In the beginning, having fun is one of the cornerstones of your new relationship. You’re focused on dates and activities and adventures. Exploring and traveling and staying busy with something new and exciting and fun every chance you get, your relationship thrives on the mutual enjoyment. Like many couples, after a while Sammie and Jack spent more time on the menial tasks and have-to-dos around their home than they spent…

Ever get an email thread requesting a simple yes or no answer bounced back to you a million times because everyone is hitting “Reply All” on their responses? Irritating, isn’t it? Just respond to the person who sent it, already! My husband has a great trick for this to passive-aggressively hint that we don’t all need to hear your answer. He just replies after a while with one word: Unsubscribe….

Ever feel like you’re talking to a brick wall? You’re the only person carrying the conversation and you get no response? You’re not alone. As we make our way upstairs in the Sound Relationship House, we hit the third floor, Turning Towards Instead of Away. Notice that the first three floors are the means for accessing all of the floors above, that means if you want to manage conflict well…

Here are three easy ways to bolster your relationship by expressing your love in a positive way.

The research found that any healthy relationship had about a 5:1 ratio of positive expressions to negative expressions. That means…

Love Maps are the spaces we reserve in our brain for our significant other. It’s the basis of all relationships and it’s a very important…

The basis of any good couple relationship is a great couple friendship. The couple friendship can be broken down into a few main pieces.

What about these perpetual problems? Perpetual. Forever. On and on. Does that mean we’ll never solve them? That seems hopeless right? And two thirds of our problems are perpetual? Geez Louise, cut me a break!   Well, we’re in luck, Louise helped us out. And by Louise, I mean Dr. Gottman. His research shows that the issue isn’t that we aren’t solving these problems, it’s that we are mishandling them….

In last week’s post, we talked about solvable and perpetual problems and how important it is to deal with them effectively in specific ways. So let’s say you now know that you’re dealing with a solvable problem, what do you do? What gets in the way of being able to solve these supposedly solvable problems? If there’s a solution available, we’ve got to learn how to keep it as pure and…

Do you ever notice in your arguments with your partner that sometimes you are discussing the same thing over and over and it never seems to be solved? Other times, do you notice  it is new material and solvable problems? You’re not alone. In fact, research by Dr. John Gottman reveals that 69% of problems in relationships are perpetual problems. Wow, so two-thirds of our problems are never getting resolved?…