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good marriage nurtures and enhances your life while a troubled one can be enormously
painful and destructive. When things are going well between you, you feel fine
wherever you are, but when things are not going well it often negatively affects
your mood and other areas of your life. That’s because the state of your
relationship creates the emotional atmosphere and mood in which you live. A
relationship is an attachment. Breaks in the attachment are caused by disappointments—unfulfilled
expectations and wishes. Expectations are based on reality and precedents, while
wishes are the stuff that dreams are made of. In healthy relationships, couples
reattach relatively quickly when these breaks occur. Usually, one person tends
to initiate reattachment. A
healthy marriage requires “mutual accommodation”. Unfortunately, and
especially for men, accommodation can feel like submission. It isn’t—accommodation
takes strength; submission doesn’t. In
addition to love, the other major component of a healthy marriage is respect.
Together, they create conditions for mutual accommodation. With
rare exception, an affair is a symptom of unresolved marital problems. When marriages
are good, people don’t have affairs. After
an affair is discovered, one essential element of re-establishing trust is absolute
“transparency”. There is nothing that the wounded spouse can ask about
their partner’s present and future activities that is off limits. Communication
is the lifeblood of contact. Contact is essential--without contact, the relationship,
and parts of us, wither. It’s
easy to neglect the relationship, especially after you become parents. Be sure
to make time for the relationship. | 
