There’s nothing worse than trying everything in your power to make your connection with your man work and still feel like your relationship is dying.
Whether you feel like you’ve become emotional strangers or every conversation ends in frustrating fights, or you haven’t had sex in months or even if you’ve reached a point of simply not talking to each other anymore…
Let me tell you, it can CHANGE.
When my relationship with my boyfriend Gabriel (who runs this blog with me) was about to die, things were TOUGH.
Even though we kept trying to make things work and grow closer, we couldn’t seem to save our relationship…
It was as though there was an invisible wall between us that we were powerless against.
And what’s more, the wall kept slowly expanding and pushing us further apart!
And as it did, we gradually made less effort and cared less…
There were times where both of us wanted to simply throw in the towel and call it quits.
So in order to save you all the pain, here is what I learned you need to do to revive your dying relationship and save it!
1. Uncover What Is Making Your Relationship Die
There is no magic at work here!
If you feel like your relationship is nearing its end, then there is a REASON.
In my case, it turned out that there were external factors like our jobs and family getting in between us.
As well as letting our relationship start to go on autopilot.
Whatever the case might be for you, the point is to try and figure out what is making your relationship feel like it’s ending.
And it’s the first step in saving your relationship.
This means taking charge and honestly talking to your man and asking questions to uncover the reason why the spark is fading.
In other words, try to get to the bottom of it all.
Also know that the process of a deteriorating relationship generally happens slowly, VERY SLOWLY…
So much so that you might not even notice it until months or even years have passed! Even though it’s happening right in front of our eyes…
So if you happen to be beating yourself up over not “Not having noticed it sooner”.
Don’t.
It happened to me too, just as it happens to countless other women.
2. Understand That There Are Multiple Causes
When your relationship is dying, I guarantee you it’s never due to one isolated cause.
There are always multiple things at play.
As previously mentioned in my case it was jobs and family getting in the way.
And there were also many other smaller factors, like me not feeling understood or taken seriously by Gabriel.
On top of it all, there was also his side of things.
So, not only were there multiple causes of mine that I needed to uncover to save our relationship. There were Gabriel’s as well.
This means that in your relationship, there will be two sides to contend with.
Yours and his.
This adds up to what might feel too complex a problem to unravel and somewhat overwhelming.
But for now, you only need to remember one thing; There are many different causes that are contributing towards your relationship dying!
It’s very unlikely due to one isolated reason or incident.
3. Focus on the Main Cause in Your Relationship First
So we just said that there are various contributors to take into account when it comes to your relationship dying.
Having said all of that, when starting off, it’s best to take on the MAIN cause first, rather than trying to solve all at once!
This ensures you’re dealing with only the biggest and most urgent reason behind your relationship troubles, when trying to save it.
Then you’ll also not be overwhelmed and can take the other issues on one at a time.
For me, one of the big ones was focusing on setting boundaries with my family.
But for you it might be that your man is distant, or maybe every discussion ends in a fight or worse you might even suspect him of lying to you…
Whatever is bothering you the most, start trying to address and solve this ONE thing first.
You can think of it as saving small parts of your relationship, one at a time. And it will all add up.
Once you’ve taken care of one, you can work your way to the others when you feel ready.
4. Have a Framework and Tools to Save Your Relationship
When I need to do my makeup, I have brushes, concealer, eyelash curler, various other tools as well as a technique.
If I’m going shopping, I know which stores I’m going to for which items, I have a shopping list app, carry bags and my car.
Every little and big task in life requires some kind of system and tools if you want to be quick and make things easier for yourself.
When it comes to relationships though, we’re taught that once you find the right guy things must somehow magically fall into place.
That there will never be a need to work on- or save your relationship…
That relationship skills are somehow instinctual or passed on and should just work.
Yet in my experience it’s nothing like that.
I struggled A LOT in my relationship at the beginning, because I was navigating blindly and hoping things would just somehow work out!
But the truth is that relationships require a method and tools just like any other task in life.
The only reason I have a fulfilling and happy relationship with Gabriel today is because I have the right framework and tools to not only save, but also create the relationship I want and know how to DEAL with problems if they arise.
Without them I’d be lost.
And they’ve added so much value to my relationship that I eventually decided to start this blog with my boyfriend Gabriel and teach these relationship techniques.
So if you find yourself in a similar situation and are not sure how to best approach saving your relationship, be sure to check out our Rebuild Your Relationship course designed especially for women.
With it, you’ll learn exactly what you need to do, to not only save your relationship from dying, but also how to build it back to being the way you want it to be: fun, loving and steamy!
Being in a relationship that is falling apart can be extremely painful. When my relationship was falling apart I used to feel heartbroken and hurt almost every day.
