How to Improve Your Marriage and Make it Last Forever

Even the happiest couples can slip into despair as mounting problems and distractions wear away at an otherwise successful marriage. Don’t let your love diminish and your marriage fall by the wayside. There are plenty of things you can do to fix it.

Evaluate your relationship. A lot of married couples don't see trouble coming and find themselves in a difficult situation when their marriage no longer resembles what it did at the start. Stressful jobs, problems between family and friends, verbal and physical abuse, troubled finances, infidelity, pornography addiction, drug and alcohol addiction, and even lifestyle changes can all drain the spice out of a good marriage.

Identify the problem or problems. If you can't admit to the problem, you may be contributing to it rather than helping. Secondly, talk to your partner. Just as it's unfair for your spouse to hide things from you, it's not fair for you to hide your feelings from them and expect them to change anything. If you still love them, give them a chance to make things right.

Acquire professional help. If communicating directly with your spouse does no good, you may want to involve a counselor, but it's best not to make this a family member or friend who is untrained in dealing with marriage problems. This can make the situation much worse. Sometimes, it is not practical to spend money for counseling, but you have to ask yourself how important a part of your life your spouse is. If you want to make your marriage to last, you may have to make sacrifices in order to work things out. A happy marriage is worth much more than any material thing you could ever possess anyway.

Once you've begun working on your problems, try to find some interests that you both share. Try new activities and see if you can agree on something fun to do together. If your interests don't overlap in many areas, this is OK too. Try to compromise and do things with them even if you don't enjoy them. On the flip side, they must participate in an equal number of things that you like to do.

Always listen to your partner. Whether you agree with their ideas or not, actively listen to them and give them your honest opinion, but never say anything that you will regret later. Give your marriage time to heal and continue to do things for each other. Do some research and find helpful books or movies to enjoy together.


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How to Diffuse a Family Argument

It’s not uncommon for family members to eventually get on each others nerves. Something as simple as a misunderstanding can erupt into a major fight. How can you calm everyone down and get things back to normal?

The first thing to do is separate the people who are fighting. If things escalate too far, you may not be able to stop the fight and people could be hurt emotionally or worse, physically.  Talk to both people separately and find out exactly why they are angry. If a misunderstanding has occurred, this will bring things to light. If both parties have a legitimate gripe, then it's going to take more work to find a solution.  Try to remain objective and don't take sides. If other people try to intervene, decide whether they are helping or hurting the situation and if they are making things worse, encourage them to stand down.

Speak to each person and remind them that you love them and that they are family. Get everyone calmed down enough to talk. If it looks like that will not happen, encourage everyone to separate and spend some time cooling down.  If everyone goes their separate ways for the time being, ask that they immediately write down as many of the details about the situation as they possibly can. They should also write down as many ideas as they can for resolving the situation.  Sometimes, it just takes time to heal the wounds caused by a major argument. If this is the only option, then just wait it out. Remind everyone how important family is and stay in touch with both sides.


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