Through all of that I try to pick apart and analyze how we do make it because aside from the nastiness we throw at each other sometimes, we can find our way back to happy love (far different from angry love or sad love).
I made an earlier post about positive self talk and training your brain to believe that you are worth everything and regardless of what you hear or go through, you can come out on the other end feeling great about yourself. I've said that if my positive self-talk was ever outwardly verbalized I'd sound like the cockiest person alive (but that's the whole point of SELF-talk not real talk).
Anyway, my point in revisiting all of this is that you can also apply those same strategies to your relationship. Nick and I probably sound like the cockiest couple if you heard our conversations. We are constantly acknowledging our ability to talk through problems and vocalize what is on our minds. We pride ourselves on building a friendship inside of our relationship. Anyone out there thinking...well that's just damn fantastic Kate but we're not able to do that in our relationship. Super! Ok not super but that's ok because just like self-talk when building your self-esteem you have to start somewhere.
When Nick and I started dating we established what we wanted our relationship to look like. We didn't want to build resentment, we wanted to be able to tell each other everything free of judgement, we wanted to be able to compromise knowing we were going to disagree. These desires can be established at any point in a relationship. Set a new creed for your relationship! Give it a rebirth! Then something beautiful happens... A self fulfilling prophecy.
There's a promise and an investment in this new creed if you both agree on it. A few months ago I vocalized something that was bothering me that I wasn't feeling supported on. I was met with defensiveness (strong personality :D always fun) but I was able to remind him that this is not how we decided we were going to handle things. I was supposed to be able to voice my concerns and not be met with judgement but rather move towards resolution. (Trick to this is being able to swallow the defensiveness when you're being confronted as well.) With that reminder we were able to get back to what our words reminded us of what we are as a couple and the only way we could have done that is with the ridiculous cocky conversations that happen behind close doors. We don't know what the future holds but if I'm hoping if we focus on the "now", we can get to the future.
There are plenty of other communication techniques that can be worked on and applied but first let's build up the relationship self-esteem even if building on the small things.
So go ahead and fist bump your partner with a reminder that "we got this."