Our constant fights and misunderstandings made me endlessly worry. I used to wonder “Will this ever change?”, “Can we even make this work, or maybe we’re just simply not meant to be…”
My relationship with my partner Gabriel started out great, but things deteriorated over time.
After being together for a year and a half we have reached a point where we fought almost all the time, we couldn’t enjoy each other’s company anymore, our spark was fading and we even broke up a couple of times.
I didn’t want to give up on our relationship though and eventually, we managed to COMPLETELY turn things around.
No matter how bad things are in your relationship right now, it’s important to remember that there is always a way out.
You can fix your relationship even when it’s falling apart.
Here is how I did it:
1. Stop Expecting Things to Change on Their Own and Start Making Changes Yourself
This might sound obvious to some of you, but it wasn’t at all obvious to me back then and I think it’s a problem a lot of people have.
When my relationship started falling apart, in the first couple of months I was simply HOPING that things will get back to normal on their own.
Initially, I was hoping that Gabriel would change his mind or attitude towards me, or that he would become more caring and attentive again, but I wasn’t DOING anything to make any of these changes happen.
I spent hours complaining about our issues to friends, and even read books and articles about relationship problems, but I didn’t implement anything I’d learned.
I wasn’t making any active efforts to fix my relationship.
Back then, I used to be caught up in a belief that: “If it’s meant to be, it will work out”.
Because of this I almost felt like I’m not supposed to make any active efforts to fix my relationship from falling apart.
Once I put that limiting belief into question and started implementing new knowledge and actively changing my attitude, my relationship started gradually changing for the better.
One of the first big changes I made, that stopped my relationship from falling apart was:
2. Limit Attitudes and Behaviors That Are Damaging Your Relationship
We all come with our share of emotional baggage and unhealthy attitudes.
There are countless ways in which women sabotage their relationships, make their men more distant or even drive them away.
Things like chasing him to do, be or feel certain things, punishing or dismissing your partner are common behaviors that a lot of us resort to ALMOST EVERY DAY.
I used to do all these things too.
I used to chase Gabriel to feel more grateful and appreciative of my efforts, I’d dismiss his complaints or even withdraw my love and become more distant to show him that he did something wrong.
The main reason why I resorted to all sorts of unhealthy tactics was that I simply didn’t know any better.
It was the only way I knew to try to get what I wanted from him.
And I know many women make the very same mistake.
The thing is, all of these behaviors have a TERRIBLE influence on a relationship.
In fact, they directly cause relationships to fall apart.
That’s why, in order to fix a relationship, it’s important to limit these damaging habits as much as you can.
3. Learn Healthy Ways to Try to Get What You Want or Need
The reason so many people resort to all sorts of unhealthy behaviors in their relationships is that they think it’s the ONLY way to get what they want or need from their partner.
But in reality, this is not the case.
There are COUNTLESS ways and approaches that can get your partner to give you what you want or need without damaging your relationship in the process.
This includes learning how to say things in a way that will him listen.
As well as discovering how to listen in a way that can make your partner feel heard and understood.
When you can communicate openly in your relationship, you don’t have to silently hope that he will figure out what you’re needing and give it to you.
You can simply ask for things!
This way you’re much less likely to fight over countless little misunderstandings and you’re also much more likely to get MORE of what you want.
Improving communication was definitely a big stepping stone that helped me fix my relationship and stopped it from falling apart.
But there were many other skills I picked up that allowed me to quickly turn things around.
4. Set Boundaries to Prevent Your Partner’s Unhealthy Behaviors and Habits
In most cases, it’s not enough to just limit your own damaging habits and attitudes.
Because it takes two people to bring a relationship to the brink of falling apart.
Your partner has likely their own ways in which they damage and sabotage the relationship.
That’s why learning when and how to set boundaries is a crucial step when it comes to fixing things.
In my relationship, there were countless occasions that required me to set boundaries with Gabriel and also where he had to set boundaries with me.
We would often say or do hurtful things without fully realizing their negative effects.
In these kinds of situations, boundaries can act as a shield, protecting you and your relationship from potential damage.
They are absolutely necessary in order to fix a relationship when it’s falling apart.
And they also have other positive side effects.
Setting boundaries might initially be met with some resistance, but when you manage to persist and stand your ground, they’re bound to invoke deeper levels of respect from your partner.
They can actually make you feel more connected and bring you two closer.
It’s also important to mention that when your relationship has reached this point of falling apart, there’s often a lot of hurt and broken trust that happens along the way.
That way you’re starting again with a more solid foundation.
Now, fixing a relationship when it’s falling apart is definitely a challenge.
