Maintaining Your Relationship or Marriage Through Tough Times

Relationships are hyped and overrated as complex and difficult when in actuality it is people that are complex and difficult. The paths that relationships traverse are twisted and form intricate patterns on life's canvas. Maintaining relationships in today's fast paced world where everything is changing and mutable and temporary is a tough task indeed. Old world values such as true love and enduring marriages and lifelong relationships are a thing of the past and are no longer embraced by the new generation that has substituted these values with an entirely new set.

The purity and sanctity of marriage as it was once prescribed in every religion is fast losing ground as marriages fail and divorce rates increase. When a decade or two ago, dysfunctional families or single parent homes were few and far between, these days they are very common. Every person on the planet might know at least one other person in their family circle who is divorced or has suffered from a failed marriage.

Marriages suffer due to ego hassles, emotional immaturity, lack of communication and mistrust or sometimes just because the partners fall out of love. Relationships cannot be taken for granted. The parties concerned have to strive hard to make it work. With a lot of effort, commitment and sacrifice and a pinch of respect and bucket loads of love, any relationship can stand the test of time.

The key ingredient to any relationship is mutual love and affection, when that factor no longer exists, the whole equation of the relationship crumbles. It is important to analyze the reason that an individual has for entering into a relationship with another in order to successfully understand the causative factors for the failure of the same.

There are two main reasons why a man and woman would want to enter into relationship. It must be love or lust or it could be a combination of both with one greater than the other. Just like a fine and precise mix of the requisite ingredients ensures the birth of a perfume, in order for a relationship to blossom and bud and flower and flourish by withstanding the ravages of time and circumstances, it is essential that the two ingredients of lust and love are in equitable proportion.

If you feel sexually attracted to a person, you need not be in love with them while on the other hand you like a person a lot but feel no sexual attraction whatsoever need not be love either. It is when you like a person badly enough to want to share yourself with them, that true intimacy is established and love blossoms and when it is reciprocated in equal measure it gives birth to an ideal relationship. Such an ideal relationship can be exhilarating initially and might take your breath away. You might feel that you cannot live without the other person as a part of your life and think that you are in true love and all that stuff.

A few months later, the relationship would have reached its first crisis. The initial exhilaration might be gone and the feelings that seemed breathtakingly beautiful would have mellowed down and sobered up. This is the phase when you are allowed to and hence, begin to look deeper into the soul of your partner. This is a critical phase when you seek to understand the essence of the other person and each day learn something new about them and love what you learn, even if it is a disgusting habit that you find out he or she possesses, it still has a charm and inspires tenderness within you.

This is when the stage is set for the relationship to prosper and if both partners feel the same way about each other it is a good sign of a healthy relationship.

From here on it could survive if the following seven guidelines are followed.

1. Always show the love and appreciation that you feel for your partner. Never hold back.

2. Never take your partner for granted.

3. Make sure that you do enough to keep the relationship lively. Planning a surprise event or trip or buying something special once in a while, going out for a lovely dinner and spending holidays and doing mutually enjoyable things together are some suggested practices.

4. Never lie to your partner and always be honest and forthright about everything under the sun. Lying is allowed only if you are not keeping something horrible from them and if it makes them happy. If for example your girlfriend asks you if she is looking fat you could always smile and look longingly at her and say that you like them chubby anyway or something like that so that she doesn't feel angry or depressed about you being critical but at the same time gets the idea into her head that she's getting fat and needs to trim down.

5. Always preserve your individuality and never lose it in a relationship because a relationship needs two people and not one. Furthermore if you let your partner be the center of your universe, you start becoming unattractive to them. Let them know how much you love them but don't drool over them all the time.

6. Trust is the key to any relationship and building trust requires honesty and openness and lots of communication. Ensure that these are ingredients in your relationship masala.

7. Making sure things stay hot in the bedroom. It is not how you do it or how much you do it or for how long you do it, but how much you want to do it to them. Making them feel wanted is the key.