The 3 secret ingredients for happy relationships that last
By Dr Berni Sewell | Improve your relationships
What makes a happy relationship that lasts?
The right partner? With shared interests, passions and world views? Undying love, commitment, trust? Faithfulness, honesty, equality? The ability to communicate, overcome conflict and grow together?
All of the above? Or something else altogether?
The more people you ask, the more you’ll realise that the number of potential ingredients for a happy relationship is infinite. And none of us knows the definitive recipe for relationship bliss.
So, finding that one person to love, becomes a matter of trial and error. Mere luck at best and impossible at worst.
But still we search. Anxious to be loved, to become one with another. Find our other half, to finally be whole. And happy.
So, we stumble from one partner to the next. Trying to unearth that top-secret recipe to our “happily ever after”, we bend, distort, please. Compromise, put up, tolerate. Battling rejection, heart-ache and disappointment on the way.
Until we become disillusioned by our inability to make it work. Frustrated by our failures, furious with ourselves and the world. And we start to doubt.
Are we impossible to love? Are we destined to roam this Earth alone? Doomed to a half-life of solitude, longing and misery?
We blame our unlovable nature and incompatible partners for our unhappiness. And hate ourselves for our incompetence.
Because, despite all our struggles and sacrifices, the true recipe for a happy relationship still eludes us.
When, in fact, we are only missing 3 essential ingredients.
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