
The Importance of Friendship & Respect in a Relationship
Arguments are inevitable. Good marriages have bad years. Terrible events happen to good solid families. What separates the satisfied marriages from those that are unfulfilled? Gottman believes friendship is the key. Being truly interested in building bridges and connections with your partner and liking who your spouse is as a person, makes you fight fairer and work towards resolution instead of defensively planning your next move of attack. He states that developing a curiosity and a desire to really know your partner creates a bond that gets stronger through connectivity and has the ability to weather times of adversity and pain.
Couples Need to Feel Emotionally Understood and Connected
Johnson believes that teamwork and partnership are vital to a lasting fulfilling relationship. She looks at problems within the relationship as being a fault of the dynamic that the couple has created as opposed to looking to blame the individual spouses for the demise of the relationship. Teaching couples to understand their spouse’s emotional needs and desires and helping them to feel heard by their partner breeds connectivity and a deeper bond. When couples begin to routinely reach for one another, trust begins to build. Protecting this trust and union is often what builds the foundation of a newly evolving relationship and dynamic.
The Waxing and Waning of Passion in a Marriage
Looking at a marital dyad through the lens of roles can be an important step to understanding and dissecting waning sexual desire. When couples begin to fill too many roles for each other, it leaves little room for sexual mystery. Perel believes that knowing too much of our partner’s inner and outer world can cause us to not need to seek them out passionately and may even create an environment for sexual numbing to occur.
Sorting out the Pieces of the Marital Puzzle
How do you Know if Couple's Therapy is right for you?
Gabrielle Anderson is the Director and a therapist at the FamilyTherapy Center of Northern Virginia, llc.
She and the other team members can be reached directly from the Center's Meet the Team page.