- Due to your upbringing, family background, cultural heritage and psychological makeup, you and your partner approach life from completely different perspectives.

- By accepting that fact, you can begin to appreciate the value that your partner brings to the relationship. A balanced relationship requires Ying and Yang, the male and the female to flourish. Differing viewpoints make for a rich and rewarding relationship.

Relationship Strategy No.2: Understand the Nature of Love

- Has the hot, heady romantic passion subsided in your relationship? Has the infatuation faded? Good! Now you are ready to move on to the mature stage of love. You have moved past the first flush of romantic love where your feelings are in a constant flutter and your emotions are running high.

- Now you can develop a more mature and realistic approach to your relationship. Work, family, children, friends, as well as your relationship, are all part of a much bigger picture. This is the natural progression and does not mean that you are no longer in love. It just means that reality has taken over from unrealistic expectations.

Relationship Strategy No.3: Accept Your Partners Values and Beliefs

- Do not expect your partner to agree with everything you value and believe.

- You can expect to fundamentally disagree about most things. If you can accept that your partner has a different opinion to yours, then you can agree to disagree. This need not impact on your emotional agreement. You can still love your partner even if you don't agree with their opinion.

Relationship Strategy No.4: Accept that you and your partner have conflicting interests

- You like may like pop music, your partner may like soul music. You like football, your partner prefers tennis. You like drama, your partner prefers comedies. You like X, your partner prefers Y.</LI>

- Just because you have different interests does not mean that there is anything wrong with your relationship.

- If you experience conflict and stress as a result of engaging in activities that you don't really like, then you should consider giving them up.

Relationship Strategy No.5: Learn How to Argue Constructively

- Disagreements arise in every relationship. This need not be a problem.

- When you argue, keep to the issue. Do not verbally attack your partner personally.

- Ask for time to calm down if you are emotionally upset.

- Don't put your entire relationship on the line for the sake of winning an argument.

- Try to achieve emotional balance after expressing your opinion.

Relationship Strategy No.6: Learn to Control Your Feelings

- If you are emotionally out of control, it might be best to leave the room for a while, go for a run, do some exercise or find other ways to relieve the tension you feel.

- Avoid saying things in the heat of the moment that you might regret later when you have clamed down.

Relationship Strategy No.7: Remember to Maintain an Intimate Relationship

- It is so easy to drift into lazy habits. Watching T.V. late into the night so that you are too tired for intimacy. Overeating or over drinking so that you are incapable of quality time together. Allowing yourself to get out of condition or becoming slovenly in your habits. These all impact on sexual desire and performance.

- Recapture some of the romance of courtship with flowers, candlelight and dinners for two. Rekindle the flame of sexual desire by taking the time to be intimate. Maintain the physical comfort of touching, caressing and holding hands.

Relationship Strategy No.8: Accept your Partners Weaknesses

- Your partner may be less than perfect but then so are you. Accept your partner's weaknesses. If they were perfect then they wouldn't need you, would they?

- Focus on your partner's strengths. Make a list of all the things you like about them and concentrate your attention on those.

- Providing your partner's behaviour is not abusive or destructive then you can learn to overlook it and learn to compensate for them. Remember you are two halves of one whole.

Relationship Strategy No.9: Accept the Unique Qualities of your Relationship

- Every relationship is different. What you accept in your relationship others may think is objectionable. What you think is objectionable in the relationship of others, they may think is tolerable.

- Just be yourselves and find your own level of acceptable behaviour within your relationship. Do not allow yourselves to be judged by anyone else's so-called standards of acceptable behaviour.

- Everyone expresses love in their own unique way. The underlying feelings are genuine and real, however they are expressed.

Relationship Strategy No.10: Accept Responsibility for the Relationship

- If you want the relationship to change then start by changing your own behaviour or attitudes.

- You cannot expect your partner to change just because you are unhappy about their behaviour or their attitudes.

- Accept the responsibility of changing your own approach, use new techniques, adopt new strategies.

About the Author

Alan Moreton is an International speaker, writer, editor and businessman. Article reproduction permission is hereby granted providing the article is republished in its entirety, with author's information and any links intact. Copyright 2005 by Alan Moreton