It is a common mistake among couples that they only go to a relationship coach or counsellor when things get bad. This is like suggesting that the national team shouldn’t have a coach unless they start losing games. The time when you should ask for advice about your relationship is before you have started it.
Before starting a serious relationship there are several things you should do before becoming more deeply involved which help ensure that you are compatible and that being together is the sensible option and not simply ‘a nice idea.’
One important thing that you should do is check what values you have and make sure these values are similar. Furthermore, they should be prioritized so that you both know which values are most important to you. It’s no good thinking that ‘time together’ is a shared value when she considers it the most important element of the relationship and he believes that ‘time together’ is something that happens only when the weather is too bad to go fishing and there’s no sport on.
Another good precaution is to sit down and describe to each other the ideal relationship and how you envisage the relationship together. Many couples go into a relationship with differing ideas about what an ideal relationship should entail, they both try to create an ideal relationship, but because its an individual, rather than a team effort it leads to frustration, unhappiness and conflict. Knowing what the two of you want and coming up with a shared goal for life together is essential to ensure that that life will be just as magical as dating.
Learning how to communicate can also help ensure that a relationship continues to function beyond the honeymoon. This may seem odd, because if you are thinking of taking the relationship to the next level you clearly like being with each other and are communicating. However, there are important principles to learn about each other which couples often do not know and never learn.
One of the common mistakes is not speaking the same language as your partner. Have you ever had a situation when you have been with someone and they have said something and you really don’t know what they meant by that? With your partner it is often slightly subtler, in that you probably think you know what he or she means, but it doesn’t really have much meaning to you and consequently you don’t value it.
Furthermore, when couples communicate and miss-communicate they often do a series of quite predictable mistakes which can cause havoc with a relationship. These mistakes can be simply failing to respond to your partner when you are busy, failing to take an interest in what your partner does, not valuing your partner – and worse, valuing them, but not telling them that they are valued and failing to have a shared purpose together.
Good relationships are not simply the result of chemical highs caused when we are in love, if we rely on these, we don’t get a relationship but an addiction and become addicted to the non-functional nature of the relationship. A relationship takes love, care, affection and communication and for your lives to work happily together they must be bound with overall goals and hopes. All of these are things which need to be worked out before becoming serious, otherwise serious problems can be caused in what would otherwise have been the perfect couple.
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© Peter Campbell, NLP Master Practitioner, www.cogniscientNLP.com.