Many of us start out wonderfully in fantastic new romantic relationships. We soak in every moment of our partner and relish in every word. We feel connected and stimulated both in and out of the bedroom. While the initial merger may seem natural, maintaining the relationship may not come so naturally.

There are a number of techniques necessary to build relationships that transcend time, but both partners must have the emotional intelligence to effectively communicate with each other and overcome the obstacles that life hurls their way.

build relationships
To building relationships that are strong, we must build our foundation upon seven pillars. The first pillar is honesty. You must be honest with yourself and with your partner to create close interpersonal relationships. With honesty comes trust, and you must be able to trust your partner in every way and put keeping their trust as a top priority. The third pillar is respect.

You must respect each other’s strengths, shortcomings, dreams, goals, personality and opinions. The fourth pillar is communication, which requires time, attentiveness and good listening skills. Attention is the fifth pillar, which means showing that you’re thinking about your partner, enjoying time together and sending positive energy their way on a regular basis.

The sixth pillar is intimacy. This entails more than just love and relationships but also letting your guard down, trusting, sharing and respecting the other person. The last pillar is commitment, which is essential to a good, strong relationship.

There are five key skills needed to build relationships that are strong, positive and enduring. Knowing how to manage stress is the first skill of emotional intelligence. Stress has the potential to disrupt communication, drain you of energy and damage the relationships.

You’ll need to recognize when you’re getting stressed and practice relaxation techniques to maintain control of your emotions. The second emotional intelligence skill is having the ability to control your emotions. It’s perfectly natural to feel anger, sadness and other emotions, but it’s how we communicate those emotions that matters.

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You must be in-tune with yourself to recognize how your past has shaped your present. Nonverbal communication is emotional intelligence skill #3. Eye contact, good posture, touching one’s arm, keeping a calm tone of voice and smiling are all techniques to use when communicating with your partner. The ability to use humor and play is the fourth key to happy social relationships and the ability to resolve conflicts is the fifth skill.

Almost all relationships advice centers on making time for one another. Once you build relationships, quality time spent together is the glue that holds intimate relationships together. “Couples need to spend a lot of time with each other,” says Dr. David Kaplan, chair of the counseling department at Emporia State University in Kansas. “There is no substitute for quantity of time.”

He advises spending at least 15 minutes each day with a personal one-on-one conversation. Additionally, he says couples should take half a day each week to go out on a date. Getting physical is also essential, whether you’re 20, 40 or 60.

interpersonal relationships
Relationships sex may not need to happen every day, but partners should be on the same page for how often it should happen. You may feel guilty taking off work on Saturdays to plan a date with your spouse, but quality time is the best way to make old, stale relationships feel like new relationships again.

Tags: Attentiveness, Building Relationships, Emotional Intelligence, Fifth Pillar, Good Listening Skills, Honesty, How To Manage Stress, Intell, Interpersonal Relationships, Intimacy, Key Skills, Love And Relationships, Love Relationships, Pillars, Positive Energy, Practice Relaxation Techniques, Relish, Romantic Relationships, Shortcomings, Top Priority

Positive personal relationships can provide great strength during hard times. They can add to our self-esteem, boost our confidence and illuminate our admirable traits. Forgiveness may require a new way of looking at the situation but certainly it is one of the pillars of healthy relationships.

They can be a daily comfort to our psyche and make life so much more fulfilling. Conversely, negative social relationships can tear at our sanity and cause extreme stress, depression, loneliness, anxiety and frustration.

love and relationships
The keys to successful personal relationships are often the same, regardless of what type of relationship you’re looking to strengthen, be it friend, coworker, family member or romance relationships. For instance, being assertive and drawing clear boundaries is a good practice in any relationship.

First you must explore your own feelings and decide what your limits are. Next, you will need to assert yourself using “I” statements, as well as cause-and-effect consequences. For instance, you might say, “I dislike being tickled because it makes me feel powerless and uncomfortable.

If you tickle me again, I will have to leave.” If the person violates your boundaries, then you must stick to your guns and do as promised to reinforce those boundaries. Over time, you may note that the other person cannot adhere to your boundaries and you may come to the conclusion that he or she does not actually respect you.

While it may be a tough conclusion to reach, you couldn’t have come to the truth without first setting boundaries.

social relationships
Another way to bolster any of your love and relationships is to learn to manage your anger better. Anger can be an extremely detrimental to building relationships, parent/child relationships, workplace relationships or friendships. Feeling anger is not the problem; rather, the problem arises from our mismanagement of anger.

The first step to managing your anger is to understand the triggers, both the superficial triggers and the underlying triggers. For example, you might blow your top over your spouse forgetting an anniversary. Yet, beneath that, you may see a pattern of behavior because your spouse also forgot to get you anything for Valentine’s Day, forgot to tell you all his friends were coming over last weekend, forgot to tell you your mother called and forgot to call to say he’d be home late from the bar.

Perhaps you’re really feeling like he doesn’t consider your feelings or inform you on important matters. It’s crucial that you learn to stop bottling your emotions and instead relieve them in healthy ways.

In any of your personal relationships, “Disagreements are going to occur,” says Dr. Phil. “The question is, do you go into it with a spirit of looking for resolution or do you go into it with a spirit of getting even, for vengeance or to gain control? You’ll never win if you do that.

romantic relationships
If you make your personal relationships a competition, then that means your spouse has to lose in order for you to win. It’s not a competition, it’s a partnership.” Whether you’re looking into marriage counseling or seeking healthy relationships with friends, family or coworkers, it’s important that you stop feeling like a victim and take responsibility for your feelings and your behaviors.

