Creating and sustaining a long term relationship that can thrive requires you to put in the work. In other words, you can grow older with your partner in many ways, but you will only grow closer and more creative through the steady practice of some actions that are necessary for love to last.
Become A Master Of Commitment
One of the ways to make your love last is to know how to make real commitments to your partner. Everyone wants the benefits of a long term relationship but forget that it requires commitment. Make a conscious effort to make real commitments and not unrealistic ones. This type of commitment builds long-lasting love and saves relationships while turning on the flow of intimacy and creativity.
Be Emotionally Transparent
If you want a long-term relationship that’s both close and creatively vital, you’ve got to become emotionally transparent. To go all the way to ultimate closeness and full creative expression, you must eliminate all barriers to speaking and hearing the truth about everything. You have to be willing to listen to the truth about everything. Everything means everything: feelings, deeds, hopes, dreams. We ask them to consider any hesitation about telling or hearing the unvarnished truth to be a symptom of resistance to greater love and creativity.
Break The Cycle Of Blame And Criticism
The blame and criticism game is an addiction that saps creative energy as surely as drugs or drink. Make your relationship a blame-free zone and quit trying to find faults. To build a lasting relationship, go on a strict no-blame diet, and stick to it. As a practice, this move liberates tremendous energy. The couple who is deeply addicted to blaming and criticism has usually come to mistake the adrenalized drama of conflict for the flow of connection.
Express Your Creativity
If you want a vibrant long-term relationship, one in which you feel close as a couple and creative as individuals, you’ve have to do one big thing first. You’ve got to take your attention away from fixing the other person and put it on expressing your creativity. Even one hour a week of focusing on your creativity will produce results. More than that will often produce miracles. Nothing will sap your vital energy faster than squelching your creativity. Often, couples stifle their creativity to focus on fixing and changing the other person. Since this seldom produces tangible results, they devote more energy to the other person as a fixer-upper and less to individual creativity. When results are not forthcoming, they complain about the other person to third parties. They enter a dangerous cycle of complaint that has addictive properties—the more you do it the more things there are to complain about. Ultimately this leads to the dissipation of creative energy and inner despair, and none of this is helpful as a way to make love last a long time.
Master The Art Of Verbal And Non Verbal Appreciation
Couples must learn that it is vital for them to appreciate each other spontaneously and frequently. As simple as it sounds, it is not the easiest thing To receive such an appreciation from another person is equally challenging. Most of us have never seen or heard a rich flow of spoken appreciations in relationships. Learn to appreciate your partner in words and actions. In reality, it produces powerful results very quickly, but it is important that the appreciation not be spoken as manipulation or in expectation of a reward.
