What are the most important components for making a relationship last? A lot of people would say communication, passion, or trust. Would you also add friendship to that list? Surprisingly a strong friendship between husband and wife can overcome a lot of marital difficulties that most other things can’t. In fact, it is one of the biggest signs that a marriage is healthy, despite whatever difficulties may arise.
The best way to prevent dissatisfaction in your marriage is to become close friends with your spouse, but how do you become best friends with your spouse? A best friend would be someone who you want to spend a lot of time with, someone who you see in a positive way, and someone who supports you as you support them. The best way to see tell if you have this relationship with your husband or wife is to assess whether your interactions fall under a pattern of being mostly positive, mostly negative, or whether they are superficial. Every marriage will have some amount of all three, but ideally the positive interactions will be the most common by far. In fact the ideal ratio for positive to negative seems to be at least five positive interactions for every negative.
When learning about this research from authors like Dr. Gottman, I started to think about how we treat our friends that we aren’t in a romantic relationship with. It seems that with our other friends we find it very easy to keep our interactions within that “golden ratio” of at least five positive interactions to every negative one, so why should it be so much harder with our spouses? Maybe we should take notice of the things we do to make our friendships so positive. First, we are slow to criticize. If our friend shows up a little late to meeting us somewhere and apologizes we are usually quick to brush off their tardiness with words like “it’s ok” or “it happens to everyone”. Are we so forgiving with our spouses? Second, we usually go out of our way to meet up with our closest friends quite often. Do we still go on dates with our spouses? Third, we tend to assume the best of our friends and don’t talk negatively about them behind their backs, at least if we’re a true friend. How often do we assume that our partners are doing something just to be mean? How often do we talk negatively about them to our family and friends?
For me this has been a learning process, I used to not think much about sharing negative things about my husband with others in my life until I saw how much it hurt him. I have also been struggling to let things go the way I would for others in my life. It’s time we started treating our spouses as well as we treat our friends
Craysy Life 