Tags: Admirable Traits, Building Relationships, Cause And Effect, Depression Loneliness, Extreme Stress, Family Member, Forgiveness, Friendships, Healthy Relationships, Love Relationships, Mismanagement, Parent Child Relationships, Personal Relationships, Pillars, Psyche, Romance Relationships, Sanity, Setting Boundaries, Social Relationships, Workplace Relationships

Healthy love relationships and marriages are based around communication, intimacy, friendship and time spent together. When romance relationships graduate to marital relationships and child rearing relationships, it’s easy to get blown off-course.

Many parents focus all their love and attention on the children and lose sight of their own needs and desires as a couple. Instead, parents must put their love marriage priorities first so the children can learn love from their parents’ example.

love and relationships
The first step for creating happy love relationships is fixing any communication problems. Dr. David Burns suggests overcoming the silent treatment through a technique called “multiple choice empathy,” where you take on full responsibility for the other person’s feelings.

You might say a statement like, “I see you don’t want to talk to me. Is there something you’re upset about? Perhaps I didn’t listen to you as well as I should have or I tried to tell you what to do. I feel really bad that I’ve done this to you.” In most cases, the other person will open up.

If your partner is overly critical of you, the best move, Burns says, is to accept responsibility and make the statement more positive. For instance, if your partner accuses you of being a control freak, you might respond by saying, “I’ll admit I have a tendency to be controlling at times.” Then reaffirm how much the person and relationship means to you, mentioning your desire to make things right.

healthy relationships
The next step for creating happy intimate relationships is to share experiences together, no matter how big or small. Some couples get into a TV series together to spend that time cuddling on the couch, eating ice cream, laughing and discussing episodes together. With many top TV series available on DVD now, you can even indulge without all the time-wasting commercials!

In fact, it’s a great way to unwind from a long day and relax. Other couples may prefer to do something a little more active by taking a post-dinner bike ride, a Saturday morning hike and picnic or a daily treadmill workout at the gym. Creating time for each other doesn’t always come naturally. To borrow from an food analogy, think of relationships like chocolate cake: after five days of eating chocolate cake, it might not taste as good, yet after five days of talking about it, that chocolate cake sure sounds good!

interpersonal relationships
Another method to bolster love relationships is to get spiritual together. A University of Chicago survey of married couples found that 75% of Americans who pray with their spouses report their marriages are “very happy.”

Religion promotes many values that apply to building relationships, like respect, humility, faith and selflessness. You can have the satisfaction you desire if you are determined to get it.

Tags: Child Rearing, Communication Problems, Control Freak, Cuddling, David Burns, Desires, Dr David, Empathy, Healthy Relationships, Intimacy, Intimate Relationships, Love And Relationships, Love Marriage, Love Relationships, Marital Relationships, Multiple Choice, Relationships Love, Romance Relationships, Silent Treatment, Top Tv

Dating relationships, whether good or bad, can teach a person a lot about him or herself. New relationships can fill a person with confidence, inspiration, hope and love. However, relationships that turn negative can lead to uncertainty, shame and depression.

Therefore, it’s important to understand what constitutes healthy relationships and unhealthy relationships. It can be difficult to objectively answer the question about what makes healthy relationships.

love relationships
Communicating properly within love relationships is often easier in theory than in practice, yet each partner should still strive for maintaining positive interaction. For instance, accusing someone with “you never listen to me,” or “you always forget to call me,” will automatically put the other person in a defensive position.

Instead, a positive partner will simply state how he or she feels. “Sometimes I feel that you don’t listen to me because…” would be a more appropriate way of communicating; or one could say, “I felt really disappointed when you didn’t call today and wondered why you didn’t do what you promised.”

Tone is also important. Couples should avoid sarcastic remarks, putting the other person down, blaming, name-calling, yelling or interrupting. Instead, a “How can we both work to fix this” approach should be taken to create more positive and effective interpersonal relationships.

sexual relationships
Marriage counseling therapists use tools that are also effective for dating relationships, such as a nine-step process called “Emotional Freedom Techniques.” When a couple arrives, the first step is to lay out the problems.

Most couples will fight over laundry or paying the bills, which are surface-level issues that may happen repetitively, but it’s the goal of the therapist to uncover the real relationship issues troubling them. The next step, then, is to realize the destructive cycle and the underlying needs/wants that fuel this negative pattern.

The third step is to understand what’s fueling one’s emotions. In the fourth step, partners become less combative and realize that no one is to blame, but rather, the cycle is the common enemy they must defeat. Partners become more honest and admit their deepest fears and desires in the fifth step.

In the sixth step, the partners should acknowledge each other’s feelings. In the seventh step, couples become closer because of the newfound realizations and the eighth step involves brainstorming and problem solving. Lastly, the partners vow to stay on-track and prevent relapses.

People from broken homes can find it extremely difficult to create healthy dating relationships. Our first experience of love and relationships begins at home with our parents’ example.

Therefore, if the social relationships at home have been negative, then the child will have a skewed vision of what constitutes a “normal relationship.” Many people from broken homes find that they are always searching for what their family life has lacked.

interpersonal relationships
It is entirely possible to view an abusive upbringing as an example of what not to do. Some people in dating relationships can break out of these cycles and learn to live and love positively; although, many more people require some counseling to uncover negative behavioral patterns that have been adopted from childhood.

It’s important for the individual to do some soul-searching and remain honest about where one has been and where one is going. Spending some time alone, soul-searching and trying to think more positively is really what this woman will need to make healthy relationships a reality.

Tags: Couples, Dating Relationships, Defensive Position, Destructive Cycle, Effective Interpersonal Relationships, Emotional Freedom Techniques, Healthy Relationships, Inspiration, Interaction, Laundry, Love Relationships, Marriage Counseling, Relationship Issues, Relationships Love, Sarcastic Remarks, Sexual Relationships, Shame, Surface Level, Uncertainty, Unhealthy Relationships