Twenty Tips for Growing a Life-Long Relationship

By Mary Jo Blackwood, RN, MPH and Thomas R. Blackwood, Ph.D.

You two have been together a looooong time- or at least it seems like it. Things can get, well, programmed and predictable. And having picked up some bad habits at our mothers’ knees, we can settle into repetitive patterns of stimulus and response. Then when something catastrophic happens to one of us, such as cancer, a heart attack, or a job loss, all of those patterns become magnified and we begin to question their contribution to our lives.

We can, of course, throw the baby out with the bath water and decide to start a whole new life, but there may be some compelling reasons for fixing this relationship instead. Here are twenty hard-learned tips for keeping that relationship vibrant and growing with you. These tips assume you have an underlying respect for your mate and believe that he or she is somewhat salvageable.  Put that shared history to work. Tune it up. A long-term relationship adds a great deal of richness to the fabric of our lives, but it doesn’t just happen.

1. Compliment often and specifically. Too often a relationship founders because we may feel love or other complimentary things about our mates, but never bother to tell them. All of us need to hear that we look very nice tonight, made an outstanding meal, sounded very sharp in that presentation, or made a wise decision. We have enough critics. That’s what mothers are for. What we need are more fans!

2. Maintain your own opinions, especially if they don’t agree with your mate’s. It becomes easy over time to defer to the strongest opinion and avoid confrontation, but that reduces our personality and uniqueness. We should have our own opinions, hopefully with some basis. When our actions follow our beliefs, we like ourselves a little more. It’s okay to agree to disagree on some issues. That’s what makes us – us, and worthy of respect.

3. When you have a beef, express it from the perspective of how it makes you feel when it happens. When we own our reaction, it doesn’t sound like character assassination. Instead of “You ruined everything,” we can turn it around to: “When this happens, I feel …..” Staying calm is good, and stressing its impact on us as clearly as possible and as soon after the incident as possible are even better. Maybe it doesn’t make sense to our mate, but that’s how we feel.

4. Be specific and avoid generalization or gunny sacking. “You always …….” (See #3 re: character assassination.) Best not to bring up that forgotten birthday two years ago about which we are still peeved. Focus on the present issue as objectively as possible. “When you forgot to pick me up, I missed an appointment and walked home twenty miles in the rain.” (Okay, maybe overly dramatic.)

5. Work with a counselor if you are having problems breaking destructive patterns in your relationship. Martyrdom is an ugly habit we often pick up from our mothers, along with our thighs and recipes. We can only change ourselves, but by refusing to rise to the patterned “bait,” we can, over time, change our mate’s behaviors and eliminate the bait. Basic behavior modification can work at any point in a relationship. It’s never too late. Most of us only wish we had started sooner.

6. Have a personal and work/volunteer life outside your relationship. A good couple is not two half-people. Each of us has to be a stand-alone success. Having interests and talents outside the relationship make us more interesting and well rounded, and gives us a start on life after death. (Excuse me?) Statistically speaking, if we stay together, one of us will outlive the other. Now is the time to forge strong outside friendships, career goals, volunteer activities and hobbies.

7. Stay physically fit and in good shape- and encourage your mate to do the same by planning active pastimes and more physically demanding vacations. Physically fit people feel more attractive, confident and in control of their lives, and are more sexually active. They have more energy and feel better able to deal with the stresses of living and relationships, even grandchildren and in-laws. Mary Jo got Tom walking by suggesting a frozen yogurt after dinner from a shop a mile away. Now he walks because it feels good. (Fortunately, the yogurt shop closed.)

8. Plan a variety of new activities for the two of you, and be willing to try new pursuits your mate proposes. As we get older, our world tends to get narrower unless we consciously resist it. Predictability is very comfortable, but can be deadly to a relationship. We can take advantage of unexpected opportunities to try something we’ve never done before. By doing new things together, we find out more about our mate’s capabilities and interests, sparking renewed interest. Remember that compromise is an underrated art. When Tom decided it was the year of the African safari, Mary Jo used her hard-won skills in compromise to agree to the safari if he would help her celebrate her 50^th birthday by climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. 

9. Even when busiest, work hard at devising creative ways to celebrate things like birthdays and anniversaries. That effort speaks louder than words as to the importance of that relationship in our lives. The longer we’ve been together, the more of a challenge originality becomes, but the effort keeps our mind and creativity honed. It could be as small as making our own fortune cookies with libido-raising fortunes, or as major as taking our love on a cruise to South America.

