Want a Successful Marriage? Learn Relationship Skills

Want a Successful Marriage? Learn Relationship Skills

You have no doubt noticed: Serious relationships take a lot of skill. In marriage, or any committed couple relationship, you are dealing  close quarters with someone whose wants and needs can be  challengingly different from your own.

Quite possibly, you and your partner both bring powerful expectations  to the relationship that you will be loved and accepted, heard and  respected, and your needs and wants met – otherwise why get married.  Right?

Two adults with sometimes conflicting wants and needs living in close  quarters: Skills are obviously needed - skills of compromise,  negotiation, understanding, generosity, empathy, respect,  cooperation, plus others of equal weight: the sort they don’t teach  you in school. But you better get them somewhere, if you want the  relationship to succeed.

Unfortunately, several factors work against us paying sufficient  individual attention to the relationship skills that we clearly need.

The first factor is the assumption that many of us carry that the  weight falls on our partner to care for us, more than the other way  around. Unless this assumption is recognized and challenged, we may  not take seriously our own need for skills we plainly don’t have yet.

The second factor is the competitive nature of our couple  relationships. We get angry and resentful about the manner in which  our partner treats us. Seeing ourselves as victim, we see our  partner’s presumed bad intentions toward us as the problem, when what  we really need to do is drop the mutual accusations – and focus on  skills. What don’t we do well? And how can we learn?

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[Prince Swanson]

One's first step in wisdom is to kuesteon everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything.