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Showing posts with the label romantic love

Four Tips for Building a Better Relationship

Journey to a Better Relationship Four Things to Pack Couples often seek counseling to improve their relationship. The general goal is something like satisfaction, which can be quite vague unless you flesh it out with some specifics. But that’s where things can get pretty negative if couples and therapists aren’t careful. Getting to relationship satisfaction can be an arduous and discouraging process of identifying areas where each partner is unhappy. The usual culprits are ways of spending our money, spending enough time together, enjoying sex, sharing responsibilities, and agreeing on parenting strategies. Enter Jen Ripley and Ev Worthington—two experienced couples’ therapists from the Eastern U.S. I’m reading their recent book, Couple Therapy for a book review I’ll be sending off in a few weeks. My focus in this post is on four goals they suggest for couples’ counseling . What I like about these ideas is how they fit with trends ...

Am I in Love?

Am I in Love? “He loves me. He loves me not.” Pulling the petals of love from a flower to gauge the status of a relationship seems so arbitrary. How do people decide if they are in love? In western cultures, marriage and long-term relationships have been based on love for decades. And when love is no longer present, couples separate. Marriages dissolve. Some find a second love relationship before an existing one is formally abandoned. Others pause between relationships as if one should end before beginning another. Love is a squishy idea. Love is hard to define in terms of a checklist. But that does not stop magazines from responding to the demand for answers to the question: “How do I know if I’m in love?” Geoffrey W. Sutton, PhD Cite this post Sutton, G. W. (2015, February 13). Am i in love? Geoffrey W. Sutton PhD, Psychology and Culture https://geoffwsutton.blogspot.com/2015/02/am-i-in-love.html A Love Model You might suspect that psychologists st...