3 Experts Tips To Improve Your Love Life

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to sit down with a group of happily married couples, couples who were all celebrating significant wedding anniversaries (read 30, 40 and even 50 years of wedded bliss) and have an opportunity to ask them for love advice? To be able to glean advice from people who can reflect on years of successful happy marriages? Guess what? We’ve done it for you! Here are some of the highlights from that conversation; words of wisdom that you can reflect upon, straight from the life experiences of the “wise elders.” Get ready to learn from experience!

* Love yourself before you can love others

People who don’t feel they are worthy tend to attract partners who will feed into that belief. So they pair up with mates who criticize them or abuse them or take advantage of them. They don’t think they deserve anything better because they haven’t yet learned to feel a sense of their own self-worth.

* You are responsible for your own happiness

Making your partner be your only source of happiness is a recipe for disaster. Mark, 48, remembers when he was in his early twenties and would burn through relationships at a rapid pace. I kept expecting the woman I was dating to take away my depression and make my life joyful. And when they didn’t, I’d move on to the next woman. What I didn’t understand is that I had to create my own happiness. Having a woman in my life would be an extra dose of joy, but not the only source of it.

* Be realistic about your relationship expectations

Real love does not look like a Hollywood movie. Sharon, 45, divorced her first husband after only a couple of years of marriage. “He was a great guy but I had this idea that a husband should be like in the movies. You know, bring me roses every night. Write me poetry. Charter a private plane to take me on a surprise weekend. I had clearly grown up with unrealistic ideas of what love should look like, and my first marriage suffered for it.” Fortunately, Sharon did some serious soul-searching after her divorce and worked with a therapist to help her identify what real-life love is made of.