How relationships work and how to have a successful Life Partnership have always been fascinating mysteries to me. One thing’s for certain; times have changed and what used to work doesn’t work anymore. The biggest change in the past 30 years impacting relationships that I can see is that we have developed a need to be “happy”.

This is a dramatic shift from our parents and grandparents who were quite satisfied surviving and achieving some measure of comfort and security. The need for happiness sounds very simple and innocent, but it’s the primary reason for failed relationships today, and the high divorce rate, single parent families, mental and physical health problems, juvenile delinquency, welfare, and so on.

While we seek to be happy in relationships, we don’t seem to know how. As a result I have seen many people make relationship choices and fall into traps that prevented them from getting what they want in their life, resulting in unhappiness and relationship failure. A trap is basically an unsolvable problem that results in unhappiness in a relationship. Getting out of the trap often means leaving the relationship.

When you’re single you can do a lot more than you realize to avoid these traps and prepare for a successful and lasting relationship, as you’ll see in this article.

1.       Marketing Trap

Believing you need to make yourself more appealing to attract a partner and “selling” yourself with attractive packaging and presentation. High risk of disappointment and relationship failure as people discover that the excitement and promise of the “sizzle” conflicts with the reality of the “steak”.

Solution: Authenticity. You will attract compatible people when you show them who you really are. At the risk of mixing metaphors, “Birds of a feather flock together”, so don’t try to look like a prize-winning chicken when you are your own breed of duck!

2.       Scarcity Trap

Believing there is a limited supply of possible partners, so you have to take what you can get or be alone. Results in relationship failure when you settle for less and compromise your Requirements. A self-fulfilling prophecy when you get less because you expect less.

Solution: Define your first choice of what you really want and persevere. Trust that if you apply yourself you can get what you really want in your life. You must be able to say “No” to what you DON’T want, to be available to say “Yes” to what you DO want. You have the power to choose who, what , where, when, and how, and can get what you really want if you make effective choices aligned with your Vision and Requirements.

3.       Compatibility Trap

Assuming that if you have fun together and get along well, you are compatible and a committed relationship will work. Results in relationship failure when discovering the vast difference between a fun-focused, recreational ” dating” relationship, and a serious long-term committed relationship. Being so different, the process and criteria for choosing a recreational relationship needs to be very different from choosing a Life Partner.

Solution: When you are ready for a Life Partnership, define your Requirements and use them to scout, sort, and screen potential partners. Do not try to convert a recreational relationshipinto a committed one, unless 100% of your Requirements are met.

4.       Fairytale Trap

Passively expecting your ideal partner to magically appear and live happily ever after without effort on your part. Believing that finding your soul mate will just “happen”. Results in disappointment when the frogs that happen to jump into your life don’t become princes.

Solution: Take personal responsibility for your relationship choices and outcomes. Have effective scouting, sorting, and screening strategies. Initiate contact and be the “Chooser”, don’t simply react to people that choose you.

5.       Date-To-Mate Trap

Becoming an “instant couple” as if giving each person you date an extended test drive. Believing that if you develop an exclusive relationship with someone you are dating, a successful committed relationship will eventually happen. Other terms for this are “Serial Monogamy” and the “Mini-Marriage.. This approach is a costly use of time and emotional energy. The inertia in this trap is pressure to make the relationship work, attempt to solve unsolvable problems, and fit the round peg in the square hole because breaking up and being single again is an undesired outcome.

Solution: Date a variety of people and have fun without being exclusive. When you are ready for a committed relationship define your Requirements and use them as tools to scout, sort, and screen potential partners. Make a careful relationship choice and consciously use a “pre-commitment” period to determine if this is the right relationship for you.

6.       Attraction Trap

Making relationship choices based on feelings of attraction. Interpreting a strong attraction to someone as a sign that the relationship is a good choice and “meant to be”. This approach results in relationship failure when unsolvable problems surface because you ignored the red flags while infatuated. Unconscious choices usually result in repeating unproductive past patterns.

Solution: Balance your attractions by defining your Requirements and use them to scout, sort, and screen potential partners. “Choose your life’s mate carefully. From this one decision will come ninety percent of your happiness or misery.(H. Jackson Brown, Jr. from “Life’s Little Instruction Book”).

7.       Love Trap

Interpreting infatuation, attraction, need, good sex, and/or attachment as Love. “If it feels good, it must be Love.” “Love is all you need.” “Love conquers all.” Results in relationship failure when you discover that love is not enough to meet your requirements and needs.

Solution: Make conscious relationship choices by defining your Requirements and use them to scout, sort, and screen potential partners.

8.       Rescue Trap

Hoping a relationship will solve your emotional and financial difficulties and bring you happiness and fulfillment, something like winning the lottery. You avoid taking responsibility for your life challenges, expecting to be rescued from them. Results in desperation, neediness, and relationship failure when problems multiply instead of disappear.