1. Be consistently loyal to your mate in public, and in front of friends and family members. In-laws are notorious for helping drive the stake that separates a couple. Okay, maybe one of us did behave like a total jerk-- and we should express that, but in private when at all possible. Our mate will appreciate our discretion and be more receptive to criticism or suggestions.

2. Listen, listen, listen. The most flattering thing we can do is to give our undivided attention. If one of us REALLY is in the middle of something right then, we can be honest and say when we'll be free. Then we seek out our mate and ask sincerely what he or she wanted to say. When we pretend to listen, we can miss something important! (I told you two weeks ago the Smiths were coming to dinner tonight.)

3. Refuse to get in the middle of family squabbles. We’ve been told that the only thing you get from being in the middle is shot from both sides. It is not our job to make sure our mate and parents, or our obnoxious brother-in-law get along. It's helpful sometimes in private to share a particular insight that person may not have, but that’s it. They have to work out their own relationship. By us staying neutral, it's more likely to happen. (Another one Mary Jo wishes she had learned earlier.)

4. Listen to your self-talk. If we constantly run ourselves down, we can "sell" our mate on our inferiority. Better to focus on the event and what we could do to self-correct the next time, than to spend precious time and energy assassinating our own character. If we give ourselves credit and value, those closest to us also will view us with respect.

5. Pray often and believe in the future. There can be great comfort in prayer and optimism. We suspect that from the time mankind first walked upright, people have been bemoaning the state of affairs and how frightened they were to bring children into this kind of world. Much of our world is what we make it. We can be hopeful, upbeat people and focus on improving this world- one person at a time. Habitual hand wringers are a drag.

6. Make an effort to change your most annoying habits. One of the biggest irritations in a long-term relationship is each partner wondering why the other doesn't change something that has clearly been explained as a major annoyance. "Doesn't she care enough about me to change, knowing how it upsets me?" Once we clearly understand how important something is to our mate, whether we understand it or not, we should try to change. Big points for effort!

7. Be honest about particular likes and dislikes. If one of us really hates eggplant, we shouldn’t wait twenty years to tell our mate. The longer the wait, the worse the impact. Mary Jo thought if Tom had been eating it for twenty years, he could keep eating it. Okra, on the other hand, loudly proclaimed from the nuptials on to be repellent, has never darkened our door.

Also problematic over the years is shopping for holiday and birthday presents. Rather than stockpile a mountain of sweaters, we should let our mate know early on that we never wear sweaters and would appreciate not receiving any. At least it narrows the field.

8. Agree to a unified front when it comes to raising children and grandchildren. Kids will always play one parent against the other to advantage, and it sends mixed messages about our relationship. Not being stupid, we picked this dynamic up early on and agreed on a common way to handle anticipated requests. It really frustrated our son, and we could console each other about how mean we were.

9. Give each other some space. We suspect too much togetherness is the groundwork for insanity. Several of our friends were ready to chuck their newly retired spouses when they had too much time on their hands and decided to rearrange the kitchen to be more “logical.” Ever try to keep different-size spice containers in alphabetical order?  It’s amazing how much more we appreciate each other when we set turf boundaries and spend some time apart.

We are both self-employed and work out of the home, but Tom takes occasional business trips, and Mary Jo teaches and meets with clients. That always gives us great stories to share when we get back together.  When neither of us is away, we still have solitary activities and projects that keep us apart for hours at a time- thank heavens.

10. Develop some little comforting ritual you do for your partner. It doesn’t have to be much to convey caring. When we’re at our cabin in Colorado, Tom brings Mary Jo a cup of coffee in bed every morning with a kiss. Then he goes out to commune with nature while she leisurely rises, feeling cherished. When we’re at home, we don’t do that because our schedules revert to early morning meetings and gym workouts. That ritual is associated with a special place where we can both slow the pace, and enjoy life and each other.

11. Prepare for the worse (as in: for better or for worse). The future does hold some uneasiness for both of us. Obviously, the physical unknown is out there, along with the skeletons all long-term relationships have. Widowed partners speak glowingly of their deceased mates, but that’s because they prefer to focus on the positives of the relationship.  After all, that’s what they miss, not the negatives.  We look critically forward at the negatives because we can see them getting bigger as the frustration of aging fuels the fire.  And we have to decide how we will deal with them.  Life is glorious - six days a week.  We will probably continue, for at least one day a week, to irritate the dickens out of each other.  Such is love.

“Twenty Tips for Growing a Life-long Relationship” is excerpted from Tom and Mary Jo’s book in progress: Blazing Boomers: The Complete Guide to Awesome Aging. You can contact them at www.healthsiteassociates.com