8 Ways YOU can Improve
your relationship
1. Deliberately adjust your idea of reality
Many problems are caused in a relationship after children arise, because the idea that you have of a relationship and how you should interact is based around the life you used to have before children. The truth is that life has changed. There is absolutely no point in trying to reinvent the past, or live the way that you used to before you had children, it only causes you misery. The reality is, that you have to now work even harder to keep your relationship in tact. Conversations are going to be interrupted by the children on a regular basis, Sex may take a plunge for while, or disappear altogether sometimes due to lack of sleep, energy or because your attention is elsewhere. You cannot lounge around on a Sunday afternoon with a video or a newspaper and completely relax entwined in each other’s arms. These pleasures are a thing of the past, at least on a spontaneous level. You can still have these things, but the new reality is that you have to plan your time away from the kids in order to do these things without interruption. Misery comes from having a resistance or a denial about your present time reality and wishing it was like it used to be. Deliberately recognising and deliberately readjusting your idea of reality about how your relationship is and becoming honest about how things are now is going to help you to accept your new reality. After children, a successful relationship comes from a new understanding of your partner and their adjustments to parenthood. A successful relationship now comes from support, understanding and being united as parents. It’s about sharing your responsibilities and chores as a family unit and supporting each other to explore your individualities and help each other to grow through this transition into parenthood and mature adulthood. If you deny that your life has changed, you will be constantly disappointed and annoyed at life. If you accept that life has changed and your relationship has to change with it, then you can get on with discovering a new and improved way of interacting, sharing, loving, supporting and nurturing your relationship at a new and deeper level.
2. Create a common goal
We all have our individual wants and needs that we are aspiring for in our lives. It is really important within a relationship though, that you both have a common goal. A common goal is something that you are both working towards. It is something that excites you, unites you, keeps you interested in a common interest. It could be planning a holiday, running a business, saving for a car, boat, house etc absolutely anything that you have aligned on together that you will work towards. Having this kind of goal together keeps you focussed and, even when you are working on individual pursuits, this common goal that both of you are working towards, helps unite the two of you and can decrease feeling separated and disconnected. Especially when your children are little, life can get chaotic and time can disappear very quickly. If you have a common goal that interests the both of you, then you will find that you still maintain a connection with each other, even if things are crazy at this time of your life. For example, let’s say you were planning a holiday overseas. It may mean that your partner needs to do overtime in order to save for this holiday. If this holiday is what you want to, you are more likely to be more understanding about the overtime and having to do more by yourself around the house and with the kids, because you are aligned with the reason why your husband is working those extra hours. If you were not aligned with this reason, then you may become resentful and angry about these extra hours. The trick is to know what the both of you are working towards and then you will be able to work at it together and also align on how you are going to achieve the goal, together.
3. Stop making excuses and make time for you
An extention of adjust your idea of reality – stop blaming the children for your lack of time for yourselves. No one can wave a magic wand and create more time for your relationship. Now that you have children, you are unable to spontaneously run off on weekends away, or lounge around your house together. Now you need to create the time to spend together and deliberately work on nurturing and loving your relationship in order to keep it healthy. There is always time to spend together, it’s a matter of making it a priority. Hire a baby-sitter, get help from family members and arrange some time alone. If support is not available, the kids will always sleep at some point, so turn the TV off and arrange a night under the stars, or a game of cards, or a few drinks on the back deck. Create a date night. There is no excuse for not giving yourselves time together if you make it a priority.
4. Consider how you are contributing to the problems in your relationship
Whenever there is a problem within any relationship, there are two sides to the story. There are contributions on both sides that either help and hinder the problem. The trick in any problem is to try and decipher how and why you contribute to the problem at hand. Is your approach to the problem inappropriate? Are you unable to communicate effectively? Do you in some way antagonise your partner to get a specific reaction? How is this problem serving you – does it confirm your idea of your relationship? Does it help to sabotage your self-esteem? Is this problem about a deeper issue that you have that you are not handling? Become the observer in your relationship and try to imagine that you are an outsider observing the argument and look at how you are contributing to the argument and where you are adding fuel to the fire. When you can objectively and honestly observe your interactions with your partner, you will be able to see that the problem is not entirely with him and there is always something you can do about your part that you play in this problem.
