This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Master Guides: Maintaining a Happy Relationship" by Shortform. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What’s the secret to a happy long-term relationship? What should you do, and what should you avoid?
If you’re regularly fighting with your partner or just feeling a little bored, staying happy may seem more easily said than done. But, maintaining a happy romantic relationship isn’t as difficult as it can seem—as long as you’re armed with the right knowledge.
Read on for expert advice on how to maintain a healthy relationship with your partner.
How to Maintain a Healthy Relationship
We’ll draw from the work of 11 relationship experts—including renowned relationship researchers John and Julie Schwartz Gottman and noted couples therapist Esther Perel—to lay out the secrets to maintaining a happy romantic relationship. We’ll discuss the importance of understanding your needs and your partner’s and share the experts’ tips for sustaining both emotional and physical intimacy. We’ll also explain why conflict can ruin your relationship—and describe how to handle conflict effectively so that it doesn’t. Let’s get started with their advice on how to maintain a healthy relationship with your partner for the long haul.
Understand Your Needs and Your Partner’s
One essential element of maintaining a happy relationship is to understand both your needs and your partner’s. Specifically, relationship experts recommend understanding your attachment styles and your love languages.
Understand Your Attachment Styles
In Attached, psychiatrist Amir Levine and psychologist Rachel Heller contend that the best way to create a relationship that fulfills your emotional needs is to understand both your own and your partner’s attachment styles—the beliefs and behaviors that determine how you function in intimate relationships.
There are three main attachment styles: secure, anxious, and avoidant.
- Secure attachers are nurturing, responsive, and comfortable with intimacy.
- Anxious attachers are preoccupied with making their relationship solid and constantly seek reassurance from their partner.
- Avoidant attachers are more distant and see intimacy as a threat to their independence.
If you’re a secure attacher, your major relationship goal is to maintain your secure attachment style. If you’re an anxious attacher, accepting your romantic needs is critical to developing a happy relationship. If you’re an avoidant attacher, developing a happy relationship depends on recognizing and combating the techniques you use to maintain emotional distance from your partner.
Understand Your Love Languages
In The 5 Love Languages, Gary Chapman argues that the way you understand love depends on your love language—the types of actions or behaviors that make you feel the most loved. To help your partner feel loved, you must learn which language they speak. According to Chapman, the five languages of love are Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service, and Physical Touch.
You can identify your love language by reflecting on what makes you feel most loved, what makes you feel hurt or unloved, and how you treat your partner.
To identify your partner’s love language, self-help expert Jack Canfield offers three tips in The Success Principles:
- Listen to what they ask of you.
- Watch how they behave with other people.
- Note their complaints.
You can tell you’ve identified someone’s love language when they respond favorably to what you did.
Maintain Emotional Intimacy
Relationship experts contend that another key to maintaining a happy romantic relationship is to sustain emotional intimacy. Specifically, they suggest that you regularly connect with each other and let each other and your relationship evolve.
Connect With Your Partner
In The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, relationship researcher John Gottman and coauthor Nan Silver highlight the importance of connecting regularly with your partner so that you can maintain your connection long-term. They explain that happy couples regularly respond to each other’s bids, or overtures for connection.
To improve how often you respond to your partner’s overtures, Gottman and Silver suggest that you intentionally reconnect each evening.
Let Each Other Evolve
In Eight Dates, Gottman, his wife—fellow relationship researcher Julie Schwartz Gottman—and married couple Doug Abrams and Rachel Carlton Abrams also highlight the importance of connecting regularly with your partner. The authors explain that relationships last when both people support the evolution and growth of their partner, as individuals and as a couple. So to support each other’s growth, you and your partner need to set aside time to continue learning about each other through intentional conversation and open-ended questions.
Let the Relationship Evolve
While the authors of Eight Dates highlight the importance of letting each other evolve, How to Not Die Alone author Logan Ury emphasizes the importance of building a relationship that can grow with you. She explains that most people recognize that they’ve changed a lot in the past, but they don’t expect to change a lot in the future. But in reality, you (and your partner) will probably change just as much in the future as you did in the past. Therefore, it’s critical to ensure that your relationship evolves, too.
Maintain Physical Intimacy
In addition to maintaining emotional intimacy over time, maintaining physical intimacy is a key aspect of maintaining a happy relationship. To do so, relationship experts recommend that you communicate about sex. However, their recommendations for how to communicate about sex differ.
Talk About Sex
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Master Guides: Maintaining a Happy Relationship summary:
- Advice from top relationship experts on how to maintain a happy relationship
- How to sustain both emotional and physical intimacy
- How to handle conflict so it doesn't ruin your relationship
