An Amazing Relationship is Easy If You…What?
Forget the self-help mumbo-jumbo, just do it
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I am in my second marriage. My first marriage decayed due to my mental illness, lies, and no communication. I got married again 11 years ago, and for the first 5 years, it was more of the same thing, except for the lies.
For some reason, I thought I could run my marriage the same way I had always done and have a different result. I thought I could treat my new wife the same way I did my old one. We didn’t communicate, I slept all the time because I was depressed, and I never helped around the house. I ignored my new wife and wondered why she was so angry with me.
Worse yet, because I was on enough psychiatric medication to sedate a horse, and didn’t feel particularly like having sex, and I was paying no attention to my wife’s needs in the bedroom.
Our relationship got so bad that I thought our marriage was over. She was angry all the time, and more often than not yelled instead of speaking, and I continued to feel sorry for myself.
It was sometime after my suicide attempt that I realized what was going on. I had been doing quite a bit of inner introspection, and I started realizing just how unfair I had been to the woman who loved me. Of course, I loved her with all my heart, and she stuck with me through the whole aftermath of my attempt, even though it was incredibly traumatic for her to find me half-dead on the kitchen floor.
Like I do with everything else, I started analyzing what I was doing wrong. Yes, I know a relationship is a two-way street, and she held some of the blame, but I wanted to start off by figuring out what I was doing wrong in this relationship.
It was an eye-opening experience.
One day, we had the afternoon to ourselves, and as men and women do, we spent the day making love. Back then, it was still a bit of a stuffy affair. Neither of us knew what the other wanted in bed, so it was largely a selfish coupling.
But that day, we did something we had never done before. We started talking. Still in bed naked, we picked that day to start telling each other our needs and what we wanted from the other in bed. It was an eye-opening experience, to say the least, because I had never in my 48 years talked that honestly about sex with any woman.
I told her my fears, and about my aversion to sex due to past experiences. She told me what she liked and what she didn’t. We are both quite conservative when it comes to sex, but we let it all out and talked about everything.
That honesty continued for the next few years until today. We have both been incredibly honest about what we want and it has resulted in many orgasms and satisfaction with our sex life that made us both very fulfilled. And even though we still had issues with frequency (we both are very busy, the kids were sleeping with us, and I was still heavily medicated, and my sex drive was lessened) when we did make love, it was unbelievable, and amazing.
That honesty bled over into everything else. We started talking about my wife’s anger issues and the reason she lost her temper so often. She has put a huge amount of time into changing the way she reacts to situations, even though a lot of her issues came from anxiety and panic attacks which have not been resolved yet.
We talked about everything. Anytime we were alone, our conversations were deep. I let her know I was truly interested in how I could be a better husband to her and she responded and told me her concerns and how she wished I would act.
When we started communicating, a whole new world opened up for us.
The two of us don’t have many friends, we are best friends with each other, and we had to see for ourselves that a lot of the anger and misunderstandings between us were due to venting because we had no one else to lay all our problems on.
Our relationship now is the best it has ever been. We laugh, we share, we make love, we cry — most of all, we communicate. We have found the most important thing that a couple can do in their relationship is to communicate and be as honest as possible.
We have found the secret to a good marriage or any relationship, and it is talking about everything. Communication is the most important part of our marriage and the reason we are so close. There is no part of our relationship that we don’t analyze daily by talking about the things that bother us and the things we like.
So if you want a good relationship, the key is communication. If you cannot talk to your partner like he or she is your best friend, you should find out what is causing the hesitation. A solid relationship is one where you can express the things that bother you, where you can talk about sex openly and tell each other what you like and what you don’t. A good relationship is one where you can express your deepest and darkest feelings to your partner without fear or misgivings.
If you want a good marriage or relationship you must communicate, and for some, that is not an easy thing. But you must step past the fear and express how you feel.
My marriage has improved 1000% since we started talking and your relationship can too.
