10 ways to nurture your relationship

How to make our relationship better?

Connection and nurturing…. yes but how ?

As I shared in the other article (read here) learning more about each other’s love language can help to be more mindful about how to nurture each other. Dr Gary Chapman has created a Quizz to quickly get an idea of your main love languages. Take yours now.

Communication: Taking a few minutes each day to ask and listen about each other‘s day. Being open about how we feel, what is happening in our life. Avoiding shaming, insulting hurting and gaslighting when even if we feel hurt.
Aknowledgement: Saying thank you or simply expresing what you enjoyed about what you partner said or did can help your partner feel loved.
Honesty: being honest with the other person about how you feel but also with yourself about what emotions you feel and why.
Playfulness: Having fun together can really help to reming you of why you fell in love with each other in the first place. It also hels to ease tensions and futile arguments.
Nurturing: looking after each other through small gestures, choosing to spend tile together can brin us close.
Understanding: Accepting that sometime one of you will need time and space tu rest or retreat is important. Looking after each other in these times can make an even stronger relationship.
Independent: cultivating your own happiness and having your own hobbies or friends can make you happier which in turn will make you happier in your couple.
Interdependence: Being supportive of each other without compromising your values or sacrificing yourself for the relationship. Interdependence means having time to yourself as well as time together. It is all about balance.
Boundaries: Be clear about what your red lines are. You do not need to accept everything in a realtionship. Be clear with each other about what they are.
And the most important one … BE HAPPY yourself. If you are calm and relaxed you are more likely to have an open and honest way to communicate. Read this blog to learn how to connect with YOU.

If you need clarity and support to create more happiness and harmony in your life, I can help!

Have fun together as a couple!

We often stress about having evenings or weekends together for a special date, not always easy when we juggle parenting and work with being a couple. But having fun doesn’t have to be that complicated.

Find small things you enjoy doing together or go back in time to what you used to like or the opposite and try to find something new.

10 fun dates for parents

Picnic on the floor of your living room
Take a bike ride
Create a video or a slideshow of your best moments
Make a playlist
Make a tik tok
Go to a pub Quizz
Play a game
Drive to nowhere
Go back to where you met
Take a class together (cooking, pottery, …)

Because falling in love or getting married is easy, staying together is hard.

I talked about playfulness and nurturing but how?

As I mentionned in my other blog what helped us was to join a marriage reflection group with Marriage encounter, a Christian Marriage organisation. We still try to make time for small fun sharing, taking 10 minutes to write and talk about little things to continue this discovery of each other.

Take a paper each.
Answer the question for 3/5 minutes.
Swap the papers and take time to read each other’s answers.
Share what you felt reading the answer.

Other example:

If I were President for a day I’d …
What is my most vivid memory of the first we met?
Our relationship is most like what sport?

There are many more here.

Working on your relationship can benefit your children.

Because happy parents, make happier children.

The same steps can help strenghten the relationships with your children?

Relationships ressources:

5 love languages quizz and tips https://www.5lovelanguages.com/
Marriage Encounter https://wwme.org/ For Married couples of all faiths.
Relate – relationships support Charity https://www.relate.org.uk/
Marriage ressources https://www.marriage.com/ and on communication
Take Heart: The Ways of Love,Free of Fear and Ego from David Richio
10 ways to nurture your relationship from Barton Goldsmith in Pshychology today