First you fall in love. The relationship is filled with passion, newness, interest, hope, intimacy, and togetherness. Then something changes. Children come along. A close relative gets ill. There are changes in one of your careers. There could be a new business or a business failure, relocation to another city, state or country, or one of the partners hits 40 or 50 years of age. There are very few people who can just coast along when a major change comes into their relationship. The intimacy gradually diminishes. The passion dies. The togetherness ends and the conflicts increase. Why? I have been through many of the above and I can tell you that these outside forces can have either a negative or positive influence on the quality of the relationship between you and your partner. What’s the difference? Here are just a few.

Relationships don’t change. People change in them. Passion or intimacy doesn’t leave a relationship. It leaves the people in a relationship. Outside in circumstances can add a great deal to the quality of relationship if you will let them, and they can also destroy your relationship again and again if you let them. People tend not to change their basic nature. They can, but they usually don’t. So what you see in the early stages if you pay attention is what you’ll get later. People don’t fall out of love. They just learn to love their partner in different ways.

After the initial newness of a relationship wears off a relationship, doesn’t have to begin that steady decline toward nothingness. It can actually get better and become more loving if the basic foundations are there, things like respect, acceptance for who the person is or who they’re becoming, and respect and acceptance of yourself. But you must develop ways of dealing with changes, conflicts, differences, disappointments, struggles, and even success.

Next, you can’t learn relationship skills when you are not in a relationship, you can read every book, attend every seminar and listen to every expert on the planet, but to get good at relationship issues, challenges, and opportunities, you have to be in one. Why not spend some time looking at your relationships to see how some have changed and see if you can find the source for those changes inside you, rather than blaming some outside element or other person.