Two Simple Rules For Having A Happy Relationship

Relationships evolve quickly in 2018. Cell phones and social media provide people with instant and unlimited communication. Couples get to know each other and cultivate depth faster than at any other time in history.

The stresses of such a rapid existence can make modern romance hard to be lasting. Couples seemingly go through entire relationship cycles in a matter of months. One relationship ends and the next “swipe right” starts the cycle all over again.

Relationship experts have laundry lists of rules and tips for procuring happy and lasting relationships. Listening to these experts could make you feel like you need a PhD in psychology to have a chance at a happy ending with your chosen one.

However, I always found it fascinating that the majority of my college psychology professors seemed to be divorced. I, myself a psychology student, was married and tried to apply what I had learned about the human psyche (as well as many other pop psychology prescriptions) to my own marriage.

It didn’t work. I got divorced after ten years.

It was a spectacular failure.

Needless to say, I was utterly baffled. Had I not done everything the textbooks and experts told me to do? Was I speaking the wrong Love Language? Did I fail to properly contextualize the difference between Venusian women and Martian men? Was it perhaps something cosmic; an unbroken and infinite chain of events that dictated my every thought and action and ultimately destined my marriage for failure?

I racked my brain. I combed through my old psychology papers and textbooks. I reread all of my old pop psychology books. I read new pop psychology books. I spent endless hours watching YouTube and GAIA videos.

It became a quest to understand where I had gone wrong.

I began dating superficially and reconnected with past loves and lovers. I looked for clues and cues, but nothing gave me the answers that I sought.

But then, a breakthrough.

I unexpectedly fell in love again.

My quest was quietly replaced by the nurturance of this new and budding romance. The in-love feeling is powerful and intoxicating, and I wished that I could somehow bottle it and keep it forever.

I couldn’t. Ultimately, it didn’t work out.

All relationships evolve; even the kind that seem so suddenly and obviously meant to be. This new relationship evolved quickly. Though the in-love feeling remained firmly intact I eventually found myself staring down the divergent paths of a familiar crossroads.

Suddenly, it all came rushing to me like the final life-flashing instants of a man preparing to meet his maker. My past, present and future converged into one, and in that moment it all made sense to me. Everything my professors and the experts had tried to convey was distilled into two simple maxims:

1) Make Love... a lot of it.

and

2) Go home before it’s too late.

Modernity provides a minefield of distractions and temptations. That fact, coupled with the mundaneness of daily life and work, can make us forget to take time to simply hold each other, and kiss each other, and feel the warmth of each other’s bodies. There is perhaps no more powerful human emotion than the connectedness you feel from the naked embrace of the person you are in love with.

Making love is a powerful signal; a reminder that you are both willing to give time and effort to make each other feel wanted, attractive, noticed and important.

Making love also makes a multitude of relationship challenges more manageable. All psychology is biological. The hormones released by both the physical act of making love and the in-love feeling itself increase problem solving abilities, and make relationship partners more agreeable and willing to compromise.

Secondly, mole hills quickly become mountains when we fail to diffuse situations while they are still manageable. This often happens with the accompaniment of alcohol. Alcohol has the opposite effect of making love. It decreases our problem solving abilities, and in a conflict, makes us less likely to agree and compromise.

As a social experiment, next time you are out at a bar or nightclub take a look at the couples who remain past 1:00am. More often than not you will witness squabbling, drunken irrationality, poor decision making, and relationships literally ending before your eyes.

Evenings of cocktails, dancing and laughs are hugely valuable experiences for couples. Couples who have had a joyous night, and go home on a high note, tend to enhance the evening further by making love. We run the risk of tarnishing meaningful memories by engaging in arbitrary and meaningless conflict. We can preserve pristine experiences by just knowing when to call it a night.

Conflict is an inevitable, and healthy, part of all relationships. The goal shouldn’t be to avoid all conflict, but rather to avoid meaningless conflict. It’s a basic human axiom that happy people have healthy relationships. Happy relationship partners are more willing to share and work through uncomfortable truths, and develop deeper trust in one another. These two simple rules help to cultivate closeness and mitigate avoidable strife; resulting in happier individuals and more successful relationships.

These two rules may not be the definitive road map to happy endings, but I know that they will at least keep me on the road to that destination if and when I fall in love again.