All relationships have one thing in common- they remain a mix of give and take.
You decide to give your time, effort, care, commitment and love to a certain person and you expect to get most, if not all, of it back in return. But sometimes, the things we wish to give and eventually get in return don’t exactly match the things that our partner wishes to give and get in return.
Situations like these inevitably lead to a lot of frustration, resentment, and arguments. So what can be done to resolve this issue? Communicate! Your partner is not a mind reader. They won’t magically know all of your desires and expectations.
They won’t give you every single thing you need without you ever asking for it. You need to be open. You need to be expressive. You need to give your partner the opportunity to learn more about you, to understand you better, and to know what adjustments are necessary to keep you happy.
All of this might sound a bit exhausting but when you’re with the right person, it will never feel that way. Here are 6 things that you should always keep demanding in your relationship in order to make it last:
Consideration
When you’re in a relationship with someone, you need to be considerate about your partner’s feelings, emotions, opinions, and views. If you feel like your partner has stopped involving you in the important decisions of their life, question them about it. If you think they don’t really ask any more about how your life is going, tell them it’s bothering you.
If something they said or did offended you lately, let them know. When you’ve been in a relationship long enough, you tend to get unintentionally careless. This is the time when you need to give your partner a reality check, when you need to demand the consideration back.
Time
It’s always unreasonable to demand that your partner should make you the center of their entire universe. You both have separate lives outside of this relationship. You’re both independent individuals who have set out to achieve their own goals in life. And you both have the responsibility of balancing work along with your personal life.
So it’s not unlikely that you reach a point in your relationship where you don’t take out the time to meet each other for days or even weeks.If you feel like you’ve reached that unfortunate point, let your partner know. Talk to them and make up a schedule where you can meet each other and still accomplish all the other things in your life.
People sometimes tend to believe that their love will last no matter what the circumstances but that is never the truth. If you let yourself spend too much time apart, the distance between you two might just become something permanent.
Presence
If there’s one thing worse than having a partner who never meets, calls, or even checks up on you on their own, it’s having a partner who actually does all of those things but for some reason, it feels like they’re never completely with you, like their mind is just wandering somewhere else.
Situations like these make you feel hopeless. Even when you’re together, it feels like you’re drifting further and further apart. You feel hurt. You feel confused. And you feel like you don’t even know how to confront them.
But you have to try. You have to tell your partner about the way they make you feel. It’s possible that they’re going through a tough time or have something on their mind that’s bothering them and keeping them from being with you. And you won’t ever find out if you don’t even ask.
Empathy
We always assume that empathizing with the people we love will just come naturally to us. And that actually remains the case until the realities of life get in our way. The truth is that we’re all egocentric individuals.
At the end of the day, we see this life through our own eyes and not through anyone else’s. But if we’ve decided to be in a relationship with someone, we’re obligated to be understanding, to be empathetic, and to try to place ourselves in the shoes of our significant other.
So remind your partner of this obligation. Ask them to always try and understand the things you’re going through, the emotions you’re feeling, and the problems you might be facing in life.
Novelty
We all know how it works. You meet someone new. You start to fall in love. Emotions run high. Your feelings of passion and excitement can’t be contained. You give in your all, all your romance, all your love, and all your care. A few months pass and it all starts to die down. A year passes. And you feel like you have completely given in to the boredom and monotony of life.
The moment you give in, the moment you stop trying to make things special, and the moment you let the romance die, is when your relationship starts to fall apart. This doesn’t mean that you should always try to keep changing things in your relationship and never be content with what you have.
All that’s needed is to keep things alive, to keep looking for ways to make your partner feel special, and to keep searching for new experiences that you two can discover together. If things have started to feel a little bland, don’t be scared to ask and help your partner to spice things up a bit.
Effort
After all is said and done, the one thing that every relationship thrives on is some real effort! No one is perfect. We all have our set of flaws. We’ve all made mistakes in the past and we’ll probably continue to make some in the future too. We all reach a point where we lose touch with our relationship. But all of that is a part of life. You need to lose touch in order to rediscover your relationship again, maybe even make it better than before.
This is where effort comes in- an effort to accept each other’s flaws, an effort to forgive each other’s mistakes, an effort to keep your relationship alive. If you feel like your partner has stopped putting in this effort, don’t hesitate in asking them why and don’t hesitate in demanding to become their top priority before it’s too late!
