Love & Sex Answers

Today's #1 Love & Sex Resource

You are here: Home / Archives for marriage counseling

How To Discuss Deal Breakers Before You Get Hitched

By

Marriage can be a truly exciting thing. During the time between your engagement and your wedding day, you’ll be busy with planning, enjoying the feeling of anticipation at your coming nuptials, and more. The engagement period is also your last chance to move past any doubts you may be having about your relationship.

The most important thing you can do prior to getting married is make sure you and your significant other are on the same page. Within the first week of getting engaged, you need to cover all of the possible deal breakers, so you don’t find out about anything bad after you’ve already said “I do.”

She Said Yes – Now What?

So the question has been popped and answered in the affirmative—now what? If you’ve already discussed all of your plans for the future with your S.O., congratulations! You’re ready to start planning the ceremony. If not, it’s time to have a very serious discussion together. You two need to cover all of the possible deal breakers and make sure you’re either on the same page, or one of you is willing to bend for the other’s sake.

Talking About Children

First up is one of the biggest topics, children. Do you both want to get pregnant? If one of you does and one of you doesn’t, that can be a major deal breaker. Don’t convince yourself that you can go without the little rug rats you’ve been hoping for just because your soon-to-be spouse doesn’t want them. Definitely do not convince yourself that he or she will likely change their mind.

Give this topic very serious consideration, because if you want them and he/she doesn’t, it can definitely lead to divorce farther down the line. If you both want children, you probably need to set basic expectations about it now. If one of you wants them right away and the other wants to wait, be sure that you’re willing to meet in the middle before you move forward with your marriage. As for how many you want, it’s probably best to wait until you’ve actually had one child before you start deciding on numbers. In this area, as in all of the other major issues, it’s necessary to establish where you are willing to compromise and where you are not.

Talking About Religion

After the issue of offspring has been covered, it’s time to talk religion. If you both practice the same faith or are not particularly religious people, there won’t be much to discuss here. If you’re both the same faith, two Methodists for instance, but go to different churches, you should discuss whose church you’ll join.

Other than that you’re golden. If you’re not of the same faith, or one of you is more religious than the other, you’ll definitely need to examine this subject more. Does one of you expect the other to convert? If you have children, which faith will you expect them to practice? Clarify these issues now, and no major problems will arise further down the line. Besides, if you’re intending to have a religious ceremony, you’ll need to have this discussion so you can pick a venue, etc.

Talking About Finances

You will also need to discuss your living arrangements and financial situation. Does either of you already own a home, or are you both renting? In either situation, will one of you move into the other’s place, or are you going to find a new place to share? If you are going to find a new place together, you need to decide whether you want to buy a home or rent something. Then you should compare your expectations.

If one of you would prefer to go on renting an apartment and the other expects to be a home owner within two years, the sooner you can reach a compromise, the better. Discussing your finances will go hand in hand with deciding where to live. Now is the time to talk about whether or not you’ll combine bank accounts, if either of you has any debt, and more. Unromantic as it may seem, financial worries can cause marriages to crumble. You don’t want to find out six months after you got married that your new spouse is $20K in debt and expects you to put your salary toward that. Talk about fighting and a possible divorce waiting to happen!

Smaller Issues To Deal With

There are other smaller issues that can wait until after the honeymoon, like how you’ll be splitting household chores and deciding which person’s family to visit on each holiday. What’s most important is that you clear the air on the major parts of your future—children, religion, finances and living arrangements. If you can have an honest discussion on these topics and plan to tackle any problems together, you’ll start your marriage on a much happier note.

Getting these things out of the way prior to the wedding not only leaves you with less to worry over, but it also makes sure you don’t walk into marriage with incorrect expectations. If you’re not comfortable talking any of these topics over now, you may need to question if you’re really ready to be married or not. However, if you can start your engagement with this sort of openness, you’re setting a great precedent for the rest of your lives together.

The Marriage Ref Almost Nails It

By

I recently watched The Marriage Ref which premiered earlier this month. According to Wikipedia.com, the premise of the show involves real life couples who have been having an on-going fight for a long time. A video clip is shown to the three-member celebrity panel, showing both sides of the argument. The panel then discuss the merits of each side of the argument and vote on who they think is right.

While this show is one of the funniest I’ve seen in a long time and aims to do the right thing – give both sides a voice and listen to each argument – it doesn’t necessarily translate into creating change or fostering the proper habits for the couple. It starts to play off of what I call “Smart Heart Skills and Dialogue,” but they were not able to define and enact these skills. The Smart Heart Skills were validated but undone by the actors doing cheerleading into each other being right and wrong. Smart heart skills are not about being right and wrong as opposed to “walking in the others shoes” and making the person feel safe.

