The fact remains, that whether you’re dating or married, relationships are hard. Not everything is always going to be perfect but if you both choose to make it work then it can. And remember it’s the little things that you sometimes do that can go a long way to making your relationship work. Read through the helpful tips below on how to make your relationship go the distance.

Communication is vital to all healthy relationships. Listen to your partner and avoid blame and judgement. Don’t let your emotions dictate your behavior. Remember just talking things over can help you to both have a deeper understanding of each other. Learn to argue well. Never say something to your partner that you wouldn’t want to hear said back. Just remember, the one good thing they say about arguing, is the making up afterwards.

Often those little things that first attracted you to your partner can turn into nasty annoying habits. Learn to love your partner warts and all. Money is one of the top conflicts between most couples. For the relationship to work, you need to address your finances and maybe even work out a budget.

Try to keep your dependence and independence in balance. Tell your partner how much you need them, but don’t get to dependent on them and cling to them all the time, as that can make your partner feel trapped. Try to keep a happy and healthy balance between the two. Learn to forgive. If you know you will never forgive your partner over something important, and feel the trust can never be regained then give yourself, and him a break and start again, with someone new.

Don’t ever think that going to counseling is a sign of a failed relationship. It can turn a bad relationship around and can also turn an average relationship into an excellent one.

Without quality time together, your relationship will not survive. You both want to feel secure within the relationship. A good relationship is built on compromise and a lot of give and take from both of you.

Sort out your sex life, it may start to go downhill over the years, don’t just accept it. As soon as you notice it, address it with your partner and work out why, and what to do to bring back the passion. Why not experiment with new ideas in the bedroom. Role play, dressing up, or maybe take your sex life out of the bedroom and try new places. The introduction of marital aids into the relationship can also help to spice things up.

Whatever you decide, remember communication is vital.

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.