In 26 years together, we’ve seen a lot and never thought it could be as good as it is right now.
Think about before you got married, when we’re wooing and we’re in love and we’re about to get married and everything’s perfect and we think it’s going to be blissful forever, right? And then you get married and there’s work and there’s kids and there’s obligations or community- and it gets really difficult to keep that commitment.
What are the payoffs of commitment? In our experience, commitment means security. It means we have this overwhelming feeling of love and safety in the space that we’re in. We don’t feel alone. We feel like we’re sharing this life with someone who cares and is concerned.
The willingness to work at it and want to go forward makes a difference in the relationship. Another characteristic of a relationship critical to success, is trust. If you don’t have trust or faith, or that loyalty with your partner, then it makes it really difficult to have a good secure relationship. We need to know that when our partner is in a compromising situation, that they’re going to make the right choice. We need to be confident that if we have an argument or something happens, that they’re not going to go try to get the kids on their side, or go tell your friends and say, “you’re not going to believe what happened”. We need that trust that they’ve got our back, even though we might be disagreeing, or maybe we’re not on the same page, but we need to know that our partner is not going to go behind us and do something that would hurt us or harm us, or be disloyal to us. There’s a lot of security in that.
You don’t want to wonder what they are doing. What are they thinking? You’ve got to just know, and hopefully you’re getting the signs in all areas of the relationship that build that. It’s not just one thing. It’s really- it’s a collection, or it’s a mosaic of a lot of words or feelings, thoughts, actions, expressions. It’s a trust account, it keeps building.
We keep putting into that account and building that person up and helping them to know and feel that you’re going to make the right choices. They can trust that whenever you are put in a compromised position, that you are gonna always take the right path for the relationship.
We work on the area of trust almost on a daily basis. We are constantly checking in with each other, which builds that trust account. If something compromising does happen, we’re pretty open about it. Hey, this person said this to me. It made me feel a little bit uncomfortable. This is how I responded,. what do you think? We have a very open and honest relationship. We’re pretty vulnerable with each other, which, again, builds trust. We’ve been working more on this in the last couple years, but we also feel that we’re getting better at it. Just building that trust account up a little bit each and every day makes the other person feel like they can confidently place their full and complete trust in you.
Until next time, remember happily ever after it doesn’t just happen, It’s on purpose.
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