Like tending to a beloved garden, relationships need regular tending at all times and special tending at certain times in order to thrive and expand. January is one of those times when intimate relationships need extra attention and care.
Why, you may ask? Because, after the frenetic activities of the holidays, the lack of partners’ focus on each other, and the tendency to put each other on the back burner due to other activities going on, intimate relationships in January tend to feel depleted and partners may question their bond and their feelings for one another. Love relationships suffer at this time because the holidays may have brought a lot of excitement and newness with travelling; celebrating with friends and family, gift giving and holiday cheers, and now all this is gone. So, if you and your partner feel down, facing the relational doldrums of everyday life with little excitement and not much to look forward to, you are not alone
It is easy to displace frustrations and lack of enjoyment from the loss of sensational and extraordinary activities in our lives to lack of excitement in our primary relationship. While you may feel disappointed about what’s gone, however, you need to turn the situation around by creating renewed freshness and enthusiasm about each other again.
It is quite possible that you may want you partner to be emotionally and physically available to you, with a positive, caring and responsive attitude and a willingness to respond to your demands and needs, but perhaps your partner wants and needs the same from you and neither of you is getting what you want and need. Typically, when this happens each partner will do one of two things: he or she will either become louder in asking for what’s needed, or shut down and disconnect. Though understandable, it goes without saying that neither of these reactions produces healthy results, because neither provides what one partner is looking for from the other.
So, make sure you devote the time, attention and care to your loved one by setting up New Year’s resolutions for your relationship. By the way, had you ever heard of New Year’s Resolutions for couples? If not, you are not the only one, as most of people’s New Year’s resolutions tend to be about individual goals – losing those extra pounds; plan to exercise more and more regularly; take care of what you have been ignoring or procrastinating; create more balance in your life, and so on – but what about setting up a New Year’s resolution about your relationship with your life partner? Being in a healthy intimate relationship is a very foundational part of being happy. So, taking care of what’s going on with your partner is a very important task.
Think about your own love relationship and see if you can see where more attention and care are needed at this time. Write a list of things you are willing to do in areas where you would like to see improvement, and begin to be more aware of what you may be doing to contribute to the current situation – you being part of the problem – as well as to improve it – you being part of the solution.
In the next blog I will list some specific ways in which you can begin to feed your relationship and get it out of the current sad state it is in and into a more exciting and healthy one. So, stay tuned!
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