While it’s common to turn to the tools provided by the Law of Attraction with a view to finding a new partner, plenty of people are also just hoping to improve their current relationships.
Whether you’re feeling disconnected from your partner or just want to work a bit of healthy relationship maintenance into your lives, try some of these five exercises to bring a fresh dose of positivity to your romantic dynamic.
Take a look at these exercises and try to practice them to help boost positive thinking in your relationship. Positive thinking can do wonders for your relationships – these exercises can help you increase that.
This exercise is easiest to do if you’ve been together for at least a few years, and if you’ve been a couple for decades then you’ll have a wealth of material to draw on. The key idea is to focus on memories that connect you with feelings of love and happiness. You can approach this in a variety of ways.
For example, try writing down five of your favorite memories and then taking an hour to share them (or even planning a dinner date with the sole purpose of exchanging and reveling in the memories). Alternatively, you can ask each other relevant questions, like “When did you first realize that we were in love?” and “How have our lives changed for the better since we decided to get together?”
You may have heard of Gary Chapman’s theory of love languages—it suggests that we all prefer one of five possible ways of expressing love and that if we don’t have the same love language as our partner then we may not feel loved or effectively communicate love (even when the desire is there).
Discuss which of the five resonates most with each of you—physical touch, giving gifts, spending quality time together, speaking words of affirmation, or doing acts of service (i.e. things that help make the other person’s life easier).
When you know your love languages, figure out five types of appropriate gestures for each of you, and commit to expressing your affection in those ways more regular. This won’t make love appear if it isn’t there, but it will make you feel more positive on a daily basis and help to avoid miscommunications.
Just as you can use vision boards to enhance your attempts to visualize your goals and keep your mind focused on positive beliefs about the future, so too can you use a dream board to enhance morale in your relationship.
All you need to do is get a board or choose a space and fill it with images, words, souvenirs, postcards, and anything else that connects the two of you to your happiest ideas about the relationship. If you’re going through a difficult period, you might want to design the dream board to represent how you want things to be in the future.
Meanwhile, if your thoughts are more on the idea of keeping your relationship as good as it is now, you could benefit more from using the dream board to showcase all the things you want to keep doing in your partnership. However you use it, just looking at it will instantly make you feel more positive about your love life—and your life more generally.
It can be so easy to just throw out hurtful assessments of a partner’s behavior, especially when you’re tired or feel you’ve been let down. However, you can keep the tone of the relationship more positive by making a shared commitment to communicate dissatisfaction in a more constructive way.
In particular, you might want to try balancing negative remarks with positive asides—for example, “I told you to do that chore, and you haven’t bothered to do it!” becomes “I really appreciate that fact you did the groceries yesterday, but could you please take the trash out like I asked?” or “It means a lot to me that you’re helping me with my project today, but I’m also feeling a bit annoyed because you haven’t stuck to your promise to tidy the living room.”
The core idea is that although you’re not suppressing your less pleasant feelings, you’re ensuring your partner doesn’t start to believe you see them as all bad.
Long-term couples often end up taking each other for granted to an extent, so talk to your partner about ways to avoid this. Little tokens of gratitude can mean the world—for example, leaving a note in a briefcase, buying your partner’s favorite sweet treat, or giving them a card that contains ten reasons why you love them.
Challenge yourselves to find a small but creative and meaningful way to express your appreciation and love each week, and enjoy not only the gesture itself but also the anticipation.
