Welcome back!

For the next several weeks, we are going to be covering the following topics in-depth. Once we’re done, you will have an excellent assessment of the current realities of your relationship, and how you can improve. Let’s begin!

There are four key areas that are foundational to building a successful relationship:

  1. You. If you do not make healthy choices about how you live or relate, your relationship cannot be healthy.
  2. Your partner. How well are you tending to, watching over, and supporting this one special person with whom you share your world?
  3. The relationship. It is a living, breathing entity all its own. It is bigger than just the two of you, and it has a major ripple impact on those around you.
  4. Navigating life together. Even if both of you are healthy, connected, and making your relationship a priority, life events will still happen and can throw things off track.

Additionally, there are three main sources of stress that can drive any relationship to the breaking point:

  1. Internal pressure generated by problems within one or both individuals. Dysfunctions that either one of you have automatically places great stress on the relationship.
  2. Internal pressure that builds up within the relationship itself. Even if both of you are reasonably healthy within yourselves, but you relate to each other in a dysfunctional way, that also causes major stress in the relationship.
  3. External pressure. This covers a full range of issues including job stress, other people meddling in your relationship, financial problems, and serious illness, to name just a few.

Until next time, I’ll be praying for you to contemplate the above and begin identifying what’s going wrong so we can work towards fixing it.