How to keep love in the family: a generalized experience

How to keep love in the family? The work of keeping love in the family requires certain knowledge and skills. Unfortunately, few of us have inherited the full skillset from our parenting family. Therefore, it is worth turning to the experience of other people who are happy in family life. This article summarizes the experience of all the authors of our site. This article does not replace the others, but only summarizes this experience, for its better assimilation.

All these people have not been married for the first year, and they are really happy, their families are full of love. Like any happiness, their happiness is not an accident, but the result of a correct understanding of what a family is, and conscious, constant work to build the most important interpersonal relationships in their lives.

The experience of these people is precious. Obviously, we can fully use this experience in a situation where the family was originally built with the right goals and the correct understanding of what marriage is. If the husband, thinking that he is choosing a wife, in fact, chose not a life partner and mother of his children, but only a mistress and the wife chose not a spouse, but a sponsor, the advice offered may not be enough to preserve love and marriage. But it’s worth trying.

1. How to keep love in the family? In any situation, put love first.

Human consciousness is very mobile. It so happens that, in principle, he agrees with some truth, but in specific circumstances, he forgets about it, acts as if he does not know it. Therefore, our understanding that the goal of life in general and family life, in particular, is love, should not be abstract theoretical. In each specific family situation, when we make a decision or feel the approach of negative emotions, we must remember that love is most important. And act on this basis.

2. Wear each other’s weaknesses.

You are not perfect, and the person you live with is also not perfect. Both of you are not saints. Therefore, the only way for both of you to keep love is to wear each other’s weaknesses.

Our shortcomings can be thought of as a heavy bag. If a person lives alone on a desert island, he alone carries the weight of his sack. If he lives in a society, he touches many people with his bag, and everyone carries a piece of this burden. In a family, people seem to change sacks, and each carries the full weight of the other’s sack.

You shouldn’t treat this as a tragedy. True love is sacrificial, so if you love or want to truly love, bear this burden with joy, as a manifestation of your love.

If the weight of the “bag” of our spouse seems to us too heavy, unbearable – as a rule, this is not because our spouse is really terrible, but because of our pride and conceit. We do not know how heavy our own bag is, which is carried by another, and we think that we deserve much better. Watch yourself – and you will be more tolerant of others.

3. Try to love each other’s parents.

When people start a family, a man and a woman enter a new stage of their maturation. They take upon themselves such a responsibility that they have never taken before – for the common life, for the happiness of another person, for the health and mental well-being of children. But if they share this responsibility with someone else, it will prevent them from growing up and becoming full-fledged spouses. Therefore, if possible, it is better for a young family to have their own home, separate from their parents. Moreover, each of the parental families has a peculiar way of life, and that of the spouses who ended up in a strange family will have to adapt to other people’s habits. This is much more difficult than adapting to the habits of only one spouse. The situation is more “harsh” – if a spouse can change his habits for you, his parents are unlikely.

But even if you live separately, you will most likely have to communicate with parents and other relatives of each other. Even if each of you tries to separate economically and emotionally from your parents, the influence of your parents on your family, especially in the early years of marriage, will be significant. Therefore, it is vital to try to establish as warm and respectful a relationship as possible with the spouse’s parents.

Parents, of course, are not angels, people are living. Loving them is often difficult. But try at least to be grateful to them for giving birth and raising the most important person in your life. This is the most important thing to strengthen your family.

4. Don’t try to change your loved one.

It was necessary to get to know the person as best as possible before marriage. But in any case, living together will reveal some disadvantages of both. However, the marriage has already been concluded, and you created a family, not with your own idea of ​​a person, it was not your dream that signed the marriage certificate, but this living, real person. Therefore, accept it as it is. Even if he is not what you saw him. Any person can and should be loved.

And love means freedom. You give the right to a loved one the freedom to be yourself. If you start to find fault with him, press, it will mean: “I do not love you like that, become different so that I love you!” These will be words of dislike and they will kill the love in both of you.

Believe in yourself, in your power to love him the way he is! After all, your union in any case is not an accident. There are no accidents.

If he himself wants to change, becoming what you want him to be, thank your spouse and God. You are in luck, as very few people are lucky! In this case, you can gently help him move in the direction he has chosen. But don’t forget: this is his choice, not yours!

