What Helps Couples Stay Content? They Embrace the Upside
At the beginning of a relationship, positive emotions are flowing with regularity. Excitement, joy, and passion are all right at your fingertips. But, as the relationship progresses and you both get more comfortable with each other, some people expect that those positive emotions will just happen without any effort. Not so.
“The research shows that the happiest couples with the most sustainable marriages are the ones who actively cultivate them all the time and prioritize them as opposed to waiting around for them to happen,” says, Suzann Pileggi, co-author of Happy Together: Using the Science of Positive Psychology to Build Love That Lasts “Because, like with anything, the newness of something, those heightened positive emotions, the level, and the frequency just naturally don’t occur as much as at the beginning of a relationship, the falling-in-love stage.”
So, couples in long-term relationships who are looking to cultivate positive emotions must ask themselves What can I do each day? What activities or actions can I do in order to keep positive emotions flowing in my marriage?
“Imagine if you just bought a gym membership and went once and then said, ‘Okay, now I’m going to be fit,’” Pileggi says. “No, you work out regularly and throughout your lifetime.”
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