Many people report that they started out as friends with their spouse prior to getting married. However, over the years this friendship seems to change. Some people think that once you get married you are no longer “friends.” However, it is very healthy to keep up on the friendship aspect of your marriage. When a couple [...]
Determining what role your friends will play in your life after you’re married can be difficult for some people. Perhaps, you always spent Friday night with your pals and you wonder, should this continue? Or maybe you struggle to deal with the amount of time your spouse spends with friends. Learning to set healthy boundaries [...]
Years ago I was part of a couple. We were friends with another couple. We thought of sharing a house. So, we went to some meetings and shared a suite. I put the newspaper I was reading down on my bed. That offended the woman in the other couple. “You just don’t do that!—you put [...]
You go visit your family or friends. You all start talking about the past or the recent present. Someone tells you new information about what happened regarding you. It may be a fact or an insight into who they think you are. All of a sudden you think you have to reevaluate everything. You feel [...]
We all love our pets. We would do anything for them. They are our companions and love objects. We often give them the care we should give ourselves. Yet we might be giving them too much attention and they may be running our lives too much. A few examples should help clarify the situation. The [...]
Spending time away from your spouse and visiting with friends and family can actually improve your relationship. Your spouse is not going to meet all of your needs all the time. It is important to try and get your needs met in other ways instead of depending on your partner, and then feeling disappointed in [...]
In case you’re looking for some free advice, and you haven’t yet made the decision to go forward with real therapy or marriage counseling, I want to introduce you to a website we started 4 years ago. Talk About Marriage (http://talkaboutmarriage.com) was started so the public would have an open, supportive forum where they could [...]
Often, we make some mistakes in normal dealings with older people. These mistakes either make the person feel like a baby or child or else somewhat alone or shunned. There are some actions we can do to make the person feel better—they don’t cost anything and they’re easy to implement. The first mistake is assuming [...]
One of the most important aspects of any relationship, particularly a marriage, is friendship. When you look at your partner, can you say they are your best friend? Can you confide all your fears to them, talk about them, and perhaps work together to resolve them? There are often times when third parties are our [...]
One of the areas that pre-marital counseling focuses on is the maintenance of independence. In the past, one of the leading causes of marriage problems was the lack of, or perceived lack of, freedom. When a couple meet and fall in love, their focus remains on each other, often to the detriment of their friends [...]
If you look around your extended network of friends and family I’m sure you’ll come across a couple that has divorced then, several years later, reunited and remarried. Why do they remarry, and do they work? It’s a good question and there is a lot to be learned from these remarriages. Every relationship is different [...]
Do you know anyone who’s relationship fell apart and then months later came together again? It happens quite frequently and if you were to run a microscope over their relationship, you will most likely find one common thread – friendship. Not common friends, although they can help. We are talking about friendship with each other. [...]
