It is not your looks, as sexy as you may be.  It is not your job, or your money, it is not your large house or the metals you won in sports; it is not how you romance someone.

The biggest asset in securing a relationship and keeping it is your attitude.  Your attitude is something that, whether you like it or not, is going to come out at your best times and your worst times. Your attitude includes the way you evaluate yourself and the outside world around you. It makes you judge and perceive situations and people.  But it also gives people insight on your personality.  Your attitude will allow your partner to see how you engage in certain situations and with certain people.

Here is a list of unattractive attitudes:

- Bad attitude.  Who wants to be around Pouty Pat or Sassy Sarah all the time? No one does!

- Entitlement attitude.   The reality is that your entitlement attitude might get you through your teens and even college, but it will not help you secure a spouse.

- Inflexible attitude.  Exceptions are important in life.  A black and white view of the world will only hinder your attitude.

- Selfish attitude. Being giving shows your ability to love.  If you are too busy keeping things all to yourself, sharing your life with someone will be difficult.

Your attitude will motivate you or make you fearful.  Your biggest relationship asset is part of your personality, but it is the part of your personality that can be altered.  Your attitude can change, but you have to work on aspects of your life in order to begin to change it.

Here are some attitudes you should adopt: hopeful, optimistic, playful, grateful, cheerful, open, and confident.

Here is how to work toward those promising attitudes:

Change your Expectations:  If you want others or yourself to meet too high of expectations, you will always be disappointed which will fuel a bad attitude.  Lower your expectations and make them more reasonable, this way you and others will be able to meet those expectations.

See the Glass Half Full:  Change the way you look at things.  Try to find the good in people, events, work and relationships.  This will help shape your attitude for the better.

Your Friends:  Make sure you have optimistic people surrounding you.  Our attitudes brush off on one another.  Being around people who have good attitudes will allow you to create one too!

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Why You’re Not Married

My suggestion is that if you are continuing the relationship with your partner and trying to resolve a time of infidelity, that you forgive both parties.  Letting go of that past can be the best thing to get you and your partner to move on to a successful future.  Moving on with your partner through a time of infidelity can be a very difficult task.  However if you are refusing to forgive your partner or the situation, the best thing you can do is get out of the situation.  If you are ruminating about the infidelity, the act of the cheating, or the parties involved, and are unable to stop your bad thoughts it is time to move on.  You can not continue to analyze why this went on.  Some situations in life just don’t make any sense and you will never be able to make sense of them.

Here are some quick suggestions to move on from this difficult situation:

• Take care of yourself.  Get back into a happy hobby.  Hang out with friends.
• Don’t disclose your personal life.  In the times of Facebook Status, it may be easy to bash your unfaithful partner via web, but I suggest against that.
• Don’t listen to unsolicited advice.  Everyone is going to have an opinion about what you should and should not do in a situation of infidelity.  You need friends who give you support rather than judgement.
• Forgive everyone involved.  Forgive your partner, the other party, and yourself.  You might even have to take some responsibility in order to forgive yourself.
• Couples therapy.  It might be good to have a neutral third-party to help you get through set-backs of the relationship and move forward.  You will be able to talk honestly about your feelings in a safe environment.

 So what does this have to do with your marriage?  Well, the marriage market is similar to the housing market.  There are reports that the divorce rate is increasing and reports that it is decreasing.  However the rate is null and void to the way we need to be active participants in our marriages.

Some people speculate that divorce is more prevalent when:

• It’s a 2nd or 3rd Marriage
• You and your spouse argue consistently about finances
• You co-habitat before entering into the marriage
• You live in a red state (Republican)
• Your parents are divorced
• And my personal favorite:If you live in Wayne County, Indiana, and are over 15 years old, there’s a 19.2 percent chance that you’ve been divorced. 

Divorce is becoming an open forum in which many people willfully or unwillfully take part. Reasons for divorce are said to be:

• Lack of commitment
• Lack of positive interaction
• Lack of communication
• Lack of sex
• Lack of real expectations

So when our home does not have enough equity in it to sell, we stay with it.  We know that the investment we made in the beginning and it has to  yield the proper return for us.  Why can’t we do this in marriages? Whether the housing market is up or down, if you are a home owner, you are a home owner. The housing market is boosted by the economy, which is a collective citizen task.  Your marriage is boosted by what takes place in the marriage, which is a collective couple task.

