The Relationship Roadmap: 7 Steps to Creating Healthy Relationships

1. Enhance Your Love Maps

To love someone, you have to truly know them. Happy couples strive to know each other better than anyone else, and stay up to date about how their partner is growing and changing over the years. It’s like having a map in your mind where you store all the details about your partner, e.g. their favorite foods, recent stresses, pet peeves, biggest dreams and fears. It’s easy to build love maps when you’re first falling in love, because everything is new and you are both eager to get to know one another. But unfortunately, many people stop being curious and wrongly assume their partner will stay the same over time. Everyone experiences major life changes, such as growing older, career transitions, finding new hobbies, having children, or experiencing illness or the death of a loved one. When you understand your partner well and stay curious, by asking open ended questions and keeping a pulse on who they are becoming and what is going on in each other's life, you’re more likely to stay connected and feel closeness through the years as you both grow and change.

2. Build Fondness and Admiration for Each Other

Both you and your partner need to share affection and respect towards one another to keep romance alive. Everyone needs to feel liked, especially by their partner. Unless you keep saying it and showing it, even the most confident person will begin to doubt how you feel about them. By sharing affection and positive feelings about your partner, you build a reserve of positive feelings for your partner and your relationship. This habit of noticing what you love and appreciate about your partner aloud to them, it not only fuels ongoing romance but also reinforces fond memories about your history together. Building the habit of focusing on the positive qualities about your relationship helps you not take each other for granted and makes it easier to accept their (inevitable) negative qualities, too.

3. Turn Toward Each Other Instead of Away

Being there for each other in small ways each and every day is ultimately what makes a relationship feel "right". Happy couples don’t just invest in their relationship with an occasional gift , compliment or getaway while ignoring each other for the rest of the week. They make it a habit to make small "bids for connection" and be responsive to these bids in their regular daily interactions, from taking time to talk at the start and the end of the day, calling or texting, to helping each other out with small requests like helping out around the house or being willing to discuss a problem or complaint, even when it’s inconvenient.

Healthy couples "show up" for one another in small ways throughout every day and are far more likely to show interest, make eye contact, listen, stay present, and be responsive. They are far more likely to say "yes" to their partners' needs for everyday attention, conversation, affection, or help. They treat mundane, everyday interaction as ways to make small deposits in the relationship, which ultimately builds an “emotional bank account” for a stronger relationship. When your partner is there for you, in small ways every day like small talk and helping out around the house, to deeper ways like taking care of you in a medical crisis, you build trust that your partner cares and will always “be there for you” in ways that count. This fosters a sense of general positivity and connection. To revive the closeness in your relationship, the first step is to start seeing mundane daily interactions as opportunities to connect. There are many ways to develop the habit of turning toward each other, building a positive emotional bank account, and deepening your emotional connection.

4. Let Your Partner Influence You

The Gottman research found that in the happiest and most sustainable long term relationships, the couple works as a team and consider each other’s feelings and perspectives and share power in making decisions. They don’t have the “my way or the highway” mentality when making decisions; rather, they try to be considerate of their partner and make mutually beneficial decisions. They try to find a way to compromise when there’s a disagreement. The research also found that men struggle with letting their partner influence them much more than women.

5. Solve your Solvable Problems

There are 2 key types of relationship conflict: (a) solvable or situational problems, and (b) perpetual problems that will never EVER be fully resolved . The hard truth is that every couple has "irreconcilable differences", but the master couples find a way to solve the solvable ones and continue dialogue about the perpetual ones. To improve the chances of solvable problems being resolved rather than causing another fight, use these five steps:

• Soften your startup by gently bringing up issues with language that is calm and kind. Avoid critical and blaming language such as “You always/never____!” and instead use language like “I feel____(upset/frustrated/disappointed) about _____(describe behavior)...instead, I need/prefer_____, please/thank you”.

• Use “repair attempts” to lessen the tension; "Sorry, let me say that again" or "We'll get through this".

• Calm yourself down. Learn to soothe yourself and each other, sometimes take a break;

• Compromise... know you can’t get everything you want; and

• Tolerate and accept each others’ flaws. Everyone is difficult to be in a relationship with!

6. Manage Perpetual Problems

69% of relationship conflicts are perpetual problems. This means they will never likely be fully resolved. Sometimes perpetual problems become intense, “gridlocked”, and seemingly impossible to move forward on. This occurs because gridlocked topics involve parts of your identity for both of you that are core to who you are as people, such as your hopes, dreams, world-views, and beliefs, e.g. respect, safety, freedom, adventure, etc. When you become gridlocked, your different core beliefs seem to be in utter opposition and you both become afraid that accepting your partner’s views or compromising will mean having to change your core values and beliefs and losing your own own identity. Such gridlocks can cause a lot of pain and bitterness, especially if you keep having the same fights-like "groundhog day"--without any forward movement, and causing further damage. If gridlocked issues continue without learning to better understand each other and simple learn how to manage these differences, the relationship becomes increasingly fragile and likely to end. The best way to make progress on perpetual problems is to become a “dream detective” who is curious about these differences that exist between you and your partner. You need to uncover each of your underlying dreams, so you can figure out how to better understand each other, support each other, and respect what each of you long for on the matter without completely giving up what’s important to you, too. Although you will likely never see eye-to-eye on the issue, or “resolve” the disagreement, per se, you can definitely “manage” these differences with temporary compromises.

7. Create Shared Meaning

The capstone to any healthy relationship that makes it more meaningful and fulfilling is if it enriches your deeper meaning and purpose in life. You support each others’ dreams and also share a vision for your life together, and what it means to be a couple, a family, or a unit. Gottman describes every couple as being a cross-cultural experience. Each couple has unique rituals, roles, symbols, identities, goals, purpose, etc. Couples who are truly happy long-term aren’t just intimate friends who communicate and fight well—they feel like there is deeper meaning in sharing their life together.