Tips for successful relationships

1.  Use your community:

Your family, your friends, your mental health professionals, and your mentors all have your best interest in mind and will give you valuable feedback regarding your potential mate. They are generally objective about your mate while you, by definition, have a biased point of you.  You have to invite this kind of feedback as it will not be given openly due to concerns about hurting your feelings or being involved in something that is not their business. You have to reassure the other party that whatever feedback they give will not change your relationship with them.

2. Opposites may attract but they don't make for good mates:

People with similar values, communication style, and problem-solving strategies succeed much more often in handling the inevitable challenges which happen in relationships. Many battles that end up in the therapist office are often a result of mismatches in these areas.

When opposites match up, it is often as a result of two people who are incomplete and are trying to compensate for their deficits using the other person. If you feel you have a significant psychological problem, trouble coping with stress or frustration, or have had unsuccessful relationships and/or difficulty with your family, you may benefit from individual therapy before engaging in a serious intimate relationship.

3. Project into the future:

Before you commit to a serious long term relationship, it is invaluable to think about how you were going to handle future issues and decisions that will inevitably arise. Where will you live and what kind of place will you live in? How will you manage your finances? How much will you save each year? How are you investing your money? Will your money be shared? What will happen if one of you gets sick or disabled? How do your families play into your relationship? Are they a source of support or stress? How are you going to handle it if they are a source of stress? How are you going to be a united team? Do you want to have children? What kind of school system well they enter? Private, public, religious? How will you handle it if your child has a disability, physical or mental? What will your approach be to addressing a child's disability? What is your coping style when you were under stress? Do you need to talk about it a lot, or are you someone to take care of themselves privately? Do your coping styles match up?

Believe it or not, couples often do not examine themselves or ask these kinds of questions. I see the results of this poor planning in my office every day when I see couples.

A couple of therapy visits can be very helpful in sorting out the above-mentioned issues. They can be more helpful the earlier you address any kind of problem. Once resentment builds up, or even contempt, scientific study tells us that divorce or dissolution becomes a high probability.

Please feel free to contact me if you would like a referral, a consultation appointment, or to see me for a couples therapy in my practice.