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7 Simple Ways to Wreck a Good Relationship Or toSave One
Read Jed’s new book,
Mr. Mean: Saving Your Relationship from the IrritableMale Syndrome
on Scribd
 
at:
get a “hardcopy” by going tohttp://www.menalive.com/mrmean.htmJed Diamond, Ph.D. has been a marriage and family counselor for the last 44years. He is the author of 8 books, including
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, Male Menopause,
and
The Irritable Male Syndrome.
He offerscounseling to men, women, and couples in his office in California or by phonewith people throughout the U.S. and around the world. To receive a Free E-bookon Men’s Health and a free subscription to Jed’s e-newsletter go towww.MenAlive.com. If you are looking for an expert counselor to help withrelationship issues, writeJed@MenAlive.com.When we look at the divorce rate, the number of relationships that fall apartbefore people get married, and people who stay together even though miserable,we might conclude that people go out of their way to wreck their relationships. Itcan be helpful to look at the ways we often harm each other without even trying.
1.
Misunderstand what makes a relationship good.When I queried Google with the question, “What makes a good relationship” Igot 69,900,000 responses. Things like a good sex life, compatibility, mutualrespect, agreement about money matters, and good communication werecommon. But in the 44 years I have been a marriage and family counselor Ihave found that the core quality for having a good relationship is simpler andmore basic.I’ve found that having a strong emotional bond is the key to a joyful love life.Dr. Sue Johnson is an expert in helping couples achieve and maintain a joyfulrelationship throughout their lives. In her book,
Hold Me Tight: SevenConversations for a Lifetime of Love,
she says she learned that “romantic lovewas all about attachment and emotional bonding. It was all about our wired-inneed to have someone to depend on, a loved one who can offer reliableemotional connection and comfort.”But most of our views of relationship take us in a completely oppositedirection. Many believe that emotions are something we should control, notexpress. They tell us that too much emotion was the basic problem in mostmarriages.
 
And many would argue that healthy adults are self-sufficient. Good marriagesresult when each person in the relationship is able to stand on their own two feetand “grow up.” Only immature or dysfunctional people need to lean on eachother. We give names like
enmeshed, codependent, merged,
or 
fused,
to thesekinds of relationships.According to Dr. Johnson, you must “recognize and admit that you areemotionally attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same waythat a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection.” She says thatadult attachments may be more reciprocal and less centered on physical contact,but the nature of the emotional bond is the same.
2.
Act like “communication” makes for good relationshipsEveryone assumes that good communication is the key for creating goodrelationships, but my experience tells me, “it ain’t necessarily so.” Imagine this.Your loved one lives in another city and you want to tell them how important theyare to you. So you pick up the phone and begin to communicate your love.However, after minutes of getting no response, you realize your error. Althoughyou are communicating your heart out, you never actually dialed the number andmade the connection.Likewise in our relationships, if we aren’t emotionally connected, no amountof good communication is going to bring us the love we want. Further, we canconnect with someone, but if we are communicating our anger, blame, judgment,ridicule, etc., it isn’t likely to improve our relationships.Don’t even think about trying to communicate until you connect. According toPatricia Love and Steven Stosny, authors of 
How to Improve Your MarriageWithout Talking About It,
“It’s not about communication. It’s about connection.”Relationship disconnection is the biggest factor in the soaring divorce rate.Some 80 percent of divorcees say they “grew apart.”Couples don’t becomedisconnected because they have poor communication. They have poor communication because they are disconnected.3. The best way to break connection with a woman is throughFear.Although both men and women can be moved by fear, women are morevulnerable to fear and react more strongly (We’ll see in a moment that men aremore vulnerable to shame). Research shows that baby girls, from the day theyare born, are more sensitive to isolation and lack of contact.This sensitivity evolved as an important survival mechanism to protectvulnerable females and keep them in contact with those that could keep themfrom harm. Think of a female in our evolutionary past who needed to protectionof the group in order to keep her alive and well.

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