Accept your marriage. Accept being challenged - your openness, your tolerance, your knowledge, your patience but never your faith, your love, your integrity or your character.
Use every opportunity to reinforce your confidence and trust in each other.
Learn to forgive and sometimes to overlook.
Understand that if your spouse takes you for granted, it isn't always a bad thing... There is another way to look at it; and it’s called love...without conditions.
Rise... When the situation demands it... When your partner needs you to stand up for them. Knowing that your spouse is always looking out for you is a feeling of security and comfort like none other. It also helps you take that risk you've always been meaning to take or not... Because the four-eyes principle is now at play...
Stretch out your arms when you need a hug, not just when you want to offer it... Many times your partner may not notice your subtle need for comfort and by not asking for it openly, you are not being fair to your relationship, to yourself and your partner. Don't go looking for reasons to squabble or be miserable. Unmet expectations tend to fester.
Practice patience and kindness. Never stop. Being kind while handling your partner's quirks will never go unnoticed and the same will be reciprocated to you.
Enjoy each other but don't smother. If you do not understand your partner's need for space and silence, then who else would?
Talk. Laugh. Celebrate...with your partner and with all the others in your life...friends, family... we don't live in isolation. When you expand your own universe, you expand your partner's as well. But, it's not fair to expect your spouse to like all the things and the people that you do. Being in an inclusive relationship with the freedom to exclude oneself when required, can be very liberating.
Practice being non-judgmental.
Lift each other when you are down. Sometimes all it takes for your partner to stay afloat during hard times is through the strength derived from you.
Accept that it's not easy every time. But remember that you are together because you chose to be.
Nourish and cherish. Always.
-RKR