Solution: Define your Vision for your life and relationship and “Live your Vision” as a successful single person. Resolve emotional, financial, and other problems prior to seeking a lasting committed relationship. Seek to be in a position of “choice” and “want” rather than “need”.

9.       Co-Dependent Trap

Expecting someone to love you and give you what you want by giving them what they want. Attempting to earn love and happiness by acquiescing, giving and helping. Needing to be needed often results in unconsciously attracting and choosing a relationship with a person that needs you, but you later discover is unable to give you what you want.

Solution: Define your Vision and Requirements and choose a closely aligned partner. Learn to be assertive, identify and ask for what you want and need, identify and assert boundaries, and develop the ability to say “No”. Be the “Chooser” and cautious of people that choose you!

10.       Entitlement Trap

Believing you deserve to be happy and get what you want in your life without effort or changes on your part. Results in relationship failure as you rely on your partner to bring happiness and fulfillment and inevitably experience disappointment. “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.”

Solution: Take personal responsibility for your life and relationship. Define your Vision and Life Purpose and live them when single.

11.       Virtual Reality Trap

Believing that “what you see is what you get.” Making hasty long-term relationship decisions based on short-term impressions and inferences instead of actual experience and knowledge. Results in seeing what you want to see and relationship failure when later reality doesn’t match.

Solution: Assume “you don’t know what you don’t know” and stay in a “pre-commitment” stage until you have solid experience and knowledge that this is the right relationship for you.

12.       Lone Ranger Trap

Believing that you don’t need anyone’s help in finding your Life Partner. You evaluate people you meet for their relationship potential and do not take the opportunity to cultivate new friends. Results in isolation, perception of scarcity of potential partners, and risk of settling for less than what you really want because you don’t want to be alone.

Solution: Develop a support network/community of friends of both genders and be supportable by enrolling them to scout for you.

I have tried out all the online dating services. Here is my reviews of the best dating sites out there.

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One of the things that works to keep relationships alive is spending quality time with each other. In this day of the information age, it is becoming increasingly difficult to carve out the necessary time to nurture our relationships. What with long work hours, helping kids with their homework, transporting them around to their extracurricular activities, getting dinner, cleaning up and going through the bedtime routine, what time is left?

Unless you orchestrate the time for your relationship, other less important things will crowd in and take what precious little time you do have. Pick a night that will be “date night” with your partner and make a game out of being as creative as you can be. Try to see how many things you can do without spending money.

To get you started, I’ve come up with some suggestions to help you for the next year. What follows are 52 ideas for how to spend creative time together without spending money. Feel free to add or modify any of the items on the list to suit your particular relationship and circumstances.

WINTER

1. Take a drive to look at the Christmas decorations.
2. Play cards—perhaps strip poker.
3. Watch a movie together.
4. Go outside and have a snowball fight.
5. Get some finger paints and create your own body art with each other as your canvass.
6. Go sleigh riding.
7. Go ice skating.
8. Work out or exercise together.
9. Stage your own improvisation show.
10. Sing to each other.
11. Review or create a photo album or scrapbook of your memories together.
12. Play a board game—perhaps chess, Scrabble or Twister.
13. Go to a book store, get coffee and read for hours.

SPRING

14. Work on a remodeling project together.
15. Plan and complete a yard work project together.
16. Do the spring cleaning together—room by room. When done, reward yourself by making love in the room you’ve cleaned.
17. Put on old clothes and mud wrestle after some drenching rain.
18. Give each other a massage.
19. Play catch—football, baseball, softball or Frisbee.
20. Go to a car dealer and test drive the car of your dreams.
21. Shoot basketball together.
22. Dance together.
23. Take a shower together and wash each other—everywhere.
24. Take a free adult education class together.
25. Go to a mall and have a contest to see which one of you can get the most free samples.
26. Go rollerblading or bike riding.

SUMMER

27. Build a campfire and roast marshmallows.
28. Go swimming or skinny dipping.
29. Give each other a manicure or pedicure.
30. Go somewhere crowded to people watch.
31. Go to a free outdoor event, perhaps a concert.
32. Lie on a blanket outside and watch the clouds or stars.
33. Go on a picnic.
34. Watch a fireworks display.
35. Be creative and engage in sexual role plays. Be anyone you’d like to be for the night who is also exciting for your partner.
36. Sit by the water somewhere.
37. Do a prolonged strip tease for each other.
38. Have a water balloon fight.
39. Sit outside and read poetry to each other.