There might be moments where you’ll feel hopeless and be on the verge of giving up.
One big thing that I’ve learned from when we were struggling in our relationship was to not underestimate small changes.
There are countless ways in which you can turn things around.
It doesn’t matter what method you choose to implement or how much of it you even implement.
Every effort counts.
Even the tiniest of changes can make a world of difference.
If you’re interested in having more support and a step by step method on how to fix your relationship from falling apart, be sure to check out our Rebuild Your Relationship course.
In it we cover and teach the most important tools you need to stop things from further falling apart in your relationship. And more importantly you’ll learn how to rebuild things with solid foundations that will allow you to restore the love and attraction again.
There are many skills you can learn that improve your relationship.
But there are 3 that had the MOST POSITIVE EFFECT on our relationship and made it LAST!
These skills:
Got us through our worst patches
Are the ones, we use MOST FREQUENTLY to this day
Dissipated our conflicts before they even escalated
In other words, they’re the most USEFUL and they’ll have the BIGGEST impact in ensuring the growth and survival of your relationship.
I’ve listed them in the order in which we’ve learned and perfected them.
1. Why Reflective Listening Will Keep Your Partner Hooked
Reflective listening is the first skill we discovered, that significantly reduced our fights.
What is reflective listening?
In case you haven’t heard about it before, reflective listening is a communication strategy involving two key steps:
Seeking to understand your partner’s thought
Then repeating the thought back to him, to confirm you’ve understood him.
In other words, you listen to your partner carefully, then say what they said back to them to ensure that they feel understood.
For example:
Him: “Work was such BS! My boss is so incompetent, he doesn’t even get what I’m working on! But he doesn’t even care to try and understand either! I’d do a WAY better job if I was in his position.”
You: “So your boss is not listening to you or not trying to understand what you’re working on AGAIN?”
Him: “Yes, exactly! Why am I even working for this guy?”
And so on and so forth.
The power of this skill is not to be underestimated, it will keep him absolutely HOOKED.
Because he will feel so understood and heard by you!
I’m speaking from experience here.
Karolina has gotten so good at this by now, nobody can compete.
And when I’m having a bad day, I KNOW that when I tell her about it, she’ll reflect what I’m saying back to me and it’ll help me feel less alone and sort it out.
Without this skill though, you and your partner might find yourselves endlessly turning in circles.
Because it’s extremely difficult to feel understood otherwise.
2. How Resolving Problems Prevents Potential Relationship Crises
The people we choose to surround ourselves with are an important part of our life.
Everybody loves having friends and family.
If a man is your true love, he will want to share every part of his life with you.
This includes introducing you to everyone else that’s important to him.
He will invite you to come to parties and to meet his friends and family.
On top of that, he’ll be eager for you to like them because he’ll want you all to be able to hang out and have fun together.
He’ll want you to share all his precious moments with you.
6. He Cares About Your Happiness
A big part of loving someone is caring about that their well being.
If a man truly loves you, he will make little efforts to make you happy all the time. Some of which might be habits that happy couples tend to have anyway.
There are little proofs of love that I experience in my relationship EVERY DAY.
Like Gabriel cooking things the way I like, even if he considers my methods a total overkill. Or us watching “boring” movies just because I want to see them.
Your guy doesn’t need to make any HUGE gestures to express his true love for you.
LOTS of little efforts done on an everyday basis can be a constant reminder of his love and affection.
If a man is ready to make little sacrifices, to make you happy, that’s definite proof that he really cares about you.
7. You Can Count On Him
True love is about having each other’s back. It’s about supporting each other through thick and thin.
When you’re in a stressful situation or simply stuck with a problem…
You can count on him to be there.
When I was doing my bachelor’s in architecture, Gabriel was happy to jump in and help out.
I was lost in a creative frenzy and he knew I’d be hungry, so he surprised me by coming by with a giant pizza.
He then patiently held my stick models until the glue became fully solid, no matter what hour of the night.
If you can count on your boyfriend to support you when you need him…
Physical attraction and desire play a huge part in any romantic relationship. We are animals after all, equipped with a strong urge to reproduce….
Our sex drive is not all about making babies or just pleasure though, it’s also an incredibly powerful way of connecting with another person.
A big part of what makes physical touch, kissing, affection and everything else feel SO GOOD is when it’s about breaking barriers and finding ways to feel closer and closer to each other.
A man who is in love can’t stop to look for all sorts of possibilities to feel as close to the object of his desire AS POSSIBLE.
If your guy has a hard time keeping his hand off of you, it’s a sure sign your love is true and that he is really into you.