How To Use Smart Heart Diologue

When I instruct couples to use Smart Heart Dialogue, it’s as a way to move beyond the anger and blame that typically is placed when an argument or disagreement comes to a stalemate. It can be used for smaller, more inconsequential arguments as well as larger conflicts, even when faced with infidelity.

Utilizing this type of dialogue is important in learning to fight fair as a couple. Fighting and disagreeing are not bad things, in themselves. Learn how to fight fair. It’s a misperception that fighting is bad; a relationship without passion enough to launch arguments likely won’t last for the long haul. However, arguing in the wrong way can also drive a relationship into the ground. I encourage having a weekly ten minute “Smart heart”-to-heart with a figurative emotional “bullet proof vest” to protect from hurt, anger and defensiveness, as you listen and echo back what you heard.

How Smart Heart Diologue Will Help Your Relationship

This type of discussion can open up the doors to putting the emotionality of a certain topic aside – whether it be finances, life decisions, career changes, fidelity, or a host of other things – and allow the couple to be honest with each other in a safe, loving space. Of course, this doesn’t mean that each person has a right to be angry and hurtful – quite the opposite. This exercise is designed to take the heated emotion out of a discussion so that the couple can share their feelings without a threat of emotion or anger getting thrown in the mix.

These types of habits can be the glue that helps to create passion in a relationship, even during and spite of disagreements and conflict. This may start out as basically as telling your partner you HAVEN’T been communicating these feelings and asking them to be patient with you while you learn how to go through this process. It may involve treating eachother with more respect, and being more mindful of the problems at hand during heated arguments.

Q&A: What You Should Know Before Getting Married

By

Getting married is a big step. Even starting a new relationship with someone is kind of like jumping into the pool feet first. Is there anything you can do to keep a relationship or marriage from ending badly? Is there anything you should know before getting married or starting a new relationship, so you can have the best chance at success?

Question: People should START by being more responsible when they start relationships. Maybe you guys should stop giving advice on ending relationships and start giving advice on how people can be more responsible when starting a relationship. That why you can keep more marriages together and save their children from emotional and psychological distress.

–YouTube Viewer

 [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD8hNfX0bpQ[/youtube]

Love Yourself First

The most important thing you need to do before embarking on a long term relationship or marriage is learning to love yourself first, flaws included. Many of us look for acceptance from others, when we haven’t accepted ourselves yet. Unfortunately, we won’t ever get the kind of acceptance we crave as human beings from another person unless we’ve done it ourselves first. Accept who you are, love yourself for who you are and other people will begin to do the same. Seeking outside approval is going to get you nowhere.

Don’t Try To Fix Them

The biggest problem in relationships and marriages is that a person doesn’t fall in love with someone for who they are right now, they fall in love with who they think this person will be after they are “fixed.” Many women try to change their boyfriends, partners and husbands after they’ve already gotten knee deep in the relationship. Men do it too, but it usually only ends in frustration and the dissolution of the relationship. Don’t think of how you can fix or change your partner, or that you’d love them if they just didn’t do this one little thing…learn to love your partner for who they are right now, not who you think they will be. Long term relationships are difficult, but they always help us grow. Allow your partner to help you grow and vice versa, but recognize the difficulty involved before you jump in. A good, loving, satisfying relationship or marriage is never going to be easy. But nothing that is easy is worth having. Try going to couples counseling before making a huge committment. Just because you’re in counseling doesn’t mean anything is wrong in the relationship – it’s also a great way to learn about your partner as well as learn about yourself, and learn about healthy ways to handle problems and disagreements that will inevitably come up in the future.

Don’t Stay In A Bad Relationship

If you’re in a bad relationship or marriage, don’t stay in it “for the kids” or because you believe in sticking it out. Even if there are children involved, chances are, they’re just as unhappy as you are in the relationship from having to hear all the fighting and bickering. There is absolutely nothing wrong with moving on from an unhealthy relationship, because often, that is the path that is better for everyone involved and frankly, moving on from an unhealthy or even abusive relationship is the grown up thing to do.

Want Better Lovin’? Lower Your Expectations!

By

Men who like women understand women and don’t need them to change very much. Women who like men understand men and don’t need them to change very much. This lack of need or even desire for your partner to make changes is a primary reason for marital happiness.

Carin Rubenstein, author of The Superior Wife Syndrome, says that two out of three marriages suffer from a set up between men and women where the wives feel as though it’s all up to them because they can do it all so much better. And the men let them do it all, giving up and giving in to the women’s superiority. Those marriages are not happy unions because the wives feel like martyrs and the husbands experience themselves as inadequate.

Do Lower Expectations Mean A Happier Marriage?

In the third of marriages that don’t suffer from this syndrome, Carin has observed that the wives in those marriages have lower expectations of their husbands than do the superior wives. Expectations such as how perfect the house is, when and how the lawn is maintained, when and how the family cars are serviced and cleaned, how the little children in the family are fed, bathed, and put to bed, etc. Rather than a lowering of expectations around the family’s morals or values, it has to do with the details of life that are aggravated by the differences between the sexes.

