Every relationship has its springtime; then winter rolls around. Winter can come in a few days, a few weeks, or a few months but, with rare exception, it sure does come.

This may seem to happen for a variety of reasons – everyone has a story about why a given relationship didn’t work out – and we tend to buy into these stories. There is, however, a bigger truth at work than these narratives.

In reality, winter in relationships happens for one big reason: Very few people are trained in relationship skills. Worse, most of us deal with conflicts and tensions in relationships by relying on coping mechanisms and patterns learned in childhood and teenage years – and in most cases these patterns are actually disruptive of relationships, when not absolutely destructive of them.

This is easily remedied by two things. One is professional Life and Couples coaching. The other is an absolute willingness on your part to become a student of effective relationship skills and of the healthy way to understand and approach relationship that a coach like myself will impart to you.

It doesn’t matter the current stage or pattern of your relationships. You can be at the early dating stage, you can have experienced a lot of failed short term relationships or affairs, you can be with someone for months or years. What matters is this: If you want to have a great relationship that endures past the early romantic, sexual phase, you need to learn modern relationship skills in order to gain and keep real closeness to one another.

This learning doesn’t come automatically– it can take tens of years of trial and error and ups and downs in relationships to figure it out – and that’s why Life and Couples coaching is booming. Why takes a trillion years to accomplish a state of partnership satisfaction when, given modern research and knowledge, you can learn your way into a great relationship in a few weeks to a few months, depending on how actively you apply yourself?

First, you must learn an alternative to blaming your partner or yourself. You must be accountable for your actions and get out of “the blame game.” Blaming others doesn’t solve anything. Instead, it is important to understand why you and your partner feel and behave the way you do when challenges arise- and then learn how to resolve problems in a mature manner.

Second, arguments and disagreements can actually be resolved after you have been taught some superb and easily-learned methods to deal with them. Simply learning the techniques for creating agreement and closeness provides so much confidence that it is much easier when a challenge arises for you not to go into reaction and to take a moment instead to think about the situation rather than say or do something that will make matters worse.

Third, keeping agreements is still another core principle. Better to go back and renegotiate even the simplest agreement – “I will wash the dishes tonight” – than break trust.

Fourth, open communications are essential to prevent each person wondering what’s happening with her or his partner – a gap most of us tend to fill with projections, worries and fantasies.

While there is considerably more than these four principles to learn, a smart basic way to approach working with a Life and Couples coach is to start by accepting the realworld truth – which is that most relationship difficulties, from the early dating stage on, are caused by the tension and misunderstanding created by two people who simply don’t know (because they haven’t yet been taught) how to make the other person feel safe EVEN while retaining their own autonomy.
Life and Couples Coaching can teach you that and much more. It can take you way past resentments and tensions. It can help you and your partner get out of your own ways and each other’s way so that you are each relating from a place of authentic self and tremendous acceptance.

It can, in fact, get you to an exquisite state of existence of a sort you may only have had hints of in your life.

It does this by showing you what needs to be changed and how to make those needed changes almost painlessly.

We all sometimes need good teachers and good guidance to take us past the “flaws” we think we and our partners have that show up in relationships. A skilled Life and Couples coach can be the ideal person to turn to in times of turmoil, because that’s how you can discover that such flaws almost always result only from everyone’s backwards original education in the most crucial of human experiences – in how we are to relate to each other.

By contrast, a Life and Couples coach like myself can teach you truly effective, very neat and satisfying relating skills. For most people, the sooner you learn, the sooner your relationship and life can improve.