5 Signs Your Relationship Will Last
These signs indicate that your relationship may be short-term or long-term.
Are you struggling in your relationship? Having worked with thousands of couples over the past 46 years, I have seen time and time again what makes a relationship successful and what ruins it. Here are 5 signs that your relationship will succeed.
1. You take responsibility for your feelings rather than waiting for your partner to make you happy.
The real question in relationships is whether you take responsibility for your feelings of worth, security, and ability to love, or whether you make your partner responsible for them.
How do you handle a partner who doesn’t give you happiness and security?
You:
- Do you get angry, attack and blame, or find other ways to punish your partner?
- Are you trying to please your partner by giving in?
- Do you become silent and depressed?
- Are you turning to various types of addictions to fill the void?
- Are you making a deal with a partner?
Does any of the above help your relationship?
Learning to love yourself is the main way to heal your relationship. Learn to take care of your own feelings. Giving love is healing. Trying to get love is destruction.
2. You show kindness, caring, and compassion towards your partner more often than you show judgment.
Do you treat yourself with warmth and understanding? Do you pamper your partner with affection? Relationships heal and thrive with kindness, care, and compassion. If partners neglect themselves or each other, relationships can deteriorate.
Be honest with yourself: how often are you attentive and caring, and how often do you blame yourself or your partner? If you criticize your partner, chances are you are also criticizing yourself; self-criticism often leads to condemnation of other people. It is difficult for love to survive in such an atmosphere.
3. You learn, not control
At any given moment, we are in one of two intentions:
- The intention to give love to yourself and others
- Intention to control, get love and avoid pain
By consciously choosing the intention to give love, you can heal a relationship. By choosing control, you destroy a relationship.
If both partners choose to listen to each other’s opinions, they can resolve any conflict in a couple. However, if one or both partners aim to exert control, the conflict will remain unresolved.
4. You would rather spend time together than “get all your chores done.”
Making time for each other, planning the day together, hugging, making love, playing, laughing together, and crying together can all help heal a relationship. Focusing on your own affairs will ruin the relationship. Couples stay in relationships when they make time to connect and break up when their personal affairs come first.
5. You give thanks, not complain.
Gratitude to your partner for the wonderful qualities—qualities you fell in love with—can sustain your relationship. Complaining about each other destroys harmony. Relationships thrive on high levels of gratitude and wither on high levels of discontent.
Sometimes people try to “connect” by expressing their dissatisfaction with other people or situations, but this is more likely to cause pain than love.
Taking responsibility for your feelings, showing care and affection to yourself and your partner, exploring rather than controlling, making time for each other, and showing appreciation are all signs of a loving relationship.