Eventually the marriage will return to the value it once was, we have to try to put in work.  Putting in the due diligence to make your marriage work will predict the end result.  We have to be patient and trust that the process marriage takes will yield happiness later, even during difficult times.

*Sometimes getting divorced is the healthiest decision for all parties involved.  I am not soliciting advice for your specific situation; I am just advising you to take time in making such a decision and seek counsel from professionals.

This concept makes sense when we discover that we are bound not only biologically to our immune systems but also psychologically and socially.

What this doesn’t mean is that you can blame the cold you had last week on your partner!  What it does mean is that stability in a relationship can be the beginning of good psyche and overall better health.  Once you get sick, your immune system is alerted and it tries to fight back.   When stress levels are high, our whole being (physically and mentally) has less fight left, including our immune system.  In regards to your relationship, prevention is the key.  Talking about issues and communicating can prevent arguments as well as sickness.

We were designed to give into certain biological responses.  Being in relationship with other people is natural.  Cultivating those relationships is not as natural, and it takes work from both parties. Remember these tips to increase the love you put out and the health benefit that it will put back into you:

1. Breath. Make sure you take deep breaths throughout the day or breath regularly to increase the overall calm that your body feels.  Sometimes we are not conscious to steady and regular breathing.  Controlled breathing can decrease anxiety.

2. Be aware of responses.  Our initial responses are often not the best ones.  When someone irritates us we are quick to anger.  Be aware of eliciting calm and peaceful responses. *This will take some work.  Remember that the only thing you can control is your reaction.

3. Love, Love, Love.  The articles I discussed before addressed being a caring and loving person as an important part of being healthy.  You can increase love feelings by evoking caring in your overall life.

Try being more in tune to your “love” self.

But who is it really?  When it comes to whose fault it is that a relationship doesn’t work out, can any one party be to blame?

When any relationship ends, whether it is a friendship or a romantic relationship, a small assessment is done.  The assessment takes place by talking to friends, looking back on old relationships, and by replaying what went right or wrong during the past few months leading up to the loss of friendship or break-up.  We try to find answers, but the truth is that sometimes those answers don’t exist.

We tend to think about all the bad things that happen when ending the relationship rather than having an objective idea of what the relationship looked like.  Both parties contributed to the ending of the relationship in some way.  It is important for you to be able to evaluate your contribution so you can be aware of it in future relationships.  Never try to assess or blame the other person’s contribution; this is when we get into trouble and make a bad situation worse.  Always use “I” statements instead of “You” statements.

We live in a world filled with more break-ups and breakdowns than commitment. Working hard to mend a relationship or assertiveness to make one’s life better seem like daunting tasks.  We are too used to giving up being the new “norm.” I am not suggesting that you try to stay with someone who is abusive physically or mentally, but that you take the time to assess your life, your hang-ups, and your past to understand where it puts you in your relationships today.

It is easy for us to pass the buck and the blame onto someone else or to profess ourselves the blame to slip out of something.  Maybe in a world filled with easy outs, it is time that we went back to fighting for the health in our relationships. It is time that we seek out professional help to overcome the barriers that lead us to struggle in romantic relationships or friendships.

There is a statistic that 30 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage.  I don’t tell you this to scare you or make you worry.  This is shared to let you know that you are not alone if you have experienced a miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy.  There is a misconception that a miscarriage is just the expelling of an unhealthy pregnancy.  Although that may hold true for a biological/medical standpoint, that does not make the process of a miscarriage any easier.

Sometimes our bodies tell us things and our heart doesn’t agree.  Having a miscarriage can bring many types of grief.

•  Personal grief (emotional and physical)
• Relational grief (stress in our marriage or relationship)
• Social grief (anger or confusion directed towards women/families who have conceived)
• Unknown grief (not knowing what to do next in our lives)

A miscarriage is a loss.  It is just as much a loss as loosing a loved one.  The person experiencing the miscarriage can not be pushed to “get over it.”  There is a process that grief takes and needs; it looks different for everyone.  No one can know your personal grief, but be assured that it is a process for everyone.  Trust in your faith or spirituality and do what feels right to you.

