New Relationship Advice

What qualifies me to hand out new relationship advice? Well, I tried it the “old way” twice and it ended in divorce both times. So I figured I better learn and do something differently then I did before if I was ever going to have a relationship that worked.

So the questions became for me:

• “What wasn’t working?”
• “What should I do differently then I was doing before?”
• And “How do I do it differently?”

Of course, I didn’t know I was asking those questions consciously but I was asking and searching – as you are – to get some new relationship advice.

My previous teachers were my parents. Their relationship sucked. Very unconsciously I married at 22. Basically I knew nothing about how to succeed in a relationship. I just knew I didn't want theirs.

I’ve been asked recently if one person can work on a relationship and expect improvement. It depends on many things.

• How bad is it?
• Did you get into this relationship because you desperately needed to be in a relationship?
• Did he?
• Is their basic love and respect back and forth to each other?

I did not understand that I needed to communicate how I felt or it would grow into bigger and bigger unmanageable resentment and lower self esteem than I already came to the relationship with.

New Relationship Advice:

• Find out how to communicate effectively. Go to a marriage counselor or search online or let me teach you but find out how to do it without blame so  you’ll be heard.

I knew nothing about a partnership where both parties honored what the other wanted and who they were. Now I know that in 2014 in the Western world (and maybe everywhere), partnership is what it’s about. We each bring some special things to a relationship and we need help with other things. Who is better to be your partner than someone who loves you and wants the best for you?

New Relationship Advice:

• Learn how valuable you are as a person and that your wants and needs matter. Do not think that “7 Steps to Good Self-Esteem” is going to solve your self image and self esteem issues - the issues that keep you making poor choices for potential partners.

I have spent the last 30 years figuring out how to do that for myself and what I’ve learned works quite well. It does work and has taken work but I am worth it – and so are you. I came into my relationships with a past. It needed to be worked on and healed. So does yours.

I didn’t know that defending myself was not how to be understood by another. It just put up a wall – of fear, of feeling misunderstood, of disconnection and fueled by deep shame. Nothing good came out of that for me. Now I know that I can trust the feedback from my partner of where I fell short somehow because I want to hear. I want to improve. And so does my partner.

New Relationship Advice:

• If you don’t value yourself, how can you expect anyone else to do so? The core of a good relationship is the coming together of two people who value themselves and are open to growing along with each other.

I didn’t even know that any relationship advice existed. Now, in the age of the internet, advice abounds but you wisely chose to look for “new relationship advice” and you got it. Hope it leads you into a new relationship with yourself and with anyone you choose to partner with.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

If Your Partner Is Your Best Friend, Who Do You Turn to for Relationship Advice?

Relationships are hard work and come with a lot of questions and uncertainties – hence the title. Some people warn women not to make their partner their best friend because then they have no one to talk to if they are having relationship trouble. Now what's wrong with that relationship advice? Seems to make sense on the surface but here are the fallacies:

• If there is relationship trouble between the two of you and you can't sort it out with your partner or at least feel safe talking about what's going on with your partner, you have deeper issues underlying that problem. You have a basic flaw in the communication and trust areas of your relationship.

• One of our (my husband and I) secrets is: Make Your Commitment to the Power of the Relationship I suggest making that kind of commitment so that if there is a problem in the relationship, you will not feel like running out the door away from your partner to get away from the problem. Instead you will remember that the relationship is bigger than the both of you and you will at least both be willing to find a way to work it out.


• The second thing wrong with that relationship advice is that it assumes you can have only one best friend. Friends wear different hats. I might not talk to my single friends about a problem in my relationship, but I will talk it over with a friend who's relationship skills I respect.

Many people don’t have the someone else in their lives and when things are rocky in their relationships, they may feel like they have nowhere to turn.

If you do find yourself looking for some relationship advice, be very careful. It is easy to find relationship advice all over the place. Magazines, books, the internet and other complete strangers will freely give their advice about all sorts of relationship issues. During my first really bad marriage of 15 years, people asked me for advice all the time. Now I know that's just the kind of person I am and has nothing to do with my relationship understanding at the time. I shudder to think what I might have told anyone at that time.

And, unfortunately, not everyone has your best interests in mind. They are trying to sell their magazine or book or some may even be trying to push their organization. Many churches and political organizations may offer free counseling services for people but you must keep in mind that they have very specific ideas and motives and they may be trying to convince you that your relationship should be the way they feel it should be or it is wrong, while this may be very different from what you truly want out of your relationship.

If you decide to hire a life coach or a therapist, don't be intimidated by their expertise. You are hiring them and you have the right to interview them – even on the success of their own relationships. I would think it strange for someone to hire me as a coach to help with their relationships if my own marriage was a shambles.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Is a Relationship Doomed if You Have Different Interests?

Compatibility or Commitment?

Thinking back to the beginnings of our relationship, we had some similar interests – spirituality, personal growth. And there were certainly things that the Martian was and is interested in that I'm not, for example, fixing and learning about cars, skiing, physics (which I blush to say I got a D in in high school) and airplanes to name a few. Here's what's happened with me on those subjects:

•    I now share his interest in cars - green cars.

•    I've never become an athlete but I am using WII FIT regularly and enjoying it.

•    I've found an interest in quantum physics because it veers right into spirituality so that has become a shared interest.

•    Haven't developed an interest in airplanes except for how they may impact my travel.

But do interests really create compatibility? To some extent I suppose they do but what seems much more important to me is shared values. We both value honesty, strong family relationships, forgiveness, change, commitment, meaning, accountability, responsibility, creativity, fun, laughter, freedom, gratitude, generosity, generosity of spirit, integrity, peace, abundance, prosperity, personal growth. With all that in common, how could we go wrong?

