Bruce's Guide To Fishing

Ito Live

Dating Advice: End the Cycle of Failed Relationships and Find a Great Partner

Are you tired of starting new relationships, getting emotionally attached, getting hurt, and breaking up? Would you like to find a better way without resigning yourself to staying single?

Despite our best intentions and efforts, things sometimes just don’t work out. People can fail once or twice due to any number of unforeseen factors. But, when we repeatedly have the same kind of failure, we cannot afford to attribute it to chance. Repeated relationship failures, like any other kind of repeated failures are directly connected to the way that we do things.

Obviously, in order to have different results, we must take different actions. But what do we change? How do we change? Just thinking that we should behave differently is not enough to bring about change. To change, we must actually do things differently.

1. Change your vision from looking backward to looking forward. Stop idealizing some past relationship. If it really was ideal, you would still have it. You can do better. If you don’t believe you can do better than you have, you will settle for worse than you have had. Where will that get you?

2. Balance your life. Would you buy a car before you have the financial resources to make the payments? Many people do. What happens? At first they are excited with their new car, but then they are stressed by the bills and come to regret buying the car in the first place. People who enter relationships because they are emotionally needy are not in good shape to maintain one. When your life is already going great, you will be positive, exciting, and attractive to wonderful potential partners. When you are desperate and needy, you will not be. You will get into relationships that are bad for you and the best partners will not be attracted to you.

3. Define your dream partner. What is he or she like? This must be done before you get involved with someone. Once involved, we change our desires to match the person we are involved with. Do you want someone who talks with you, is gentle, and likes quiet activities? Do you want someone who loves adventure, trusts you, and is financially sound? Where does he or she live? What kind of work does he or she do? What’s his or her income level? How does he or she dress? What does he or she value the most? You must dare to believe in order to dare to achieve.

4. Become a dream partner. That dream partner you want to have also has a dream partner of his or her own. Take time to figure out what their dream partner is liable to be like. If you cannot be a good match for your partner, it’s just as bad as if you find the wrong person for yourself. An adventurous person would probably like an adventurous partner, for example. Are you really adventurous or do you just think it would be nice to be that way? If you want to find someone who enjoys talking to you, are you a good listener? Do you need to work on that first? Planning to change after you are in a relationship will not be any better than finding a partner and then trying to change him or her.

Of course, you don’t need to do these things to find someone. Poor relationships come cheaply. Great relationships, like anything of value, come at a cost. If you are willing to do the work, you can have a partner and relationship that is the envy of your friends. Your best chance of accomplishing these changes is with someone who has helped others to do the same. Ten books on teeth care will not help you like one dentist can. Neither will 10 books on relationships help you like one relationship coach can. Believe, dream, achieve, and use the resources at your disposal to get what you want in life. That is what successful people do.

About the Author

Jack Ito PhD is a licensed psychologist and relationship coach. For 14 years he has helped more than 1000 men and women to have better relationships.
Start your great relationship with theRelationship Coach newsletter and a Free Relationship Planning Guide. Visit the Relationship Coach Blog for daily relationship advice.

How to Put More Excitement Into Your Marriage or Relationship

Are you wondering what happened to those loving feelings? You are still spending time with your partner, still doing things together, still sexually active, but just don’t feel the intensity of love and passion that you used to. What happened to it? Did something go wrong in your relationship? Do you have the wrong partner? Although those are often the conclusions that people have, they are usually not the right answers.

If you stop to think about it, you might realize that you have experienced this same decrease in passion in other areas of your life. Relationships with other people, hobbies, sports, and even your religion were probably all more exciting for you at first than they were after a while. Usually with hobbies, people end up giving them up when the passion is gone. Are we forced into either enduring our relationships or giving them up? Or is there another possibility?

Try these 7 steps to inject passion into your relationship.

1. SLEEP ONE MORE HOUR PER NIGHT. You will live longer (making up for the extra sleep time), be healthier, achieve more, and be able to focus on your partner. Fatigue damages sexuality, romance, and intimacy and takes the fun out of everything except sleeping.

2. MAKE LISTS. We live in a busy world with a lot of demands. Waiting for the demands to go away, or for the schedule to let up is not going to be your best strategy. Unclutter your mind by making lists. Shopping lists, chore lists, gift lists, whatever. Just like a backpack full or rocks takes the fun out of a stroll, so a mind full of demands and obligations takes the fun out of time with our partner.

3. SCHEDULE. The belief that things need to be spontaneous to be good is an example of a belief which limits your enjoyment. Change it. You and your partner can schedule a regular date night each week. Take turns deciding what to do rather than playing the ping pong dating question game (“what do you want to do..I don’t know, what do you want to do. . .?”). Schedule a regular time to be together each day as well, but don’t make it too long.

4. HAVE SOME QUIET TIME. Everybody needs some time for themselves, not just to do what has to be done, but for solitary play, enjoyment, peace, and reflection. When we don’t have those things, we tend to become more and more scattered and tired.

5. DO SOMETHING THAT EXCITES YOU. Having something that excites you in life besides your partner can make you more excited about your partner. It also will make you more exciting to your partner. Don’t use your partner as an excuse to not do what you want to do in life. Relationships are for sharing our lives with our partner–not for giving them up to our partner. What would that kind of freedom add to your relationship?

6. VARY YOUR ROUTINE. No matter how scenic the highway, it will become boring if you can only drive at 30 mph. Create a different kind of challenge in your relationship such as learning as a couple to dance, surf, camp, cook, or even start a business together. Don’t wait for retirement to have fun. Time makes us regret not having done more with others while we still could.

7. INTENSIFY IT. Normally give your partner a quick kiss goodbye? How about intensifying it? Get the rest of your body involved, kiss longer, more deeply. Ask your partner what would make his or her toes curl if you did it. Why not do it? You can have the same passion with your spouse that you could have in an affair–without the guilt and damage.

Waiting for your relationship to be more fun is like waiting for your shoes to jump onto your feet in the morning. “I can’t go out–my shoes haven’t jumped onto my feet yet.” Absurd, isn’t it? If your relationship is not fun, passionate, or intimate, make it that way. Have fun. Be creative. Shake it up. Enjoy your relationship. Just because you are in a long term relationship doesn’t mean that you have to act that way. Change the common idea that affairs are exciting and that marriages are dull into its opposite–marriages are fun and affairs are dull. We limit our behaviors more by our ideas than by any real world constraints. Learning to think in a different way means that we can learn to live in a different way.

If you are tired of your routine, there is a good chance that your partner is too. “I would like to make our relationship more fun and exciting, how about you?” is a good way to start that conversation. If that just won’t work with your partner, a relationship coach, like the AAA, can get you on the road and where you want to go.

About the Author

Jack Ito PhD is a licensed psychologist and relationship coach. For 14 years he has helped more than 1000 men and women to have better relationships.
Start your relationship experiment with the Relationship Coach newsletter and a Free Relationship Planning Guide. Visit the Relationship Coach Blog for daily relationship advice.

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