How Can We Have Better Relationships?

Well, I decided I am going to do a 30 day blog on developing better relationships. I'm going to focus mainly on marriage relationships but will also be talking about relationships in general.

I guess my inspiration is that I have been doing alot of premarriage and marriage counseling/coaching recently and have been having to think about and witness the biggest problems that couples of all ages deal with on a regular basis. Not surprisingly many of the issues are similar even though the couples are very diverse.

I am going to start on May 1 with the relationship tools and advice but until then I am going to set some ground work.

My basic belief about marriage is that unless you have extreme circumstances in you marriage such as abuse or infidelity (and sometimes that can be worked through) you are better off if you work on your present marriage instead of leaving and trying to find someone or something better. The reason is because the problems will follow you to the next relationship because normally the main problem is 'us". We continue to carry all our junk from one relationship to another and until we change neither will our circumstances - the faces may change but all the other stuff will still be there. So the main thing we need to do if we are experiencing problems in our marriage is to change ourselves.

Once we get to a place of discontent in our marriage we begin to develop attitudes and behaviors that often reinforce the negatives in our relationship and move us further and further away from the positives. Deciding to have a better relationship with our spouse is a Choice. It is our choice.

I can hear some people saying right now. "My Choice!!" You don't know the person I married!"

Stephen Covey calls people who continually blame other people or their circumstances for their unhappiness "the reactive person." These people allow circumstances or others to rob them of their quality of life. We can become "proactive" people who take responsibility for our own lives.

If our marriages are to improve, or as far as that goes our relationships in general, change must begin with ourselves, not others or our circumstances changing. People are truly changed when they make a choice to be changed by God's truth and become empowered by the Holy Spirit

So here is the premise of what we will be doing:

We can't change other people
We can change ourselves
As we change, people around us adjust their responses and make decisions according to our new behavior.

"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! "
2 Corinthians 5:17