he is likely to open up to you too.
Create a life for yourself that you like, and a man will also want to be a part of it
5. Give him the opportunity to run after you. Women often ask what to do if a man ceases to be actively interested in them. The correct answer is "nothing". If you start to panic, your actions will be controlled by fear.
I often see women start to panic as soon as they think that a man is losing interest in them. Sometimes it's just because he didn't text or call one day, or he seemed distant at dinner. Fearing to lose him, they try to take control over the course of the relationship themselves and go too far: they start calling, plan everything themselves, and generally take on the role of leader, trying to direct the relationship along the desired path.
