Take Responsibility For Yourself is the most important choice you can make to improve your relationship. This means that you learn how to take responsibility for your own feelings and needs. This means learning to treat yourself with kindness, caring, compassion, and acceptance instead of self-judgment. Self-judgment will always make you feel unhappy and insecure, no matter how wonderfully your partner is treating you.

For example, instead of getting angry at your partner for your feelings of abandonment when he or she is late, preoccupied and not listening to you, not turned on sexually, and so on, you would explore your own feelings of abandonment and discover how you might be abandoning yourself.

When you learn how to take full, 100% responsibility for yourself, then you stop blaming your partner for your upsets. Since blaming one’s partner for one’s own unhappiness is the number one cause of relationship problems, learning how to take loving care of yourself is vital to a good relationship.

When conflict occurs, you always have two choices regarding how to handle the conflict: you can open to learning about yourself and your partner and discover the deeper issues of the conflict, or you can try to win, or at least not lose, through some form of controlling behavior.

We’ve all learning many overt and subtle ways of trying to control others into behaving the way we want: anger, blame, judgment, niceness, compliance, caretaking, resistance, withdrawal of love, explaining, teaching, defending, lying, denying, and so on. All the ways we try to control create even more conflict. Remembering to learn instead of control is a vital part of improving your relationship.

If you are one of the many millions of people who feel lonely right now because the love of your life is far away, console yourself with the thought that long distance relationships can, and do work. Some people have chosen to be in long distance relationships, while others are in the situation due to work commitments.

Like any relationship, long distance relationships require effort for them to succeed. Where your relationship differs from a normal relationship, is the fact that you have time to live for yourself. How many couples do you know of, who complain that they never have time for themselves. As with any sort of relationship, there are undoubtedly times where frustrations start creeping in. The quality time that you spend together, probably on the end of a telephone line can quickly end up in mind games, destroying the small amount of time you do get to be close together. If the wonders do start creeping up on you, remember that your relationship is built on trust, love and respect.

It is said that the hardest part of a long distance relationship, is the goodbye. You had probably spent time getting to know each other again and before you know it, it’s time to go again.

Obviously, you’re not going to know if it’s worth pursuing until you’ve given the relationship a go but here’s a few things to bear in mind when embarking on a long distance relationship and a few ideas how to keep your relationship hot whilst counting down the days before your next rendezvous.

Ask yourself (and your partner) if you would be prepared to move. If, for whatever reasons, relocating for both of you is out of the question then there really isn’t much point in continuing to see each other. If either or both of you said “maybe one day once we know each other more” then just see how the relationship develops and discuss it again further down the line.

Share the travelling. If it’s easier for him/her to travel to you then take these things into consideration when planning your weekend. Instead of arranging a hectic night out the first night he/she arrives, cook a romantic dinner so you can both relax and unwind indoors, without the hassle or expense of getting ready to go out for a meal.

Don’t lock yourselves away by staying in all the time when you visit each other. It’s very easy to wrap yourselves up in your own little love bubble when you’re in love and, although this can make the relationship very passionate at first, you’ll never discover how your partner behaves with other people. Some people’s personalities can change when socializing with others; they can become jealous, loud, embarrassing or dull. Not only will you get to see a different side to him/her, after sharing your time with others you will no doubt be eager to get back to your love nest!

Keep jealousy at bay by communicating. If you want this relationship to work, you need to feel like you are in a “regular” relationship, one where if you want to offload your troubles/share your news for the day, you know that he/she is there for you.

Spice it up with a webcam. Whilst this cannot compensate for actually being someone, it’s a great way to keep in touch whilst you’re apart.

Turn the negative into a positive. Don’t spend every night you’re not together moping around. Make the most of your independence (whilst still having a relationship) by socializing with friends, going to the gym, pampering yourself beauty treatments or simply having some me-time.

Communication, trust, honesty and passion will strengthen your relationship whilst you’re apart but you really have to believe in each other and your relationship for it to succeed…. although long distance relationships can be difficult, they can work and do work for many couples if both parties put in the effort.