Two points emerge from our troubles during this stage. The first is the incorrect belief that our happiness and the success of the relationship are determined by what our partner says and does. As I’ve emphasized before and will again, all relationship change begins within you...
Stories of teens taking and sending a naked picture of themselves with their phones have been all over the news media in recent years. The outcome? Shocking, according to reports which have suggested that humiliation and sometimes even suicide can follow.
Couples can resolve virtually any problem by conducting marriage meetings. The meetings foster a spirit of goodwill and acceptance, a live-and-let-live, respectful attitude that allows partners to be themselves. The process results in the ability to minimize or manage conflicts that may not be resolvable.
Is relationship therapy really needed? Why can't most of us just wing it and hope that everything turns out okay? After all, many people find that perfect partner and enjoy a satisfying, healthy relationship. Incredibly, a lot of marriages are doomed to split up...
- By Osho
You exist as a sexual being. Once you accept it, the conflict that has been created down through the centuries dissolves. Once you accept it deeply, with no ideas in between, when sex is thought of as simply natural, you live it. Sex is transcended not by any effort on your part. If you make any effort, that will be repressive...
When we were in our twenties, Joyce and I were criticized for being too close. Some people even quoted Kahlil Gibran from The Prophet, “…and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.” They accused us of smothering one another. Early in our marriage...
Is pill-popping the best way to ensure we stay in love with our long-term partner? Should we also pop a pill to try to fall out of love in order to end an abusive relationship? Instead of pills, there may be some useful ancient answers...
Many men admit that the physical act of sex helps them to open their hearts to connect with their partners. Whereas many women need heart connection first so they can be open to sex. Many couples, therefore, are truly stuck. He wants sex in order to feel love. She wants love in order to enjoy sex.
“Fears about women’s higher earnings reflect theories, and anxieties, that if women had the financial means they would not stay with men so that women’s dependency holds couples and society together.” The study which included cohabiting couples found that there was no significant...
Looking for an antidote to modern culture's emphasis on romantic love? Perhaps we can learn from the diverse forms of emotional attachment prized by the ancient Greeks.
Everyone wants to stay in love, so why do some relationships make it, while others don’t? Why does the love in some relationships flourish, while getting buried in others? What are the secrets of a healthy and fulfilling relationship?
Divorce is an individual problem. It cannot be generalized. In some cases, divorce is not the solution, no more so than marriage is the solution for a lonely man. Divorce takes place first in the mind; the legal proceedings follow after. If you are in doubt as to what to do...
Love is what creates life, maintains life, and nurtures life. It is the magnet that holds the cosmos in place and the glue that makes relationships last. Without love, there is no life. Therefore, we seek love everywhere. Because love is the motivating factor on this planet, let us now use...
While they say that "love is blind", one should not enter blindly into marriage or any committed relationship. Here are a few of the questions to consider before marriage (and even for current married relationships)...
- By Alan Cohen
We can become so used to dysfunctional relationships that when we are finally presented with a healthy one, it seems foreign. Yet what is normal is often not natural. Our natural state is soul fulfillment, reflected through rewarding relationships. Anything else...
Women as well as men often receive strong indoctrination against showing love. It’s too often viewed as a sign of weakness. I have to admit, I fell into this category when I was eighteen and newly in relationship with Joyce...
When I was twenty-seven, a woman friend became frustrated with how much love and attention I was giving my husband. I was making my relationship with him my top priority, even over career and friends. She saw my devotion as old fashioned and “unliberated.”
- By Alan Cohen
The funny thing about love is that the more you try to organize it, the less like love it becomes. As spiritual master Meher Baba noted, "Love and coercion can never go together. Love has to spring spontaneously from within...."
Can men and women really understand each other? Sometimes it seems like the wall between the sexes is impenetrable. At my annual men’s retreat last month, the difficulty understanding women became a central theme. One after another of the men shared his challenges with his female partner...
Our beliefs about love no longer match up with what's going on in the world, and they are contradicted when our relationships end. I call these out-of-date notions the obsolete mythologies of love.
The statement that time heals all wounds is such a cliché that even the mention of time as a healer may seem either irrelevant or insulting. Nevertheless, it is patently true that time is a miracle healer. When we are going through a difficult experience, however...
- By Tim Ray
Once upon a time many thousands of years ago, the Devil Himself was sitting in his boiling hot corporate headquarters in Hell, looking at his mission statement. It read: "To make as many people as possible as unhappy as possible for as long as possible." The Devil was actually a bit...
- By Isha Judd
Meet somebody, fall in love, get married. That’s how it goes, right? Then what? We hear of astronomical divorce rates, couple therapy, and extramarital affairs, but we also hear of the picture-perfect fifty-year happy marriages. What is this need to get married, and why do we think it will fulfill us?