For those who don’t get excited about receiving gifts, giving them can be a chore. Worse yet, gift-giving can become a no-win trap, one in which they are certain to disappoint someone who matters a lot to them. Here are seven ways to have more fun this month if you love giving and receiving gifts but your spouse doesn’t: Create a wish list and make it easy for your mate to find. Find...
A lucky few grow up able to see what love is and how their parents love each other, growing better at it every year. But most of us don’t. We go into marriage with something like the Foreigner song lyric lurking in our heads: “I wanna know what love is; I want you to show me.” We meet a good man or woman, discover love, and marry. At first, we’re fine. We feel so loved. We...
When you’re upset about any other part of life with your husband, wife, or life partner, it’s likely you will start noticing your differences, too. How compatible do you need to be to keep the relationship going? Compatibility has two sides: propriety and enthusiasms. Marry someone whose ideas of what’s proper and what’s not differ wildly from yours and you’ll...
Want to hear more about how to Assume Love, Expect Love, and Find Third Alternatives? Listen to this podcast, in which I was interviewed by Lee Rosen of Stay Happily Married.
Hats off to Lee for doing so much to discourage business for his North Carolina divorce law practice, and for being a great interviewer.
It’s January. Time for all those post-holiday arguments. You two have different goals for the new year. You have different hurts left over from last year. You have different fears, different challenges ahead. You have different ideas of how important those threats or challenges will be. You have different ideas how to deal with them. Break out the arguments. And crank up the stakes. Your...
I am a widow who got it right the second time. I have been sharing here since February 14, 2006 what I learned from that experience and from positive psychology, marriage research, and my training as a marriage educator.
