Personal Growth | Love
Start building a stronger relationship with your partner
A series on how to grow closer to your partner
One of the greatest joy in life is to be surrounded by people who love you and the people you love. Sharing life with a significant other brings not just joy, but does satisfy some deep needs in all of us — intimacy. Infant not even knowing how to form words knows and wants to be closer to their caregivers.
While there are no official statistics on how many of us are coupling up these days, I’m guessing more than 60% (using US and UK marriage and civil partnership numbers extrapolating with cohabitation numbers and online dating stats) of us are in some sort of official/unofficial relationship.
It is strange that while we are taught in school about technical life skills, we are never taught how to be good in a relationship, how to be successful in communicating our feelings, how to be vulnerable. This is especially contrasted when we spent half of our lives wanting intimacy versus the other half having a successful meaningful career.
Like a boat floating down a river, if you stop rowing, you will never reach the top.
In this 10 part mini-series, we will explore some fundamentals of building a strong relationship. Whether you are new to a relationship, thinking about marriage or have been together with your partner for a long time, I believe these articles will encourage you and help you grow stronger together:
- Learn to communicate effectively
- Resolving the unavoidable “C” word
- Talk about money and finances (coming out soon)
- Leisure activities: date night is special (coming out soon)
- Sex and affection (coming out soon)
- Relationship roles (coming out soon)
- Marriage expectation (coming out soon)
- The Couple & The Family & The Friends (coming out soon)
- Personality: show it, grow it, talk through it (coming out soon)
- Goals: water each other’s seeds (coming out soon)
The structure of these articles will include a section where we explore some tools to helps us and another section with some discussion questions or exercises for you to use with your partner to help you build stronger relationships.
Discussion questions
- Looking at the list above, take turns sharing what each of you perceive as your relationship strengths. Verbally share one strength at a time, until each have shared three.
- Use the same procedure to share and discuss growth areas.
- Discuss these three questions:
- Did any of your partner’s response surprise you?
- In what areas did you mostly agree with your partner?
- In what areas did you mostly disagree with your partner?
About myself…
I’ve been with my partner for more than 7 years and every day we are still building this relationship we have one brick at a time. The key to a successful relationship is the commitment to each other that we will continue to work on the relationship every day.
Before you go…
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