Looking for some good news?
You can have a better relationship starting today.
While there are no quick-fix solutions, the effort you put into improving your relationship will pay off.
Maybe your relationship just needs a tune-up. Maybe it’s time for a major overhaul. Either way, change occurs in small steps, taken and sustained over time.
With that in mind, here are 52 practical to-dos—one for each week of the year—to get you started. Continue reading
A few years ago a client gave me a refrigerator magnet that reads:
Yep. I agree.
Especially when one of the chores involves the word garage. That’s how our garage ended up looking like a scene from the reality show where they bring in five guys in hazmat suits while a team of kind social workers comforts the hoarder. Continue reading
There are a hundred paths through the
world that are easier than loving…
But who needs easier?
— Mary Oliver
Raise your hand if you’ve heard this before:
Marriage is not a noun, it’s a verb.
It’s hard to dispute, isn’t it?
Anyone who’s been married longer than, say, a week, knows that marriage requires effort. Not back-breaking-drudgery kind of effort, but make-it-count, put-your-heart-into-it effort.
We build a marriage the way we build a house: day by day, brick by brick, from the ground up. Continue reading
“Chew with your mouth closed!”
“Don’t hit your sister!”
So much of childhood is about learning the rules and then striving to follow them — at least occasionally.
While some rules are unreasonable — like being told to sit perfectly still at age five or made to skip recess, as I was, for doodling on my homework — the basic relationship skills that we learned as children were, in fact, of great value. Continue reading
It’s the first question most people ask when seeking couples therapy after an affair: “Can my marriage survive?”
Most are relieved that the answer is, yes. Continue reading
It was a typical Saturday at the small neighborhood salon where I regularly go for my manicure and pedicure: a bevy of women giving and getting haircuts, perms and manicures, chatting in an upbeat banter over the background hum of classical music and blow dryers.
Across the room from where I was waiting, two young women sat side-by-side under a pair of hairdryers, giggling and pointing as they flipped through a dog-eared copy of Modern Bride.
After the Argument
Whoever spoke first would lose something,
that was the stupid
unspoken rule. Continue reading
Like most newlyweds, my husband and I stepped into marriage bright-eyed, optimistic and flat-out unprepared. We’d had terrible family role models and possessed virtually no tools, yet — let’s hear it for young love — we assumed that our marriage would be a rousing success. Continue reading
Knowing the secrets of a really good apology can mean the difference between this:
And this:
Most of us learned to apologize back when we were in preschool and as far as I can tell, few people have upgraded their approach since then.
Speaking of Marriage 