Couples

Make Your Romantic Relationship A Safe Port Not A Battleground

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One of the obvious yet surprisingly overlooked keys to happiness is to make your romantic relationship a safe port not a battleground. Intimacy is a double-edged sword, and for some increasing intimacy connotes having the right to treat their partners badly, to take out all their frustrations on the people they are closest to because they believe there is little risk.

What a backwards idea, to treat someone poorly rather than treat them well because you feel safe around them. If you feel safe around someone you should treasure this relationship and do everything in your power to safeguard it, not treat it like a garbage receptacle.

But that’s what many couples end up doing, their relationship becomes a battleground and of course a battleground is incompatible with a safe port in the storm, there is no way for a relationship to be both at the same time. Behaviorally speaking, the more often you treat it like a battleground the more will this behavior be reinforced, and the more likely you will both be to act that way in the future.

The answer if your relationship has become a battleground is to approach your partner in a loving, non-judgmental way with the genuine desire to get things back on track, to decide to treat each other as gently and carefully as you did when you first met. This careful attitude, this feeling of gratitude towards someone who has decided to choose you over everybody else, becomes more important as time goes by, not less, and it’s too bad more people don’t figure that out.

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