Rough Patches In Relationships Quotes

What all you young kids fail to remember is that the excitement and freshness of that new relationship doesn't last. Everyone-- every relationship--hits those rough patches when you argue and don't get along so well and it's so easy to be tempted to go for freshness again to feel appreciated and desired.If not ---Bam, you're miserable and getting your kicks elsewhere.But if you keep that freshness alive in your relationship you'll get through it. Mark my Words

After God, who is the central core pillar to any Christian marriage, there are four important marital relationship foundations. These are: * Self-Esteem - if you don't love yourself you will find it almost impossible to accept love from others. * Friendship - a strong friendship will sustain your marriage even when feelings of love are harder to find. * Laughter - it will improve your quality of life, your health and your relationships * Romance - feeling close to your partner can be the glue which holds your relationship together through the rough patches, but the absence of romance causes a void that problems will easily fill.

In a couple allowing each other aloneness is part of allowing each other to explore, have interests, and play. One puts oneself in the other's place through sympathetic imagination. Each person recognizes that "my partner has to do this to be who (s)he is". Each can tolerate the idea "you will forget about me, will forget I'm alive" for some stretch of time, and each accepts, supports, and respects that. At the same time, they share an understanding: "I need you to come back and remember I'm alive and that I need things from you". In a good relationship we are constantly calibrating and adjusting the elastic band of distance and closeness. Sometimes it's pulled tighter and sometimes it's more slack. But the security built over time allows for solitude and immersive experience.

Look, all your reasons are really stupid,” I say. “People in relationships need each other like I need you. I know it’s exhausting taking care of me, and I’m sorry. I can try to give you a break, and we can use this summer to get back on track. I really think this is just a rough patch.” Jamie shakes his head. I finally turn and look at him. He’s looking at his hands again. “So that’s it? You’re not even going to try? After all this time together?” “I can’t do it anymore, Autumn.” “You said you would love me forever.” I’m not going to let him off easy. “I do love you, just not that way anymore,” Jamie says. “You still love me,” I say. “You just can’t feel it right now. Sometimes that happens to me, and I just wait and it always comes back. I don’t break up with you. I just give it time.

Not long after this attempt, the issue arose again. A conference on November 8 instructed Joseph Smith to review the commandments and 'correct those errors or mistakes which he may discover by the holy Spirit.' Correcting 'errors' in language supposedly spoken by God again raised the question of authenticity. If from God, how could the language be corrected? Correction implied Joseph's human mind had introduced errors; if so, were the revelations really his productions? The editing process uncovered Joseph's anomalous assumptions about the nature of revealed words. He never considered the wording infallible. God's language stood in an indefinite relationship to the human language coming through the Prophet. The revealed preface to the Book of Commandments specified that the language of the revelations was Joseph Smith's: 'These commandments are of me, and were given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding.' They were couched in language suitable to Joseph's time. The idioms, the grammar, even the tone had to be combrehensible to 1830s Americans. Recognizing the pliability of the revealed words, Joseph freely edited the revelations 'by the Holy Spirit,' making emendations with each new edition. He thought of his revelations as imprinted on his mind, not graven in stone. With each edition, he patched pieces together and altered the wording to clarify meaning. The words were both his and God's.

Primer of Love [Lesson 56] ROMEO (taking JULIET’s hand): If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. ~ Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet, Act 1. Scene 5. Lesson 56) Gently kiss the rough spots -- don't try and hammer them out. All relationships have rough patches. These delicate times require you be at your best TLC behavior. Your relationship's future hangs precariously in the balance. You must master the art of walking on eggshells or the yolk will be all over you. Swallow your pride, listen, pretend listen. Even if you don't 'get it' say 'I understand'. This too shall pass -- if you're not an idiot.

