Stephanie discusses how in every day of your relationship, you are creating a "love map" of your partner, which is essentially your understanding of them...how well you really know them. Intimacy depends on curiosity about who your partner is as a person. For this intimacy to be sustainable, these "love maps" need ongoing updates, otherwise you may lose touch with the person your partner is becoming as time passes. In a happy, long term relationship, who your partner is today is not who your partner will become in 10 or 20 years, and so on (how boring would that be if we never evolved!). 

So maybe you haven't "updated" your love map in a while? Well the good news is you can get to know your partner again and again, for who they are today. So go ahead, get to know each other better. Start by asking the questions in the "Love Map Questionnaire" on my blog post today.

I often recommend Dr. John Gottman's most famous book, Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work, to any of my clients interested in improving their relationship, married or not. In couples therapy, I teach the skills in this book to help partners with the many difficulties related to conflict styles, communication, and strategies to heal long-term romantic relationships. 

If you're looking to build strong, sustainable, happy relationship, you have to work hard to keep liking your partner. No matter how much you love someone, if you spend enough time with them, you can grow annoyed and bored if you stop appreciating them . But this doesn't have to happen. Everyone can learn to create a healthy relationship with a culture of "fondness and admiration". 

In today's blog post, I share with you the key findings from Dr. Gottman's research on fondness and admiration, which is the second principle of making a marriage work.

Stephanie Cook, LCSW, explains what happens in healthy and not-so-healthy relationships after the infatuation stage of "falling in love", when healthy relationships shed fake closeness for authentic intimacy. Stephanie is the first certified Gottman Couples Therapist in Georgia, and owner fo Couples Counseling ATL, LLC, a small private practice exclusively dedicated to helping couples find real connection and lasting happiness using the world renowned Gottman Method Couples Therapy, a research-based approach to helping couples improve their relationships and beat the odds.