5. Change your habits.

When people start sleeping in the same bed and brushing their teeth in the same bathroom, they inevitably begin to discover various minor imperfections in each other. Often these are not even flaws, but simply different habits than those that are peculiar to you. What law stipulates that socks must be in the closet? They dry better on the floor! Who decided that the cap of a toothpaste tube must be screwed down? We waste precious seconds on screwing and unscrewing it! Also, scientists around the world have not yet decided which position of the toilet seat in the toilet is the only correct one – vertical or horizontal. There are other habits – not everyday ones, but concerning the peculiarities of our speech, punctuality, behavior at the table, and so on.

What about our habits? Fight for them with a loved one, solving the issue on the principle of “who will win”? If we love or want to love, of course, we will willingly change our habits that upset a loved one, adapt to him in what we can do.

I know a man who, for the pleasure of his wife in her presence, even abandons his inherent humor.

6. Take care of each other.

Everything we say or do is very important to the other person. Everything is evidence or denial of our love for him. Therefore, we must be extremely careful, careful, delicate in dealing with a loved one. Remember that the worst wounds are inflicted by the word. They heal much longer than bodily wounds and leave permanent scars. You can climb a high mountain together for a very long time, and then in one word throw yourself into the abyss.

7. Quench quarrels.

If we remember that love is the main thing, we will control our emotions and will not give vent to anger to the extent that it hurts our loved ones. Much more often men stop quarrels, being calmer and more judicious. Everyone does it in their own way. Some express at this moment their attitude to the woman: “I love you anyway”, “And I even love you like that”. This usually disarms the wife.

In turn, a woman should not be a weak-willed toy of passions, waiting in every conflict situation when she will be stopped. In fact, we are all able to manage our emotions, this can be learned. And if we love a person and do not want to expose his love for us to unbearable trials, we will definitely learn this.

8. Make peace first.

The results of our research (see the chapter “Love statistics”) show that 13% of fights do not end with reconciliation at all. That is, after a quarrel, no one approaches another to ask for forgiveness.

What kind of love can there be if people hurt each other and constantly live with this burden? Remember that every minute you spend in a state of quarrel, resentment, disagreement, kills love, destroys your relationship. Therefore, it is important not only to make peace but to do it as soon as possible. There is a rule: “do not let the sun go down in your anger.” Establish such a law for yourself – not to drag a single quarrel the next day. Reconciliation should always come on the day of a spat.

Reconciliation is so important that it doesn’t matter who is more to blame for what happened. Always, to one degree or another, both parties are to blame, therefore, asking for forgiveness for your part of the blame, you are not lying. And by doing so, make it easier for the other person on his path to repentance.

It is not a weakness or indulgence in the weakness of another. The one who is smarter is always reconciled first – everyone knows that. Learn to receive joy from the peace of conscience and love, and not because “he feels bad too.”

9. Forgive resentments.

Some people are used to being hurt. “They don’t love me,” “They don’t understand me,” a person habitually says to himself in any conflict situation and goes into a state of resentment, like a child in a crib. He’s warm there, and he doesn’t have to do anything. Just lie there and feel sorry for yourself. There is a rattle of resentment. And you don’t need to worry about food – they will regret you, the unfortunate, and be sure to feed you from a bottle with a nipple.

This is evidence of immaturity and cowardice. But an immature person cannot be either a husband or a wife. It’s too early for him. And since you’re already married, you need to end this habit once and for all. You are not unhappy. You are the same as everyone else. And like everyone else, you are often wrong. Therefore, you need to feel sorry for others and forgive them for the fact that they, too, are wrong. And even more so – to forgive your closest person. Of course, between the happiness of love and the rotten enjoyment of self-pity, we choose the former. “Love holds no evil!”

If it is difficult to forgive – say mentally: “I forgive you” and, if you can, pray for the person.

There are situations when it is not clear whether it is necessary to forgive at all. First of all, these are cases of violence and treason. Both are extremely difficult situations. And yet, in some of them, it is possible and necessary to forgive.

Many newlyweds program themselves in advance to be unforgiven in such cases: “Let him just raise his hand against me – immediately a divorce!” But life is not easy and not very smooth. Do not hope that all of it will pass without roughness, that everything will be perfect. Situations vary. And so that you can make a flexible, adequate decision in any situation, it is better to avoid rigid presets. They drive us into a dead end.

If there is a case of cheating or abuse, two things are important. First: what is wrong in our life together and in the behavior of each of us, since this could happen? We are working on bugs. Second, does the one who made a mistake experience repentance and a desire to improve?

If there is repentance, we will try to find love in ourselves in order to forgive the person. Think about the fact that you could also find yourself in a situation fraught with cheating on your spouse. And can you be sure that you would have resisted? And where can we get another person – one who is guaranteed against falling? If we love a person, let’s give him a chance.

