Everyone wants their relationship to be a fairy tale love story. However, reality makes it hard for this to be realized, as everything in a person’s life require effort to acquire, and when you get something you will need to let go of something, or vice versa, to achieve equilibrium. This is the universal rule, just like the time you can spend for every day is limited to 24 hours. If you spend 10 hours working, you would have 10 hours less time to be spent for your loved ones, but you will get money in return as compensation in the form of salary for the 10 hours that you have spent working. Some people will be in dilemma on whether to sacrifice their career for their relationship or to sacrifice relationship and focus on their career only.
This is a matter of personal choice as everyone views relationship differently. Some are lucky to be blessed with good and caring partner, but some are not. Some people’s characters are more direct and straightforward; they will not hesitate to break up once they feel the incompatibility. Those who are more patience and tolerance would usually be the ones that can stay in a relationship longer. We cannot say which character is better as you will get both the good stuff and bad stuff no matter what character you are having. The ‘give and take’ concept appears in every aspect of our lives.
Therefore, if you want to maintain a good relationship, some work or efforts need to be done. There are some important things to take note:
1. First, one must be clear that every individual is unique and has their own character, needs and wants. You can only accept your partner as who they are and not expect them to behave the way you want them to be. Please make this clear before getting into marriage, and ensure that both you and your partner do really understand each other and able to love each other for whom they are.
2. Second, all good relationship must come with good mutual understanding, tolerance, respect, care and trust. If you lack any one of these attributes, your relationship will be fragile and need to deal with obstacles all the time.
Some suggestion on how to keep your relationship warm all the time:
a) Always remember your partner’s goodness
What you like about him/her, what did he/she do that touches your heart before, and sacrifices that your partner have done in order to be with you. Most people are not even aware that their partner have sacrificed something in order to be with them and will think they themselves sacrificed more for their partner. Remember the ‘give and take’ concept? When anyone chose to have a relationship, they definitely will have to give up the time that they have for other things, be it career, family or dreams. You will appreciate your partner more when you are aware of the sacrifices that they have made for the relationship.
How this works when things seem to crumble up:
Give yourself a few days’ time to think, reflect, and evaluate all issues from multiple angles and point of views before making any decision. If after a few days’ time, you still felt that the relationship is not worth keeping, you may then decide to forget about the relationship altogether. However, recognize the fact that love sometimes does involves pain, but if the relationship is worth keeping, why not endure pain for a while and wait for it to heal. There is a saying that goes you will never know how to enjoy the sweet part of anything if you’ve never tasted the bitter part of it, or as some people might say, ‘no pain, no gain’.
The reason behind this is because according to Bazi or Four Pillars of Destiny analysis, our life cycle fluctuates and has a lot of ups and downs. It is the same for your emotions as well. Therefore, there are certain years that threats of break-up or divorce happening to you may be higher and easier due to the influence of your emotion. The only way to overcome this is to be patience, do not make any big decision in that year, and hopefully you can progress through the year smoothly.
b) Have a long term project together
Create a long term future target or dream in order to keep the two of you in the same direction for many years to come. A good example will be travelling around the world together.
You can either set up a project like ‘Our travel diary’ that collects the pictures of two of you taken with the world most iconic places. Maybe you can identify 20 places and you could visit 2 places every year. This would become a 10 years project together.
Alternatively, you can also plan to have an adventurous trip of a life time with your partner once awhile, something unique and special that both of you have done together and the memory is not easily replaceable by anyone else.
All these increase the special moments and cherished memory between the two of you that helps strengthen the bonding of your relationship.
After your trip, display some of the memorable pictures and souvenirs from your trip of a life time in your living hall or bedroom. This makes your mood better every time you see them. And the best part is it will remind you to start planning for your next trip together as soon as possible!
Other things that you can do include having a theme song for your trip. This helps you to retrieve back the sweet memory every time you hear the song being played. This is also why wedding songs should be chosen carefully as it plays a very important role in helping you to recall the sweet memory after many years of marriage.
It is easy to start a relationship; the difficult part is how to maintain it and keep it warm. People who have bitter relationship are usually due to their self-centeredness. If you focus on what people can do for you, you will tend to magnify your partner’s weakness and forget about what you can give them back in return, and the problematic relationship starts from there.
Just remember, it is a blessing to have someone who can share your life with you, when you are happy or when you are sad. After all, the most difficult skill that one needs to learn in their life is to love and be loved.
