Love In The Air

Why not go cloud gazing with your lover?

Relationship Rehab: 12 Steps To Becoming A Happier Couple In 2012

By Natalie Gontcharova

Your 12-step program to a better, healthier relationship.

What's your New Year's resolution for 2012? To exercise more? To be more productive? We bet "a more honest and open relationship" isn't on many of your lists. That's because tons of people put their relationships on autopilot, hoping the kinks will just work themselves out — and then they argue each and every day, and end up resenting each other. The best way to have a happy relationship is to keep working on it, so even if you're not currently in a relationship rut, follow these 12 tips from our staff and you'll keep being happy.

1. Say "please" and "thank you." This shows your partner you appreciate them and keeps you from taking each other for granted. 

2. Grab your partner's butt every day (or at least every other day).

3. Kiss every morning!

4. Say "good morning" every morning.

5. Cuddle.

6. Spend at least one night a week with your significant other and family/friends, i.e. don't hole up all by yourselves.

7. Use baby talk/pet names very sparingly. If you overuse these, you could damage your relationship since you won't be able to relate to each other seriously.

8. DO THE DISHES. Set up some type of system for who does them when.

9. Practice listening.

10. Practice honesty, even when it's uncomfortable.

11. If you and your partner are indecisive about where to eat or what movie to watch, play the "5-3-1" game. One person names five choices, the other vetoes two of them, and then the first person eliminates the remaining two. Ta-da, no more "Where you do want to eat?" "I don't care, what do you want to do?" (From 8 Relationship Tricks Happy Couples Use)

12. If you live together, make sure you each still have your own private space where you can retreat to work, think, or partake in bizarre grooming rituals that the other person wouldn't want to see.

Article Source:http://www.yourtango.com/2012130043/10-steps-happier-relationship-2012


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Date Night Ideas for Couples

Every couple should have a “date night”. This is one night out of the week that you spend together doing something fun and different. If you’re having trouble coming up with new ideas for your dates, or are interested in starting a date night tradition with your sweetie, then read on!


Play Board Games
Try LoveGames.com for an overview of romantic and sensual games for couples. You could also go with traditional games such as Monopoly, Scrabble or Sorry. To add a romantic twist to Scrabble, modify it with the rule that all words you spell have to be on the topic of love and romance. For a huge selection of boardgames you can buy online check out BoardGames.com!

Cook Dinner Together
If you’re looking for great recipes there are plenty of websites where you can search and then print out recipes to try together. We recommend Cooking.com, the recipes are easy to search, tested, and most include a picture.

Movie Night
Cuddle up and watch a movie together. Don’t forget the snacks! If you live near a drive-in movie theatre this is a must.

Have a Romantic Evening at Home
Order take-out, indulge in a bath together with bubbles and candles, massage each other, make love.

Go House Viewing
Take a drive, or walk in a neighborhood you’de like to live in and pick out your favorite houses. On the weekends you might be able to visit open houses and tour homes that are for sale.

Enjoy a Night Out On the Town
Catch a movie or street festival, a dance, a play at the theatre or high school.

Star Gazing
Find a place away from the city lights to star gaze with your sweetie. Bring a blanket and bug repellent.

Learn to Dance
Sign up to take dance lessons once a week with your hunny.

Go Dancing
If you already know how to dance visit a nightclub that plays music you like and party like buddies.

Learn Something
Take a one-time class together. Call your local information office to find out if your city offers a fun, one-night class such as cooking, painting or pottery.

Visit a Museum
If a regular history museum screams “boring”, look into whether your city has an art museum or exhibit, a “Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum”, a wax museum, cultural museum, artifact museum, war museum or museum related to a major event from the past (ex. the Titanic museum).

Play Together
Go bowling, play pool, minigolf, iceskate or inline skating.

Get to Know your City
Visit an aquacultural or environmental tourist attraction in your city. Ideas: biodome, aquarium, planetarium, arbouritarium, botanical garden, etc.


Article Source:http://www.getromantic.com/romance/romance_tips/date_night_for_couples.html



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3 Super Easy Ways to Create More Peace in Your Relationship or Marriage

By C. Pemo


While you might think that every relationship has its ups and downs, these changes in feelings do not have to be so violent, as they are in some more volatile partnerships. Why not find ways to keep your relationship on an even keel where you are not having the dramatic highs or the plummeting lows? Maybe you can create peace in your relationship! Here are some useful tips.


1) Learning to enjoy peace
What is interesting about being calm is that many people actually feel unsettled by it. Instead of being able to relax, people seem to feel like they are somehow missing out on something or not being realistic in some way. When they stop being so reactive to everything that happens, they can begin to feel like something is missing, and it is.

Being addicted to drama is just the same as any other addiction. In a relationship, when you become addicted to drama, you feel the splendor of the highs, and the horrible sadness of the lows.

But when you move away from either point, you can begin to feel so strongly that you become addicted to the feeling. When you are really low, you can get the attention of your friends and family to help you through the darker times.

This attention is calming and nurturing, allowing you to feel rewarded for the pain that you are in. On the other hand, when you are in the highs, the happiness that you feel is wondrous and you feel like you can do anything.

In order to truly create the idea of peace in your relationship, you need to begin to appreciate the idea of being steady and calm. Your relationship will have ups and downs, but they do not need to be as drastic in order to be normal. Try to find the quiet in your relationship by taking a few moments before reacting to something or taking some time to sit with your feelings instead of trying to experience them with others.


2) Finding peace
In your relationship, you can find peace, even if you are accustomed to drama. All you have to do is realize that you can be happy with peace. To do this, you will want to start keeping a list of the things that make you happy about your relationship.

This will allow you to have a reference point for when you are not feeling as happy about your relationship. You can pull out this journal or notebook whenever things feel worse than they are in order to remember where you have come from. Sadness passes, leave your self reminders of this.

On the other hand, when you are really happy, it can help to remind yourself that relationships are not necessarily going to be romantic stories every day. Seriously speaking, who has the energy? By looking again at your journal of the simple things that have made you happy, you can remember this as well.


3) Keeping the peace
In order to cultivate peace in your relationship, you will want to start a system of talking out problems before they begin. Set up a rule that you will always talk openly about things that are upsetting you and that the one that is listening will not react in any way to this kind of conversation.

This will allow you to find objectivity with your feelings and not automatically attribute your relationship as doomed when you have these feelings. Instead, you will want to change the way that you talk about your feelings. Try the third person, for example. When you start to place your feelings outside of your self and your relationship, you will allow yourself to see solutions that you can not always see in the complicated weave of emotions that you might be having.

This is not to say that you need to completely distance yourself from your relationship in order to find peace, but it does mean that you will want to remember that your relationship does not need to react to everything that happens around you. You can solve problems without becoming overly emotional or needing to create drama in order to balance yourself out.

A peaceful relationship will feel odd at first when you are used to otherwise. However, when you realize how warm and comfortable a peaceful relationship can be, you will start to see the value in not having such strong reactions to everything, and your relationship will flourish because of your peace.



Article Source:http://EzineArticles.com/5556154




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