5. When discussing your problems, work on aligning a solution, rather than demanding a change
Using the right and wrong game is a common dynamic that couples play in their relationships. When trying to discuss a problem, someone might use criticism, judgments, accusations or demands to try instigating change. This only further alienates the other person and makes them feel resentful or insulted. The trick to initiating change, is to create an alignment when discussing your problems. Rather than concentrating on the problem, work on putting your attention on the possible solutions and discuss which one works best for the both of you. It’s not about getting your way, it’s about negotiating and aligning what works for both of you. You are an individual with your own wants and needs, but you are also a part of a partnership. Making that partnership work, is about creating alignments, agreements and negotiating the terms of your relationship. This is true regardless of whether this is a sporting team, business team, or intimate team relationship. When you enter into discussions with your partner about a problem, keep the conversation solution focussed. How will this problem get fixed? What to both of you want? How do each of you see that the problem will be fixed? Listen to what the other has to say and negotiate change that will satisfy the both of you. For example, if you want your husband to do more around the house because you feel there is an unfair division of labour in the house, then having a conversation that accuses your husband of being lazy or unhelpful, or any other accusations or criticism is only going to cause him to be annoyed, angry or resentful. How about explaining how you feel about the amount of work you do, and asking if there is a way that you and him can agree on the division of labour. What does he feel is fair and why? Then what do you feel is fair and why and discuss it back and forth until you have reached a common ground. There is no point communicating with insults and hurts, as this solves nothing. Work on creating alignments with your partner, rather than demanding change.
6. Know what you want
Part of being able to align change to your problems within your partnership, is to know what it is that you want. Most often we know a lot about what we don’t want, but aren’t really clear and specific about what we do want. This makes it really hard to communicate with your partner when you cannot convey a solution to the problem. The communication ends up being an unproductive slaying match of ‘You do this.....’ or ‘you don’t do that......’. This ends up in confusion, hurts and resentment. Before entering into a conversation aimed at changing something that is a problem for you, ask yourself what needs to happen in order to solve this problem. Be clear in your head exactly what you are hoping to achieve in the conversation so that you have more of a change of communicating your desire. Be flexible though, this is not about getting your way, it’s about creating an alignment with your partner. But if you know what you are aiming at achieving to begin with, then you are already heading in a solution focussed direction, rather than just complaining about the problem with no deliberate consideration to what you want to happen as an alternative.
7. You Teach people how to treat you
This is a popular phrase coined by the famous Dr Phil McGraw, psychologist and talk show host. Somewhere along the line, you teach people what is okay and what is not okay when it comes to how they treat you, speak to you, love you, fight with you, accept you etc. If your partner is abusive, insulting, critical or physical and this is a continual thing, then you have somewhere along the line, taught him that this is okay behaviour. We all have boundaries and deal breakers and when somebody step over the line, we teach them through our reactions, whether the boundary has been pushed or not. Through our conversations, our self-esteem, our treatment of ourselves, the interactions we have with the people around us all teaches other people how to treat us. For example, let’s say that your husband doesn’t do enough around the house in your eyes. Perhaps when you first got together it didn’t matter that much to you to live in a slightly messy house. Perhaps you were so much in love you didn’t even bother bringing it up. Perhaps you feel as if it is your duty to clean up the house, not your husband’s. Perhaps you started to argue about it and then gave up and became complacent about it. Over time, you have somehow taught your husband what is acceptable by you and what is not when it comes to the housework. You have taught that the current boundary is acceptable and so this is the boundary that is being met. Another example is abuse. Now to me, I couldn’t imagine my husband ever verbally abusing me, or physically abusing me ever and me allowing it to be acceptable at any time. Over the 12 years I have been with him, through conversation or reactions to other situations, I have voiced my opinion on this and made it very clear where I stand on this issue. Even though he doesn’t have this tendency to behave like this, if he were, then I would react in such a way that was clear to him that this wasn’t acceptable. In fact, to me, it’s an absolute deal breaker with very final consequences. Sometimes though, abuse isn’t that clear. It can start off very subtley and become a very gradual thing. It might start off with a small, derogatory comment in a joking manner. That’s not very unreasonable. It wasn’t very nice, but not enough to jump up and down about it, so you let that slide. Then over time, the insult became a little more regular. Oh well, he’s just tired from long hours at work, he doesn’t mean it. Then he becomes angrier and starts yelling quite often, then becomes very sorry and guilty and makes it up to you, so you also let that slide. Over time, you may also find that you have begun to believe a lot of what he has said about you and your self-esteem is taking a plummet, so you are unable to teach him a new behaviour because at some level you may believe that this treatment of you is warranted. All of a sudden you realise that you are living with an abusive person and you have no idea how this came to be. If you look back over the time of being together, you will be able to see how by being complacent and accepting the undesirable behaviour as it arose, you taught your partner that this behaviour was okay, by being complacent about it and not bringing up the issue in its onset. Obviously abuse of this kind, can be a lot more complex than this and this example is only a very weak description of how you can teach people how to treat you, but hopefully you can get an idea of how easy it is to teach people what is accepted behaviour. Now this is not to make you at fault for the way people treat you, but understanding how you have contributed to this current treatment or behaviour, can help you take part responsibility for the problem, and thus can take responsibility for the solution, by reteaching some new boundaries. In tutorial 9 – Create the Ultimate Relationship (below) you will learn how to do this.