Relationship advice: If you are new in a relationship, begin to have conversations about your values and see what comes of it.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

How Do You Act on Your Dates?

Relationship Advice

Are you one of those people who think that they have to show the people you date that you have the same interests they do? You probably read a magazine article that suggested you do just this type of relationship advice. DON'T DO THAT. Be yourself. Relationships come in all types but the strongest relationships have proven time and time again certain things. Following are two of them:

1. One of these things is that you need to do is to stay true to yourself and who you are. Dating is difficult but it is even more difficult if you waste your time trying to be someone that you aren’t. You see it happen all the time. People begin dating and like each other but try to convince each other that they have many things in common whether they really do or not. For example, a women might claim she is a huge football fan when in reality she knows nothing about the game and could care less. For this relationship to go anywhere, sooner or later she is going to be found out and have to come clean and admit she isn’t a football fan. You may not realize it but this is lying. Is this any way to start a relationship that has any hope to survive? And how can you ever be sure you are loved for who you are if you don't show who you are?


2. Another important piece of the relationship of relationship advice is to keep your humor. You need to be able to laugh together and about yourselves. This keeps your relationship fun and playful and there is less chance that you will be hurt over silly little things that don’t really matter. Supposedly men especially don’t like women that take life too seriously and make everything a matter of life and death. I agree the less drama in the relationship the better but I don't want my partner to take every little thing too seriously either. I hate it when he takes things personally that I never meant that way,

The better you are able to be yourself with each other and laugh with each other, the more you prove that you can work together even when things aren’t so great. A positive relationship can only really happen when both partners are happy with themselves first and then with each other and laugh a lot.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Relationship Advice Series

Why do we always fight when...?

One of the things I love to help transform in a client's life, is the way of their intimate relationship. The relationship advice  I give is based on  my experience. My own path wound through a 19-year first relationship which produced much pain and 4 kids, a short 1 1/2 year relationship which taught me what I didn't know about what a relationship could be but wasn't and, 30 years ago, the one that has it all.

My husband and I have an amazing intimate  relationship - amazing if it was the only one we ever had but most amazing because it is a 3rd marriage for us both. "The Martian",  aka  my  husband, promises to comment on my entries on this topic. We're calling him Martian because he's a high school teacher and doesn't want his students to find him on the internet.

I haven't fully figured it out but almost every time there's a weekend or a vacation, the first thing that happens is - we have a fight - small and dumb - but a fight nonetheless. Somebody wrote a song that says something like, "why do we always fight when I ....... something? "

 Relationship advice:  Maybe we feel safe enough to bring our frazzled energy picked up from the rest of our lives to each other to dump out so we can refill it with the love that we share the rest of the time. It's like removing the sediment of life so pure, fresh love has room to flow.

I always thought we'd get over it but we've been together for 30 years and we did  it not long ago at the beginning of a weekend. But we always work through it and find our way more easily and more easily to our everyday love and respect.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Is it SEX or is it INTIMACY? The View from Mars

by Maia's Martian

Yesterday evening Maia and I were talking  and she brought up the topic about how having sex too soon (whatever that means) in a new relationship sometimes seems to confuse things for women and not always in a good way.

Because I am wired and socialized as a Martian my first impulse was to think “the more sex the better and the sooner the better, what’s wrong with that?”

As I thought about my own experience however, I realized that there is more to it than that and so here is  the view from an older Martian after 30 years in a successful relationship:

The word intimacy usually is a more polite way to say “sex”.  Here is a more inclusive meaning of intimacy - INTO-ME-SEE -  which maybe means “through sex we are able to know each other.”

And that is the gift of an intimate long term committed relationship. You develop  a mirror to each other’s Soul. In simple terms you get to see the Real You and the Real Her reflected  through each other’s eyes on a daily basis. How incredible is that? Maybe women already know this but I know from being a man for almost 80 years that most men don’t know that is even possible.

Think of sex as a door that opens into a room where you will find this gift of discovering each other's Soul.

The difficulty is that Martian DNA  is only about opening as many doors as possible. However, if doors are too easy for a man to open then they will never venture into the room and discover the gift.

Opening the door is easy, finding who you and she is (the Real You) takes a long term committed relationship.

So, in answer to the question of how soon to have sex in a new relationship, it is and always was totally up to the individuals involved and hopefully after reading this you are able to make a decision that comes from a higher consciousness.

Radical Self Acceptance/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

A Simple Test to Know If Your Relationship Is Working

Is it giving you energy - or taking your energy?

Sometimes we like to stay in denial about our relationships. We can't really tell if it's working or not. Sometimes it's as if we just don't want to know - or at least our ego doesn't want to know because then it will mean change and our egos HATE change.

So here's the simple test: Stop. Think of your relationship. Pay attention to your body. Does thinking of it make you happy to think about it or leave you feeling dull, hurting, confused, wishful, pained, __fill in the blank__________. If it leaves you feeling anything like that, you've got problems.

I've had three varieties. The first one was started when neither of us had a clue about how to do have a relationship. I felt hurt, fearful, unhappy and want to leave almost every day for 15 years. I'm pretty sure he did too. We were young and did not know how to treat each other well.

The second one would have been the kind to fool most anyone. He was a really nice person. He tried to be a partner but there were the sneaky ways he didn't tell the truth about himself and what he was up to; the ways I felt wistful that maybe I made a mistake; the discomfort of the imbalance in contributions to our financial well-being with no real desire on his part to improve himself. It might have confused me if I hadn't had my long and hard disaster before it. I knew I couldn't hold onto something that wasn't working well EVER AGAIN.

I think making that decision was what led to the over 25 year never a question, always good and working partnership I have allowed in my life. No confusion. Hurts dealt with right away. Very clearly a well working success story.

What will it take for you to decide to have a good relationship?

Radical Self-Acceptance/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching