When clients come into Houston marriage counseling complaining that they feel like they’re drifting apart or that they don’t feel as connected as they once did, often I will ask them a series of questions:
- What’s the last fun or romantic thing you did together?
- When did you last do something nice for your significant other?
- When did you last compliment your significant other?
There are other questions, but they all revolve around the same basic theme—if we want to feel positive about our significant other and avoid relationship problems, it’s an ongoing process of doing things to make them feel good. Otherwise, it’s only natural to start to lose that connection and feel like you’re not as close.
Houston Marriage Counseling: Make Regular Deposits into Relationship’s Bank Account
In some ways, maintaining a healthy relationship has a lot in common with maintaining healthy finances. Depositing money is a positive, just like buying each other gifts, going on dates, or complimenting each other. Withdrawing money is a negative (though typically a necessary one) in the same sense that the way the struggles of everyday living can keep you from connecting with each other is a negative.
Over time, if you have a lot of withdrawals or negative interactions without replenishing that account, things start to get dicey. In the case of your finances, you’ll probably start worrying about how you’re going to be able to pay for things. Where your relationship is concerned, relationship problems might develop because you’ll start to feel unappreciated and eventually even unloved.
For Depositing Advice, Seek Out Houston Marriage Counseling
Unfortunately, the very things that caused you to start to drift—your job, your kids, your other life responsibilities—aren’t going to just go away so that you can focus solely on your relationship. It comes down to you and your partner making a decision that the relationship is something worth prioritizing and doing your best to create positive interactions.
It doesn’t have to be an all-out date night where you have to find a sitter and make reservations and hope and pray that something doesn’t fall apart. Sometimes it’s just as nice to tell your significant other how nice they look, buy them flowers on the way home, or offer to handle a responsibility that’s normally theirs as a “gift.”
No one is saying that this is easy, though, so if you and your partner still can’t seem to reconnect the way you want to, Houston marriage counseling is here to help.