Especially for women, it’s appealing and inspirational to hear a clarion voice calling for our right to self-actualization, given the millennia of female oppression. Until shockingly recently, and even still today, the relation of the sexes has reliably meant the silencing of female identity, desire, and goals. Even in the precincts of enlightenment and privilege, women often feel that we’ve handed over our entire minds to caring for others. We understandably feel put-upon, deprived, and resentful. Scholars provide ample evidence of the costs of workplace bias, and the corrosive effects on relationships of gendered divisions of labor. Getting in touch with our anger is a first step to positive change. But our challenge is to work toward solving the problems in the actual relationships in front of us. We reclaim genuine space for our identities not by rushing headlong into simplistic remedies, but by engaging in the less glamorous spadework of paying attention to our feelings, clarifying what matters to us, asserting our point of view, and negotiating for change. There

devices. Deepening inward is not solely about excavating suppressed feelings and expressing them. It’s not simply about throwing off the shackles of outward roles or the “inner custodian.” It is about coming to a new, more satisfying relationship between conflicting desires and goals. Our desires, our conscience, and everything in between—they are all our own. We each struggle to reconcile our own conflicts in a livable way. Stories that off-load responsibility—Jim’s first wife is a semifrigid slob, after all, and Anna’s husband is a couch potato—encourage a self-serving tendency to attribute the “problem” to others and reserve the “solution” for ourselves.

If the first thing you do on hitting a rough patch with someone you love is to make personal attacks, you still've a lot to learn about relationships.

Sex and attachment are both expressed in relationships, and both take place in our bodies. In long-term relationships, their common pathway is a trusting, pleasurable emotional flow. Whether couples can create that flow hinges not only on what goes on between partners, but also what goes on within each person. Feeling close with your partner, in love or in sex, has more to do with your own psychology than you might initially think.

In a research study entitled “The Rested Relationship: Sleep Benefits Marital Evaluations,” the authors found, unsurprisingly, that “spouses were more satisfied” with their relationship “on days after which they had slept for longer periods of time.

Now, beset with strong feelings in the moment, you lack a clearly marked mental path to self-reflection that can help you self-soothe or communicate effectively. A common difficulty in intimate relationships is not feeling seen and loved in our difference. As a child, if the people you depended upon either got lost in your distress and couldn’t maintain a separate point of view, or required you to suppress your feelings and take their point of view, it taught you that being a separate individual with a different perspective was somehow a problem. If my experience taught me that separate points of view create ruptures in empathy, it’s no wonder I might fight with my partner tooth and nail to enforce agreement. By passionately insisting that you should see things as I do, I both echo and warp the original protest, at the heart of every human, that I should be loved as myself.

Clearly, the “midlife crisis” genre draped a veil of narcissism over the entire enterprise of individual development. In the era of Levinson’s Jim Tracy, an individual problem, “I’m unhappy with my wife,” gave rise to an individualistic solution, “I need a divorce.” But the resulting critiques leveled against “individualistic marriage,” “consumer marriage,” and “expressive divorce” were also problematic; in their effort to protect children from their parents’ misguided seeking, they shortchanged people’s authentic emotional longings. The “heroic” midlife crisis genre wrongly characterized the connection of individuality and intimacy, by suggesting that we develop ourselves by casting off relationships we’ve done little to change. But if we’ve learned anything from the profusion of research on marriage and emotions, it’s that emotions are not best managed by simple suppression. Staying married by stifling individual needs isn’t a solution either. Happily,

desires for tenderness, shared pleasure, and excitement that are at the core of emotional and sexual closeness. Troubled relationships can often be recognized by the ways their members treat dependence as a problem, relegating sexual and emotional longings to the territory of shameful need.

As a twenty-first-century individual, you must choose your style of personal life. You are allowed to—in fact, you [are] almost required to—continually monitor your sense of self to look inward to see how well your inner life fits with your married (or cohabiting) life. If the fit deteriorates, you are almost required to leave. For according to the cultural model of individualism, a relationship that no longer fits your needs is inauthentic and hollow. It limits the personal rewards that you, and perhaps your partner, can achieve. In this event, a breakup is unfortunate, but you will, and must, move on. To

Developing a nuanced relationship to your fantasy life. That means cultivating awareness that actions and thoughts aren’t the same thing, building confidence in the difference between them, and using your imagination and fantasy life as a source of creativity rather than for numbing out and escapism.

