Better Relationship – Tips to Turning a Relationship Around

Do you want to have a better relationship but don’t know how to turn things around? Relationships play a vital role in our lives by adding meaning in more ways than we realize.

And yet, many times, the most important relationships in our lives turn sour. The pain caused as a result of such an experience percolates into other aspects of life and a great amount of avoidable negativity results—Yes, AVOIDABLE. It is avoidable because we created that ugliness.

We might love to pass on all the blame to the other party and justify our emotions to anyone who would bother to listen but at the end of the day, we must accept responsibility, at least some part of it, when things go wrong.

Multifarious Personalities

As human beings possess a number of personality traits, forming a fixed judgement about a person is a rather impulsive thing to do. It does make things easy for us but the validity of those judgments, objectively speaking, is questionable. Most of us have compartments in our mind: “good,” “bad,” “very bad,” “fabulous,” and so on and so forth.

Through our experiences and observations, we put people into one of these compartments with whatever data we might have about them and then feel comfortable since we won’t need to think about that person again.

These quick judgments, however, can harm our relationships. A person can be hot-tempered, generous, hard working and prone to stress—all at the same time. Besides this, he might be jealous, aggressive, sensitive, ambitious . . . the list can be quite comprehensive.

One can choose to color such a person with the light of any of these qualities in one’s mind. One person might think negatively of such a person and see him as a hot-tempered, ill-behaved man who doesn’t have any emotional intelligence.

Another person might consider such a person fabulous since he would color his image on the basis of him being hard-working and ambitious. It’s almost as if different avatars of the same person exist in different people’s minds. How we think of another has a lot to do with us as opposed to the person we are judging.

This is because the qualities we assign the maximum weight to, in our judgement, are the ones that are most important to us. The ones that are not important are left out as if they don’t even exist!

Love Gone Wrong

Sarita and Akbar had a love marriage after knowing each other for several years. Sarita liked Akbar’s vibrant personality and Akbar appreciated Sarita’s patient nature. After some years of marriage though, the relationship turned sour.

Akbar did not take any interest in family affairs and the running of the household and Sarita felt as if she was running the entire show without any support. She became bitter towards Akbar due to this and he responded similarly.

Sarita discussed the situation with a close friend who asked her to focus on Akbar’s positive traits and not to feel bitterly towards him. Though it took some effort on her part to think about Akbar’s positive traits every time a negative thought cropped up in her mind, she decided to stay the course since the exercise felt good.

She wanted to have a better relationship with her husband but didn’t know what was going wrong. With some practice, she was able to think positively about Akbar by not taking his positive traits for granted and accepting his weaknesses.

Akbar was receptive to the positive vibes from his wife and he responded by spending more time with her. Before she realized, Sarita had the kind of positive and mutually respectful relationship she had always wanted to have with her husband.

Wishing for a better relationship is easy, but working towards that is your choice.

Better Relationship – Conclusion

Avoid focusing only on any one behavior or quality of a person. Since no one is perfect, have an accepting approach as opposed to a condemning approach towards your partner’s weaknesses and appreciate his or her good qualities and behaviors as often as possible.

Recreate the negative image you might have created about your partner based on one or two negative qualities or past actions and guide your mind gently to see him or her in a positive light.

Not only will this help your marriage, this will also help you in training your mind to see the positive in all situations in life. Hope you utilize these tips for building a better relationship.