8. Take notice of where your attention lies
It’s so easy when you are tired, run down, chaotic, busy with the kids, angry or resentful about your endless list of chores, to take this frustration out on your partner. You may often get annoyed at the long hours he works, the dirty dishes he leaves on the sink, the towels on the floor when he’s bathing the kids, or all of the things he’s doing wrong. When we begin to think like this about our partners, and continually judge them, resent them, feel hard done by, we are literally disconnecting ourselves from them and creating a rift that causes the initial cracks in a relationship. What you think about expands, and if you are continually noticing all of what your partner does wrong, you soon lose sight of why you were connected with him in the first place. Initial resentment becomes accusations of character, which creates a disassociation from what you love about him. You can take responsibility for creating a happier partnership by taking notice of what you are thinking about your partner. If your mind is clouded with negative thoughts directed at your husband, then you will struggle to see any good things that your partner does. What about the fact that the long hours your husband works is so that you and your children can eat, have a roof over your heads and enjoy other comforts? What about the fact that when he left the towels on the floor, he was bathing the kids in the first place? What if he left the dirty dishes for you and went to play with the kids instead because he thought that would give you a break from the kids and some time to think for yourself? If you continually think about your partner in a bad way, you are poisoning your mind to look for the negatives and are inadvertently creating the cracks in your marriage? Try to think about the good stuff about your partner? What are the qualities that you love about him? How does he contribute in a good way around the house? What do you appreciate him for? What are his contributions to the family dynamic? Be aware of your thoughts and try to avoid the bitter and unproductive thoughts that might separate you from your partner by criticising, judging or resenting things he says or does. If there is a problem, use some of the other strategies to create a new alignment, but being bitter and allowing your attention to focus on the negatives is neither going to change your husband, nor help your relationship, it will only cause more misery.
At the end of the day, you can only control your own reactions, environment and feelings. You cannot expect that if your partner changes, then you will be happier because what you are doing is handing your happiness over to somebody else, which makes it purely by chance you will ever feel happiness. If you want a successful and happy marriage, you have to do everything in your power to contribute to creating that happy marriage. You can teach your partner how to create this happy marriage too, as chances are, he doesn't know how to create one either, so you both continue to play these right and wrong games and continue make yourselves unnecessarily unhappy.
You can be the one to stand up in your relationship and be the voice of choice. Alignment, love and connection doesn't have to be a fight and you don't need to demand it either. All you need to do is learn a better way of communicating and learning a new way to be a couple with children, because the reality is that it is very different from being a single couple without children.
Personally, after 13 years of being with my partner, I can honestly say that I have a deeper conncection with my partner after children than I ever had, because we have made the transition into parenthood with determination, communication, alignment and respect and love for each other. As corny as that sounds, this is what is required to make it through as a couple with children.
In The Happy Mum Handbook, you can learn how to apply the Mind TRACK to Happiness process to your relationship and how to begin establishing a more fulfilling and long lasting connection with your partner.