It is also true that making the effort to look within, and to struggle with your own demons, repays you in more fulfilling relationships.

The work is in facing authentic emotion and vulnerability. The work is in the challenge of opening up—to being present, to listening, to learning about feelings, to having hard conversations, to facing reality. The work is in having the courage to take risks, and to speak one’s truth and listen to the other, in the effort to create an intimate relationship. When

The challenge of the rough patch is not only to discover whether it is possible to find a way to be happy with one’s partner, but is to reckon—yet again—with our relationship to ourselves and to the world.

The work is in facing authentic emotion and vulnerability. The work is in the challenge of opening up—to being present, to listening, to learning about feelings, to having hard conversations, to facing reality. The work is in having the courage to take risks, and to speak one’s truth and listen to the other, in the effort to create an intimate relationship. When people don’t take those risks, they shut down and disengage, and then marriage can’t possibly feel like anything but boring and static.

The new Christians in Corinth also had such questions, asking the apostle Paul, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of a body will they come?’ (1 Corinthians 15: 35). To answer their question, Paul uses the analogy of a seed. When you sow you do not place the mature plant in the ground but a tiny ‘simple’ seed. Yet God has created the seed so that it grows into a plant that is far more complex and glorious than the seed. I have a small vegetable patch where I plant a few seeds every spring. To me all the seeds look roughly the same, so I always find it amazing, even miraculous, that these tiny identical dry, black specks grow into delicious lettuce, rocket, spinach or carrots. Paul says that our earthly bodies and resurrected bodies are like the relationship of seeds to plants. There is a continuity between seed and plant, just as there is a continuity between our body here on earth and our bodies in the new creation. Yet there is also a difference: ‘The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body’ (1 Corinthians 15: 42–44). Our resurrected bodies will not be less than our earthly bodies, just as a plant is not less than the seed it comes from. Our risen bodies will not be physicality-minus, but physicality-plus, just as Jesus’ resurrected body was physicality-plus. When Jesus unites heaven and earth, we will not just have earthly bodies but bodies that are also part of the eternal, imperishable, glorious dimension of heaven. They will not just be natural bodies, but ‘spiritual’ bodies; not because they are made of some non-material ‘spirit’ matter, but because they are filled with the empowering Spirit of God, the same Spirit that was given at Pentecost as the firstfruits of the new creation. So we don’t need to worry about what happens to the specific atoms of our bodies after we have died. The God who not only transforms seeds into plants, but who in the beginning created from nothing every atom of the entire material universe, is more than capable of recreating our bodies at the resurrection of the dead. It is his power that holds every molecule of the universe together so that it does not disintegrate into chaos (Colossians 1: 17) and on the last day will bring every molecule together to ‘transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body’ (Philippians 3: 21). But what happens if I am alive on earth on the day that Jesus returns? What kind of a body will I have then?

Using an instrument called the Adult Attachment Interview researchers find that an adult's ability to tell a coherent story about her own attachment history is what predicts the attachment security of her child. In other words, if a woman now a mother can reflect upon and coherently describe her relationship with her own parent, however insecure it may have been, that becomes a decisive factor in whether the attachment between her child and herself is secure.

2. Keep having conversations with yourself For relationships to stay alive, the individual within them have to stay alive. Our freedom seeking core is precious- not freedom from others but the freedom to discover our own emotional life. Sometimes only in midlife do we begin to befriend this part of ourselves. Imagination, creativity, pleasure in aesthetic and intellectual pursuits, social action are all facet of your individuality, and they deserve attention and celebration. The last thing you want is a marriage that takes over your mind.