9. You Feel Good When You’re With Him
They say that no other person can make you happy.
It’s true that no matter how much a man loves you, he’ll never be able to solve ALL your life’s problems.
However, in my experience, true love does make you feel really GOOD.
The experience of feeling seen, understood, appreciated is just something that is extremely pleasant.
Add some physical intimacy to this mix and you’ll have all sorts of happiness hormones coursing through your whole body.
True love is the strongest natural happiness inducing drug on the market…
If you feel good when you’re spending time with your boyfriend it’s a sure sign that he is the special someone and that you have finally found the one.
I hope you’re more clear on what true love is now.
In summary, be sure to watch out for these signs in your relationship:
You Can Be Yourself Around Him
You Feel Like He Gets You
He Is Genuinely Interested In You
He Can’t Get Enough Of You
He Wants You to Be a Part of His Life
He Cares About Your Happiness
You Can Count On Him
He Can’t Keep His Hands off of You
You Feel Good When You’re With Him
So, if all these signs fit and you’re now feeling the irrepressible urge to burst into a love song, then our best 50 songs about true love can help complete your Disney princess moment.
If however, reading this has made you doubt his feelings towards you, know that not all hope is lost! There are little things you can do to make him love you more, that can add up to him changing his heart.
Now if you’re already in a serious relationship with a man and for some reason you’re still unclear about whether or not he really loves you, there might be some less obvious reasons driving you to doubt your relationship.
Sometimes it’s not just about the signs of true love from him, but rather that there are things that stand in the way of your connection that can take some deeper work. This is actually why we created the Rebuild Your Relationship course.
Here we dive into the reasons why love can at times feel ambivalent in a relationship and exactly what you need to do to gain clarity and feel connected with him.
We also talk about the often invisible things that stand in the way of true love and what it actually takes to take those walls down to restore a sense of closeness and belonging.
This is already a long post by now, but if you have further questions about signs of true love, chances are you’ll find the answers you seek down bellow.
How Do You Know a Man Is Your True Love?
Now it’s all well and good to look out for the signs of true love. But, maybe, even after reading all this, you still aren’t 100% sure whether or not he really is THE ONE for you.
That’s a perfectly normal situation to be in.
The thing about true love is that we have all been brought up with a completely FALSE image of it.
Love stories and fairy tales taught us girls that when we meet our one true love, we’re supposed to know then and there.
That is not only complete BS but also a very unrealistic expectation.
When you just start going out with someone, you generally don’t know that person very well.
How are you then supposed to be able to gauge whether or not you’ll want to spend the rest of your life with this particular man?
That’s right, it’s impossible!
It takes time to get to know somebody, It takes even longer for a person to open up and build trust in a relationship.
The truth is, time will tell whether or not he is your soulmate.
It’s perfectly normal to have doubts about your relationship. Your boyfriend is going to have to prove himself to you. And you’ll have to prove yourself to him. This might take months, or even years.
Only over the course of your relationship can you grow increasingly certain that a man is your one true love.
What Does True Love Really Mean?
So, not only true love is something that gradually develops and deepens between two people as time goes by. There is also another groundbreaking truth about it that most people tend to forget:
True love is not just a chance, it’s a CHOICE.
When you meet someone you appreciate and deeply care about, you then CHOOSE to invest in this relationship. You DECIDE to open up to him and be vulnerable.
True love means making an effort for someone else. It’s about sticking through the tough times. Being ready to put in the work and not letting go and giving up.
Yes, finding your soulmate is about getting together with a person you’re attracted to who is compatible with you.
But more importantly, it’s also about finding someone who is serious, mature, willing to put in the work and wanting to commit to truly loving you.
What is True Love in a Relationship
True love in a relationship is sticking though the rough time and being there for each other. But at the same time, it’s also having a sense of belonging and intimacy. Appreciating your partner and deeply enjoying having them in your life.
Don’t expect things to be perfect.
Even the most compatible of couples will sometimes feel upset and misunderstood. The reality of our relationships is messy.
True love in a relationship is when the good outweighs the bad by a far margin.
That there are far more things that you value and cherish about your partner than the ones you resent them for. And vice versa, they too have far more warm feeling towards you than the not so pleasant ones.
True love in a relationship isn’t one-sided. Both of you care and are willing to invest into making things work. You might not be making the same efforts. For example, one of you might be more diligent in acts of service, while the other is more affectionate and physical. It’s about having a good balance of how much each of you in putting in into making the other one happy.
If you have any questions or would like to add something, let me know in the comments section.
We always believed that relationships should be FUN and uplifting! And we were obsessed with finding real-world practical solutions for our relationship problems. Today we help others do the same with our blog.
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