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Good communication. Whenever something bothers you, you can’t bottle it up inside and wait for them to understand what’s bothering you. It won’t work. Listening to each other talking about whatever and respecting each other’s opinions and thoughts.
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Admitting whenever you’re in the wrong and have the ability to properly apologize to your partner.
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Respect is so important. Doesn’t matter how mad you are, getting disrespectful and nasty to your partner is just no good.
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LOVE
My brain isn’t working much now so I can’t think of anything else but there’s a lot.
Be responsible for your own wellbeing / the wellbeing of the people in the relationship is more important than the relationship itself.
It’s not your job to make your partner happy, and it’s not your partner’s job to make you happy. Build a life that is your own – your own friends, your own hobbies, your own self-care, your own goals and dreams. Find someone who supports you in those things and who you can support in their own life, in return.
Of course long term partnership involves significant entanglement and you can’t be entirely independent, but if your lives start to overlap so much that you never do anything apart and you stop losing your individual identities to the “couple” identity, you run the very real possibility of living a life where your wellbeing is less important than the wellbeing of the relationship.
Be two trees standing on their own with branches touching, not two trees leaning on each other to stay up.
Alone time is critical. Spending time apart gives you and your SO a break and maybe something to talk about.
Honesty, laughter, sharing, and a decent amount of ‘bedroom, or any room time.” ( even when you have kids in the house, make time for each other.)
My parents have been married 31 years. One of the biggest things I’ve noticed is you have to understand how your partner expresses love (i.e. what’s their love language). My dad has never remembered their anniversary (let alone gotten her a gift for it), but he would work two jobs so she could stay home with the children and later go to school (which he encouraged). These days, he call her everyday on his way home from work. Last summer, he built her an entire patio with a gazebo and garden area and the year before he remodeled the kitchen. He’s the kind of person who does stuff through actions, and I think my mom’s figured that out. So I guess you just have to understand how they show they care.