FALL

40. Go for a drive together.
41. Go window shopping.
42. Incorporate food into your love making—chocolate syrup, whipped cream, fondue, strawberries—anything you and your partner enjoy.
43. Call or write to someone you haven’t had contact with in a while.
44. Cook something together.
45. Spend an evening just talking with each other. Talk about the things you have done, plans you have for the future, important people in your lives or current events.
46. Take a bubble bath together.
47. Go to a free movie or museum.
48. Take a drive and find the potential in old houses and their properties.
49. Create an imaginary story together—either orally or in written form.
50. Take turns being each other’s genie in a bottle by fulfilling your partner’s every wish and fantasy.
51. Play in the fallen leaves.
52. Create an exciting scavenger hunt that ends in your bed.

Now you have 52 suggestions for things to do with your partner for every week of the year divided by season. Certainly you don’t have to follow my suggestions. Feel free to add your own or to repeat your favorites as often as you’d like.

The main point is not to see how kinky you can get. The idea is to keep your relationship alive by making time together a priority. It is important that you find things to do as a couple that you can both enjoy. If you have vastly different interests then you can enter this with the spirit of taking turns and each agree to happily participate in the activity chosen by the one whose turn it is that week.

As long as you make a habit of making your relationship a priority and allocating time each week for rejuvenation of the feelings that attracted you in the first place, then you stand a good chance of staying together for the long haul.

Please don’t let insidious boredom enter into your relationship through the back door. This is what frequently happens when we are busy placing other things ahead of our time for each other. You know what I mean—the job, the kids, our friend in crisis, etc. There will always be a competing interest for the time you’ve set aside for each other.

Other than natural disasters, threat of death or major crises, do not allow your time together to be invaded by any outside forces. Make sure to create opportunities for you to do things together without outside influence. With more than 50% of today’s marriages ending in divorce, make this small investment in the longevity of your relationship. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. What’s stopping you? Start today.

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So you haven’t been out on a date in awhile and you’re nervous that you’ll do or say the wrong thing.  Or perhaps your last date was such a disaster that it should have had a rating 5 on the weather channel.  Getting nervous before a date is understandable.  Will they be attracted to you?  Are you both on the same wavelength?  Will you be able to control your mouth from saying something your brain knows is stupid?

Mistakes usually occur when stress levels are high.  And lets face it dating is a stressful endeavour.  The best thing you can do before a date is…relax…I know that is easier said than done but here are 8 easy ways to chillout before your dates arrives so that you actually have a good time on your date without any jittery mis-steps.

1.  Meditate or if that sounds too mystical just close your eyes and focus on your breathing, feel it as it goes in and feel it go out.  Can you feel it flow through your nostrils into your lungs?  Does your stomach expand too?  If it does then you know your breathing deeply and you’ll get the most benefit from the activity.  See if you can focus on the pause between breaths and that between an inhale and an exhale.  Do it for 5 minutes or do it for 20 – the length is not as important as your focus during this time.

2.  Sing.  Really loudly.  Obviously this isn’t going to work in an office but it’s great in the car, especially at night if you’re worried about other people looking at you oddly.

3.  Stretch.  Try standing with your feet hip width apart and then take a deep breath, rise up onto your toes and reach up to the ceiling with your fingertips.  Hold for as long as you can.  And then slowly release your breath, your arms and finally put your heels back on the ground.

4.  Go for a walk even if it’s just around the office or your living room.  Or you could walk to the mailbox or do 6 starjumps or put on some dancing music.  Anything to get your body moving and those endorphins flowing.

5.  Give yourself a quick massage – your feet or hands are good places to start for a quick treat.  Keep some hand cream or body lotion at your desk or in your bedside table and you’ll always be ready to treat yourself.  And take your time – afterall YOU know the bits you like.

6.  Connect with your inner child – Do a handstand or a cartwheel – this isn’t going to work indoors but if you’re wearing trousers there’s no reason why you can’t do it in the park on your way to meet your date.  And while you’re there have a go on the slide too (not a good option if you’re wearing white and its probably a good idea to make sure the ramp is clean before you slide).

7.  Go somewhere private and be as unbelievably angry as you possibly can and try to stay angry – you’ll find that 9 times out of 10 you won’t be able to sustain it.  The idea is not to get all worked up and then go and spray your anger at your date.  It’s about getting it all out and then dealing with whatever situation needs addressing.  In order to do this you need to make sure that you don’t leave your private space until you feel like your anger has all gone.  We hear so much about anger management when it’s not really about managing it, but rather letting it out.  Just remember the golden rule:  its OK to get angry but its not OK to take it out on someone or something else.

8.  Read fiction – almost everyone agrees that fiction is a wonderful escape from the day to day.  There’s nothing quite like stepping out of your own life and into the lives of the characters in a good story.  And a good short story is just the thing for a 15 minute chillout session.

Hope these tips work for you on your next date.  You might even find you enjoy it!

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