12 Habits to Strengthen Your Bond With Your Spouse

All couples who have been married for any length of time find the challenge to stay connected, and sustain an open, caring relationship. When couples fail to get aligned to each other’s needs, desires, and lifestyle, negative outcomes can result, leading to unhappiness, depression, low self-esteem and insecurity. Ultimately, a broken connection can lead to divorce.

When partners consistently choose to place their personal needs ahead of their partner’s, then emotional disengagement often follows. In some cases, partners seek comfort and pleasure in a third party — infidelity. Broken trust generates resentment, frustration and isolation, and separation can follow, as couples try to escape their misery.

My clients often tell me: “I don’t recognise him/her any more!”, feeling entitled to pursue happiness with another partner. Yet, the same relationship challenges can resurface with the next partner. We all carry wounds from our early years and engage in dysfunctional behaviors, which counseling can help with. Here are just some positive habits to incorporate in your relationships, to strengthen your bond with your partner.

1. Avoid fighting: Do not engage in a conflict with a person you love. Listen to his/her grievances. Try to feel his/her pain through your heart not your head. Remember that this is not an attack on you. He/she probably does not know how to express the discomfort in a better manner.
2. Make time: Carve pleasurable time for each other every day regardless of how busy you are. In the beginning of your courtship, you had ample time to be together which was allowing you and him/her to feel special and loved. Listen to music together, express your positive emotions, the things that you admire in him/her, and Dream together.
3. Let go of negative phrases: Avoid saying: “you Always do….” or “You Never say…”. It is highly unlikely that anyone Always or Never engages in particular activity. However, through such absolute phrases your spouse will feel that there is no hope to feel understood or for you to see that he is good enough.
4. Be generous: Don’t reduce the time you spend together, which can lead to an increase in irritability/frustration, increase in time engaging in individual activities, reduction in empathy/care/support/interest, reduction in sexual interest, avoiding spending time together, selfish behaviour e.t.c.
5. Relive your “golden age”: Engage in the activities of that happy era. But most importantly open your heart and listen to your partner’s needs, dreams and aspirations. In the process of attending to his emotional expression avoid feeling defensive and focus on him/her. When people complain it is not about our shortcomings, it is usually about what they feel even if they blame you. If you get defensive, then a fight will follow as your partner will feel ignored.
6. Collaborate: Affairs are usually an attempt to find self-importance, in place of feeling criticised, unloved and ignored at home. Yet affairs can also trigger the start of a healing process between two people, and establish better collaboration between spouses resulting in a more intimate, stronger emotional bond.
7. Manage negative feelings: Criticism, emotional disengagement and lack of care are the root cause of feelings being shifted from spouse to someone else?
8. Identify and change negative patterns: The negative patterns couples establish can be described as not paying attention to each other’s feelings, lack of empathy, selfishness, lack of support, criticism, any type of violence, focussing all their attention on children, and lack of protection from external threats.
9. Recognise your mental state: If you realise that are carrying previous hurts from childhood or former intimate relationships, declare this to your partner. He or she will respect you for your honesty and emotional openness. It would be beneficial to engage in the therapeutic process in order to process prior emotional pain and dysfunctional behavioural patterns. Projecting negative emotions or blame to your partner will break the trust in the relationship and will alienate the partners.
10. Choose fidelity: Fidelity is a choice. as humans are genetically predisposed to have multiple partners. Envision the life you want with your partner and protect this from external threats and the insufferable pain of betrayal. If you feel that your relationship is falling apart, bringing in a third party (creating a triangle) will only add to your confusion and emotional struggle. Furthermore, sex hormones can cloud your judgement regarding what makes you happy.
11. Focus on benefits: What are the positive outcomes of staying connected to partner? Feelings of love, emotional security, mental and physical health, bringing up content, and intelligent children. Feeling supported throughout life and dreaming of the golden years of less work and responsibility.
12. Enjoy each other: How much work does it take to make your partner happy, and keep him/her close to you? If you follow the aforementioned suggestions, it will take no work as you will involved in sheer pleasure. Hormones related to love and safety will guide your interaction with your partner, instead of the hormones that drive stress.

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