In just a few days we’ll be celebrating one of my favorite holidays—Thanksgiving. I love the holiday for two primary reasons. First, it’s a day to pause and give thanks for the bounty and abundance of our lives. We know from science that people who make gratitude a part of their everyday lives are happier, […]

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In past blog posts, I’ve talked about a lot of different dimensions of a successful relationship. I now want to talk about sexuality and romance, another critical aspect of marriage. Although we have many close relationships with family members and friends in which we support one another, share our thoughts and feelings, and have fun […]

  A big strategy that gets at the heart of building positive feelings and friendship in your relationship with your partner is play and recreation. By this I mean doing activities that are fun and which you can do together. Number One Factor in Marital Happiness Marriage researchers at the University of Denver did a […]

Below is a passage from a book of one of my favorite authors, Thich Nhat Hanh. It’s a powerful way to practice mindfulness at home, within your marriage and family relationships. The Breathing Room We have a room for everything—eating, sleeping, watching TV—but we have no room for mindfulness. I recommend that we set up […]

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash In my last article I talked about how we respond to one another’s bids. Do we turn toward, away, or against? As we learn to turn towards our partners, we’re putting deposits into their love accounts. Closely related is an idea called “Caring Days” which is a way to […]

In the past, I’ve talked about the Gottman labs where couples come and stay for a weekend. Marriage researchers record all of their interactions and then play them back for them and coach them in how to improve their marriages.  Well, you would think that these researchers would get a lot of boring communication. But […]

In recent weeks I’ve been talking about ways to develop friendship so that positive feelings override the inevitable ups and downs of your marital relationship. In this article I want to move on to another strategy—that of strengthening your relationship by nurturing admiration. The reason this is so important is that a happy marriage is […]

As I pointed out in my last article, one of the characteristics of successful and satisfying relationships is “positive sentiment override.” This means that you have built up enough positive feelings (friendship) towards each other that you’re able to withstand the inevitable disappointments, conflicts, and just plain hard times in your marriage. One way to […]

Happy vs. Unhappy Couples The purpose of this article is to talk about friendship in marriage. But first, I need to tell you about the research of John Gottman at the University of Washington in Seattle. Gottman may be the most respected researcher on marriage in the world. For four decades now, John and his […]