In the seesaw scenario one partner feels she needs or wants, and she anxiously presses her partner to respond or agree. In the grip of her own emotions, she can't think about him as a separate person, with needs and constraints of his own. If he doesn't respond as she hopes it's hard for her to imagine a nuanced or exonerating reason (for example that he didn't understand what she was asking for or has a different point of view). Instead she's likely to chalk it up to rejection or neglect. Instead of coming to her air her partner is deciding to stay "up" and leave her "down". Each partner must vie to be heard, seen, or responded to. The two individuals each fear that one's fain is the other's loss; there's not enough to go around. The atmosphere can quickly deteriorate to one of blame, defensiveness, taking things personally and feeling wronged. In the golden ring mind set, a partner may feeling the same intense need as in the seesaw example, but she has the emotional wherewithal not to panic, to withstand frustration, and to trust in her partner's good intentions. Rather than propel her experience into her partner she is able to place her need in a ring that we'll call the relationship. Her partner does the same. The relationship then becomes a shared space for expression. Each partner brings his or her individual feelings into the ring and they think together about the problem at hand. Both implicitly recognize that there are tow people each with a complex mind and body which means that they can't expect their communication to be magically, telepathically received.

Entering into the other person's experience while holding on to ourselves; listening and sharing differences directly and non-defensively; expressing difficult emotions without becoming over-reactive or withdrawn--these prove to the essentials of fulfilling intimate relationships

In adulthood, we hopefully begin to see that changing our internal perspective is at least as important as changing our outward circumstances when it comes to improving our emotional connections with others. We look within and realize some of the ways that our own emotional style affects our behavior with our partner. In the best case, we perceive that being happy is better than being right, that the golden ring beats the seesaw every time. We begin to feel secure enough in ourselves an our relationships to relinquish a need for certainty. "The older I get, the less I know' is one way people express a growing comfort with complexity.

He also identified what makes contemporary marriage both an ingenious psychological creation and a demanding emotional balancing act. Marriage is a mature relationship in which we affirm each other as lovable people through accepting each other's childlike--read human--dependence. In fact marriage is a "mature union" insofar as it creates an atmosphere where partners can gratify each other's "unashamed dependence." When Dick alludes to "childlike needs", "caressing words and actions," and "cherishing" he's talking about the desires for tenderness, shared pleasure, and excitement that are at the core of emotional closeness.

Perhaps all of us walk around in a more needy and vulnerable state than we think, ready to be undone by jarring losses. People can also have a subtle sense of being "emptied out," which feels more like low mood or mild depression. They find themselves inexplicably and powerfully moved by someone when they least expect it. Only in retrospect do they piece together how depleted they felt sometimes for years without knowing it. On the other end of the spectrum a manic mood can also induce lovesickness. A risky new business venture or a sudden success can catapult people into unexpected infatuations. Psychologically both depressive and manic moods alter our relationship to loss and limits...Both immoderate gratification and immoderate loss can deplete us in different ways making our high mental functions and our contact with the big picture harder to access.

sublimation a term that references a cor paradox of healthy adult life, namely that we need to give up in order to get. We we accept the limits and structure of a role-be it to parent to child, husband to wife, teacher to student- we paradoxically gain freedom to express the full range of emotion within that role. This bargain can be surprisingly hard to strike because the gain is tied to the loss. Accepting the need to behave within the limits of roles involves relinquishment for sure: the frustration of wises, the loss of a fantasy of infinite possibilities, even grief at what we cannot have. But all told, it's a productive and creative exchange. Reinvesting time and energy into our limits life often yields the greatest bounty of fruits, even if we are aware that somewhere over there is an exotic variety we'll never get a chance to try. Holding onto limits even when they are tested, is what allows us to conserve and preserve those things we care most about nurturing whether it's a stable home for our children , the time and energy to pay attention to them, or the pleasure to develop our interests. Having confidence in our boundaries also allows for the flourishing of much more diverse relationships.