When you have a miscarriage you lose not only an unborn child, but you lose the ideals that you had about a family.  You lose the joy of pregnancy.  Your body will also experience a physical loss knowing that the termination of the pregnancy was immature.  The body, person, and soul all grieve.

It may feel like everyone has a happy life with a baby, but that is not the case.  It is normal to feel that way.   Grieve as you need to grieve, allow yourself time, and give yourself lots of grace.  You are not alone.

I really enjoyed reading this book. I believe it brings insight into, not only parenting, but also all types of relationships.

“It is time for Timmy to take an N-A-P.”  Eventually the child learns the word you are spelling or they will have the ability to understand that N-A-P has an action associated with it that places them in their bed.

What this means is that children understand much more than we think they do.  From the very beginning they are mirroring what they see us do.  Mirroring is done when one person copies the action of another person during social interaction.  Children mirror the adults and peers they are in contact with on a regular basis; they may learn behaviors such as  work ethic, eating habits, and even relationship patterns.

In this blog we will focus on what children need to see from our romantic relationships with one another.  What are the best ways for us to set up positive mirroring in the lives of our children?

What specifically do children need to see in our relationships with our spouses or partners?

A boy should see his father succeed in fulfilling his mother’s needs.  The young man should see that father (or a father-figure) can make mistakes and continue to love himself.  The young boy must witness his mother (or a mother-figure) being forgiving to the father.  He must witness each partner forgiving and each partner admitting when they are wrong.

A girl needs to see her mother openly receive love.  It is important for the mother to help the young woman see what positive and healthy self-awareness and self-esteem look like. The young woman should see that her mother (or mother-figure) can be confident in herself, and supportive of other females.  She must witness her mother knowing and loving herself, while having a shared identity with the father.  Seeing stability in relationships is huge for young women developing and learning how to love themselves.

There is a healthy balance that children need to see.  Too much domination of one partner in the relationship can give children the wrong idea about what “healthy” relationships look like.  We mirror our parents, siblings, and peers from a very young age.

It is important that we also allow ourselves to make mistakes, because no one can be perfect.  Try to remember these strategies when children are in the home:

1. Have parental discussions in private, maybe when out at a quiet dinner alone or when spending a quiet evening at home without the kids.
2. An argument may ensue that was unintentional; if a fight begins in front of the kids- we need to pause.
3. Gather your emotions through quiet counting or deep breathing.
4. Whether the child hears some of our argument begin or is just with us during the “feeling” of  a certain emotion, children know something is wrong.  We don’t need to give them full details, but talk to them about what happen.
5. Make sure the talk is age-appropriate and includes why mom and dad acted in the fashion they did and what mom and dad learned about the situation.

Healthy relationships help our children to learn good relationship habits.   When it comes to patterns and emotions they will learn to mirror what we put out.  Allow yourself grace to make mistakes, humility to admit when you are wrong, and to harbor love and understanding to our partners in front of our children.

This site began as a way for readers to explore their dating and romantic relationship patterns.  After over a year of reading, research, and writing, the site hit a kind of “block”.  It was not a block from a lack of information about how to understand your romantic relationships.

As the author, I realized the site’s information could benefit readers in some instances but something was missing.  Discussions of all the other relationships in our lives was missing.  These relationships help form how we go about our romantic relationships; they form how our children will go about theirs.    Relationships with our parents, grandparents, care-givers, peers, friends, children, co-workers, or people we interact with all matter. Over the years I have heard many people ask “What do you do for a living?”  It is our conversation go-to to get to know someone.

The most appropriate answer to that question may be, “I am in relationship with other people.” But what does that mean?  What is the importance of having happy and healthy relationships?

I have heard people say “It is healthy to fight.”  Is that the real view of how things should be in relationships?  Is the new norm to fight?  Whether with our friends, family, or significant others, what are relationships “supposed” to look like?

Join me as we explore Relationships of all types this upcoming year!