8 Ways to revive your relationship
updated the 6 October 2015 à 23:15
How can you build a long-term relationship? What can you do to boost your relationship after years of common life? Psychosociologist and author Jacques Salomé provides some answers to these questions.
“One of the biggest challenges faced by modern men and women is taking the time to revive their relationship when they enter certain crucial phases of married life. Meaning that they have to try hard to continue to live together without resigning, without resorting to separation, without causing hurt or feeling trapped in an inevitable fate. In other words, they must be able to clean up and re-adjust their behaviour to create a better relationship. They have to allow themselves the possibility of clarifying the evolution of their expectations, their contributions and their intolerances.”
This will help couples to avoid a frequent trap that causes a lot of pain: where one decides to leave the other, even if they do not really want to break up, but because they cannot bear the nature of the relationship any more. By not confusing ‘relationship’ and ‘person’, we can say: “It is not you I want to leave, it is the relationship you offer to me which is not good for me. The person I became is giving up on this relationship. I would like to offer you another relationship, created by you and me to enable us to stay together, if you wish, because I also wish that too!” I believe that this alternative is positive and creative. It can be noted that it is often women who make such demands, as they want to move the relationship forward, in order to further the intimate communication within their relationships or with their children.
REVIVING A RELATIONSHIP EQUATES TO AGREEING TO GROW UP INSIDE
If we are careful not to let too many disappointments accumulate, nor amplify the frustrations that can result from the difference between the expectations of one and the answers of the other one, nor despair of the inevitable gap between the dreams and the reality, then agreements become possible. Tensions will decrease, conflicts dissolve and disappear, and adjustments will be made. Reviving a relationship equates to agreeing to grow up inside while surpassing our own emotional immaturity. It also equates to recognising strengths of explosion and strengths of cohesion that focus on everyday life. This is the support but not the real challenge in the conflicts that we dwell on and we try to adjust! If each one does not feed the misunderstandings, the relation is entirely liveable.
REDEFINE THE BASIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP
The relationships that last are those that strike a balance between the strengths of individualisation and, thus, of possible dispersion. These are present in each of us, along with the strengths of cohesion that are gathered and confirmed in the desire of being together. This balance can be reached by gathering sensibilities, zones of tolerance and vulnerabilities of each. It is not enough to count on the presence or the strength of our feelings, but to strengthen the links (instead of mistreating them), and to be more aware of the sociable dispositions which will cement the relationship in particular. After a few years of common life, a significant number of couples break up because they do not find this balance. Fortunately, some people agree, after a few years of more or less conflicting experimentation, to question their way of life and to redefine the basis of the relationship on which they built their couple. This is true for various reasons; not only because they have matured as a result of various trials of life, but also because they understand and accept that they have evolved, albeit not necessarily in the same rhythm or direction.
GET OUT OF THE GENDER ROLES
Some have managed to find the good relational distance that allows them to better understand their dominant relational needs. Thus, they can define themselves better in front of the other; to exist without guilt, to position without alienating, to respect each other by refusing to automatically answer the desires of the partner or to sacrifice ourselves for his or her well-being, and to get out of the gender roles to dare to accomplish ourselves. The questioning of the relationship between two persons who are, or were, in love is sometimes brutal, after a triggering event (the departure of the children, a professional change, a disease, the temptation of an affair, etc.). This questioning can also mature silently and present itself abruptly, to the partner’s surprise. It does not aim at disputing the other one, but rather at revisiting the relationship when the partner realises that there are three entities within the couple: him (her), the other one and the relationship that has connected them for so many years, a relationship nourished or mistreated, animated or lifeless, by their exchanges, and not only by their love, as many of us can believe.”
Fabienne Broucaret
