Healthy Marriage Tips From a Love Coach
These healthy marriage tips are love coach Karen Card, and they’ll help keep your love strong. Her tips range from “don’t mother him” to “let him keep pursuing you.”
Before her tips, a quip about love:
“Infatuation is when you think he’s as sexy as Robert Redford, as smart as Henry Kissinger, as noble as Ralph Nader, as funny as Woody Allen, and as athletic as Jimmy Conners. Love is when you realize that he’s as sexy as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Connors, as funny as Ralph Nader, as athletic as Henry Kissinger and nothing like Robert Redford - but you’ll take him anyway.” - Judith Viorst.
Ah, ain’t love grand?! Okay, back to our relationship coach, her healthy marriage tips, and achieving your relationship goals. For more info about Karen or her book, How to Get More Love: 40 Tips to Make Love Work, click the cover. And read on for her tips for a healthy marriage…
5 Healthy Marriage Tips From a Love Coach
Healthy Marriage Tip #1: Let the Man Keep Pursuing
To achieve relationship goals, the man should pursue the woman and not the other way around, and here is why. When a man pursues a woman, he focuses on her needs and making her happy - and this makes him happy. In that scenario, both are happy. However, when a woman pursues a man, it causes the man to stop pursuing her. Then when he stops pursuing her, he tends to stop focusing on what makes her happy and instead he focuses on what makes him happy. While this initially feels good for the man, without the challenge of making her happy, he quickly loses interest in the woman. In this scenario, both are unhappy.
This is often frustrating for women because being assertive and going for what they want works very well for businesswomen, but not in the world of dating. Many women do not understand that a man needs to feel he is successful at pursing her and making her happy in order for him to really fall in love with her. A man needs to feel his desire to make her happy - through pursuing her - to see her as a valuable person and someone he will stay interested in for a long time.
Healthy Marriage Tip: #2 - Recognize the 3-month Honeymoon Phase
When we start dating someone we really like, we mistakenly believe the good feelings will last forever. After all, how could it feel so good being with this person if they were not the “right one”?
When you have chemistry with someone you can’t deny the awesome way you feel when you are around them. The reason we feel so good is the result of chemistry or more accurately, chemicals, i.e. hormones. That is the good news. The bad news is that it usually only lasts about 3 months.
- Advice to Men: Although she feels like Ms. Right at the beginning, she will eventually become human and she probably won’t laugh at all your jokes. Give your relationship some time and see if you are willing to be in a real relationship with a real woman.
- Advice to Women: Realize he may seem like the perfect Mr. Right, but don’t start making wedding plans until you have dated seriously at least 3 months. Then look at him for who he really is, and not who you thought he was at the beginning.
Healthy Marriage Tip #3 - Don’t Try to Be the Perfect Wife
During a new relationship, a woman may become so attracted to a man that she already thinks of him as her future husband. If she believes he is Mr. Right she will want him to think she is Ms. Right. So, she starts acting like she is the “perfect wife” for him. She unselfishly tries to meet all his needs, i.e. cooks/cleans for him, plans all their dates around his favorite activities, ignores her friends to accommodate his schedule, and she may even offer to do his laundry. The message she is trying to send is, “See how great your life will be when we are married.”
Unfortunately, the message he hears is, “She really enjoys taking care of me, so I don’t have to do any work. And since she seems so happy doing this now as my girlfriend, I won’t ever have to marry her.”
Healthy Marriage Tip #4 - Don’t Follow the Golden Rule
We have all heard about the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This is a great rule to teach kids to get along with others and to think before they act. However, this rule does not work so well in relationships with the opposite sex, and won’t help you achieve relationship goals.
Men and women have different needs and relationships do not work if we forget this. When a woman “does unto” a man, she gives him what she wants to receive (what she really wants him to give to her). When he does not appreciate this, she is upset and neither partner feels good. One example of this is when a woman is upset, she may want to talk about it, but when a man is upset, he may want to be left alone. If she follows the Golden Rule when he is upset, she will try to get him to talk about it, which is the opposite of what he needs. When she is upset, he may leave her alone, which is what he would want, but is the opposite of what she needs.
Instead of following the Golden Rule, try following the Silver Rule: “Do unto others as they want to be done unto.” In other words, give them what they really need and not what you would need in the same situation.
Healthy Marriage Tip #5 - Don’t Mother Him
Every long-term relationship has a balance that defines each person’s role in the relationship. These balances show up in different forms; some relationships have a give and take balance while others work on a masculine/feminine balance. There is another balance however, which is not healthy; it is the mother/son balance between a woman and a man. When a mother cares for her children, she does not expect anything in return, after all, they are just children. However, when a woman cares for her husband, she expects to get something back for her efforts.
In a mother/son balance, the woman ends up “taking care of” or “mothering” her husband. The more she does causes him to do less (because she is taking care of everything so he does not have to). This results in a relationship that both partners will grow to resent. She will become resentful when he does not do his share and he will eventually become resentful of the loss of his masculinity. To achieve relationship goals, don’t she must stop getting mad at him for expecting her to do everything, she needs to change his expectations and change the balance in the relationship.
Restoring a relationship to the proper balance may take some work. To get started, she needs to ask for his help and give him more responsibility. Even if he does not do the task exactly as she would have, she needs to let him do it, for the sake of getting his help. Then she needs to be sure to appreciate him afterward.
Karen Card, a certified relationship coach, has helped clients all over the world get engaged, get married, stop divorces, and find happiness through love. To visit Karen, go to Coaching for Love.
Do you have any tips for a healthy marriage? Please comment below…