Joseph and I recently interviewed Carin Rubenstein for our podcast. As a result, we wound up in an on-air conversation about how understanding I am about the coffee rings I frequently find on the kitchen counter. In our house, Joseph is the only coffee drinker, by the way.

Later, a listener fired off a bunch of questions about why can’t a man just finally learn to clean off the counter? Although she was used to listening to us talk about the benefits of taking 100% responsibility for the results that show up in a relationship, as well as hearing us discuss the natural differences between the sexes, it frustrates her no end for men to be sloppy housekeepers and the women to have to either nag them about it, surrender to it, or clean up after them. It turns out this is a major source of conversation among her and her friends. They’re all suffering from it!

We talked with her about men we know who are excellent housekeepers but emotionally absent from their wives and children. That no one is perfect and there is always the necessity for compromise and letting go. With our perspective of taking 100% responsibility for the results of your relationships, a natural question for us to ask her was, “Why have you created a string of romantic relationships with men who were all sloppy housekeepers; and, if that matters to you, are you ready to create a different kind of man with which to fall in love?”

You Create Your Own Reality

As creator of your own reality, if you bear a grudge in general against the opposite sex, the universe will conspire to prove you correct and only bring men and women into your life who will confirm your worst beliefs about them! Which brings us back to my first paragraph, men and women who like the opposite sex understand the opposite sex and don’t need them to change very much. This very much affects living with the opposite sex.

Women who like men know that men think differently than they do and they don’t usually lose patience with that fact. Men are more focused than women. They like communication to get to the bottom line quickly. Whether they are good or sloppy housekeepers, there are always things they just don’t see because their focus is centralized, whereas women naturally see a bigger picture.

Men live in the present moment. Women anticipate the future. And so when a snow storm hits at Christmas and he’s tracking in snow, grit, and mud to free up the driveway and take care of downed branches, he isn’t thinking about Christmas coming and the need to have the house cleaned and picked up for the sake of the holidays and company coming. After all that hard work, he wants to relax with the paper and call it a day.

How Superior Wife Syndrome Can Ruin Your Relationship

If his woman has the superior wife syndrome, it makes her nuts that he can’t read her mind, understand what’s required to get comfortably through the holidays, anticipate her needs, the children’s needs, and the soon to be company’s needs. If his marriage is one of the happy third not suffering from this syndrome, his wife appreciates all the hard work going into freeing the driveway of snow and the yard of branches and, frankly, happily works around him.

She’ll ask for a helping hand here and there but not with an attitude that, were it put into words, would sound something like, “Listen, you jerk. There’s a lot to get done around here, can’t you see that?” That martyred mind-set is the purview of superior wives whose husbands have given up because they can neither read their wives’ minds nor think like women think. It just isn’t in their DNA. They do not have access to it.

Happily married people understand the differences between the sexes and either accept it and get used to it or they celebrate those differences. Either way, their expectations, compared to the folks suffering from the superior wife syndrome, are lower. I’d rather be happy than have expectations met that will really only satisfy my desire to be right and not contribute to the health or happiness of the relationship. How about you?

Tiger Woods’ Indescretions

By

Tiger Woods has all but admitted his philandering ways, most recently coming out with a statement saying that he has “let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all my heart.”

It remains to be seen how everything unfolds, how many women come forward, and what exactly he’ll admit to, but for now the couple is seeking privacy, which is a prerogative we should all honor.

Why Do People Cheat?

In the November issue of The New York Daily News an article about “What Makes Men Cheat” reports that people cheat because something is missing from their lives – even though everything may appear perfect. The article mentions that just because people have mastered something – in this case, playing a sport – doesn’t mean they’ve been able to learn how to have a healthy, honest, and emotionally intimate relationship. Tiger and his wife are successful, rich and have two darling children. It’s possible that this last component may be a contributing factor for his affair(s).

When a new baby comes into the picture men lose center stage status. They might begin to feel like a neglected sibling, fighting for attention from their wife. Of course, no one wants to admit this because feeling competitive with your child or baby just seems silly. Statistics show that a set-up for adultery is created with this complex combination of feeling neglected, feeling guilty, and repressing those feelings.

How To Heal After An Affair

Reports are now surfacing that Tiger is amending his pre-nup to include an extra “payout” to his wife Elin if she stays with him for a certain length of time. Of course, I don’t believe you can buy love, but I do believe that people can move beyond affairs and relationships can heal. I discuss this concept extensively in my book, “Make Up Don’t Break Up.” If both parties are willing to reconcile, a new, healthy relationship can be built from the ground up. Healing is possible, and privacy at this time is key for the couple to sort out their complex feelings.