THE MIDPOINT OF life represents the moment of maximal conflict between our drive to seek external solutions to our emotional dilemmas and our recognition that, ultimately, they don’t work. In the rough patch we are forced to realize, often against our will, that the life-building activities of youth—job, relationship, children, house—have not taken care of what’s unresolved within. We still yearn—for what

Second, the passage of time gives a new urgency and poignancy to the state of our intimate relationships. This is our life. Can this relationship last for the next four decades? Is

now the time to reckon with that question? We may begin to feel tendrils of doubt, the upwelling of inconvenient longings and needs, an uneasy sense that suppression or chronic discord will not be sustainable. We may encounter dread, fear, and a desire to escape through work, or screens, or drink. We’re dimly aware we may have to lose in order to gain, that painful upheavals may be the cost of emotional growth or inner peace. Oscillating between what is and what could be, between reality and possibility, between embracing and relinquishing, we feel disoriented and confused. When things feel bad, two options may loom up in our minds: endure (for the children, the shared history, the finances, the stability, the vow) or strive (for something more, another chance, a better relationship). Surrender or escape. Give in or start over. Depressive resignation or manic flight. These occur to us largely because it’s not at all clear where else to go. But the thought that soon follows is that we want to be honest, and we ask ourselves, what is the line between seizing vitality and manically defending against decline? What’s the difference between “settling” and acceptance? How might the effort to have more in our lives unwittingly result in less? When does accepting limits help us to make the most of what we have, and when does it signal premature resignation? Our dawning awareness of life’s limits means we know that we’ve reached the point where dismantling what we have and starting something new does not come cheaply. We know there’s really no such thing as “starting over,” only starting something different and trailing the inevitable complications in our wake. The acting out we see around us, which till now we’ve casually dismissed, begins to looks like one way that people try to combat the stasis of depression with the action of escape, attempting to transcend (at least temporarily) the “hitting a wall” feeling that this life stage can induce.

But unless we can nest a sexually or romantically compelling element within our long-term relationship, we fear we won’t make it through the decades that yawn before us.

and create our central love relationships.

From the last three decades of psychological research, we know that our minds are formed in relationships. This means not simply that our minds are concerned with relationships (which they are), but that relationships shape the ways we process and experience reality. Psychology has made huge strides in mapping the connections between early attachment, emotional development, and adult intimate relationships. Throughout life, our emotions signal what’s important, and what’s important—at any age—is satisfying relationships. In a real sense, then, marriage picks up where childhood left off. As a close relationship that engages body, heart, and mind, marriage offers a powerful lifelong vehicle for knowing another, being known, and developing our deep emotional life. Overall, research finds that the most important factors in whether our relationships are satisfying all have to do with emotions: how we tune into our emotions, experience them, manage them, communicate about them, calm them enough to respond to others, and align them with our behavior and goals. Throughout this book, I will sum up the key capacities of healthy emotional relating as curiosity, compassion, and control. When we’re curious, we are open to trying to understand our own and the other’s truth. When we’re compassionate, we feel empathy for our own and the other’s struggles. When we exert self-control, we contain and communicate our emotional responses to others in ways that are accurate, sensitive, and likely to get heard. The triad of curiosity, compassion, and (self-)control takes us toward a sense of personal agency, and away from holding our partner responsible for our own feelings. It helps us build the inner capacities we need to reckon well with the rough patch. Finding a way to be happy in marriage depends on our ability to exercise emotional skill, flexibility, and resilience. But

Certainly it’s a relief to breathe in the practical, empowering spirit of positive psychology, which pinpoints the aspects of happiness we can attain through effort and healthy routines. Ironically, though, the well-intentioned messages about the health benefits of long-term relationships, as well as the New Age–inflected spiritual formulas, carry with them an astonishingly simplistic view of the one thing that lies at the beating heart of marriage: our emotions. Our emotions form the core of our sense of meaning. They define

What most people want from marriage is affection, trust, safety, fun, soothing, encouragement, excitement, and comfort. They want to have companionship and be left alone in all the right ways, neither intruded upon nor abandoned. They want to be seen, accepted, valued, and understood for who they are. All of this stands or falls on the quality of emotional sharing and communication. That’s why the rough patch inescapably calls us to struggle with our emotions on a whole new level of awareness, and to figure out what they mean for our relationships. This is a profound personal and relational journey. There aren’t any shortcuts. Relationships are messy and complicated. No wonder the deceptive simplicity of all the checklists and tweets and seemingly endless reminders that our happiness is under our own control can come to intimidate rather than reassure us.