5 Skills for Healthy Relationships

5 key skills to preserving a healthy relationship

Be willing to forfeit: the win-win strategy

Disagreements are inevitable — as unavoidable as Tuesdays or the common cold. They don’t have to be acrimonious, though. And I’ve learned that in marriage the choice is often to win or to be happy. Being harsh and critical in an argument is only going to hurt feelings and alienate your partner. That’s fine if you want to rule the roost, but if you want to love and be loved, you’ve got to care for your partner’s feelings, especially when you’re fighting.

“When there’s a lot of goodwill, it’s amazing what you can say and still feel good about each other,” says Catherine Hastings, Ph.D., a licensed marriage and family therapist in Lancaster, PA.

Hastings sees couples become polarized in their disagreements, with neither person willing to yield. The problem, she says, “is the idea that there has to be right and wrong in an argument. And there really doesn’t.”

The rest of the article here.