It’s another matter if a person does not take this chance. Allowing systematic violence against oneself or living in a state of “family for three” will no longer be evidence of our ability to love and forgive, but rather a sign of our dependence, some of our psychological pathology. Fortunately, we can overcome these pathologies, restoring our high human dignity as an image of God.

10. Put yourself in the shoes of another.

A huge part of the problems between spouses arises from the fact that everyone looks at the situation from their own bell tower, not wanting to look at the matter through the eyes of another. The Gospel commandment: “As you want people to do to you, so do you to them” – this is one of the most precious pieces of advice given to mankind in its entire history.

One priest told me about an interesting phenomenon. A woman comes to him, tells her family situation, complains about her husband. The priest is filled with pity for his wife and indignation at her husband. At his request, the husband comes and tells his vision of the problem. The view of the priest changes almost to the opposite: the husband turns out to be not at all a monster, and the wife’s wrongness is revealed. And so in almost every situation. Over time, the priest, of course, learned not to conclude until he listened to both sides.

What does it mean? This means that each spouse has “his own truth.” You can lead to a chronic conflict, and then combine these two “truths” with the help of a third party – a psychologist or a priest. To make one real truth out of two half-truths in this way.

But it is better to try every day, constantly, in every situation to put yourself in the place of another, try to understand his interests, think about what we don’t give to our loved one. We can only be happy if everyone cares about the happiness of the other. And if the happiness of another does not interest us, it is not loved.

11. Prevent each other’s desires.

Some spouses are so far from understanding the essence of love and married life that they are fighting real battles of their egoisms. Each openly shows the other that he does not want to serve, but wants to be served. The husband fights with his wife for his comforts, she fights with him for hers. As if in such a war you can win some trophies and still not lose love!

True love is sacrificial. Therefore, in a prosperous family, people think about each other’s desires and try to warn them. And when it is not possible to prevent the desire of a loved one, and he directly speaks about his desire, the lover tries to give the loved one even more than he asked.

12. Be honest about your feelings.

Not all of us have a positive experience of close, friendly, trusting relationships. It is necessary to learn this in a family. If a person does not know how to talk about what worries him, worries, worries, the unspoken accumulates inside and then is expressed in conflicts. The essence of the conflict, as a rule, is incomprehensible to another person, because the reason itself is disproportionate to the strength of our explosion. But we can’t really explain anything to him and we continue to accumulate grievances until the “valve” is ripped off again.

To prevent this from happening, we will learn to talk to each other about our feelings. After all, this is our closest person, he wishes us happiness, and we must give him “feedback” so that he understands what we are missing. Or when he gave us joy, we again have to give him “feedback” so that he knows how pleased we with his act.

If we are dissatisfied with something, we need to speak so as not to offend, not to put our partner in a state of defense. It’s not hard. The basic principle is to use “self-messages”. That is, not “you are lazy, you earn little”, but “I am worried if we will have enough money for an apartment if the landlady raises the rent.” Anyone can learn to express their feelings in these ways.

13. Do not even think about cheating.

The thought of cheating is already half of the cheating. This is a step on the path that leads us to divorce. In those families that have preserved love, both spouses are attentive not only to their actions but also to thoughts, dreams, views. This is how the human mind is arranged – from an “innocent” look at a beautiful body to the tragedy of orphanhood – one step.

In the life of every family, sooner or later, the following situation occurs, and in many families – more than once. The worries of love have passed, love has taken on a calm character. And suddenly one of the spouses is visited by a spark of new love. Or passion visits, and we think that this is falling in love. How to be? After all, we said above that the spark of God must be preserved?

Firstly, you cannot save any spark by adultery, an affair, a sin, therefore, only the option of divorce and a new marriage can be considered. But what happens – without completing what we started, without achieving perfect love with the first person, without completing the house, we destroy it, and we want to build a new one starting from the foundation? What are the chances that at the same stage of construction or even earlier a new “spark” will not visit us, and we will not destroy the unfinished one again? The chances are high. Sociologists have calculated that second marriages are less durable than the first, the third – than the second. And this is not surprising. One husband, one wife for life – this is the norm of human life. The deliberate violation of the norm has not yet made anyone happy.

A “spark,” or passion that has visited you already in marriage, should be treated as a test. To this question posed by life, we answer: “I want to love my wife and be with my wife and children all my life.” And then the love that we put on the altar of our main love of all life is added to this main love, and the love in our family becomes even more. This is evidenced by people who have experienced such an experience.