The Best Steps to Avert a Divorce, Part I

Let’s be perfectly honest: there is no such thing as a foolproof plan to keep a spouse who wants a divorce from getting it. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t several extremely powerful steps that you can take to avoid coming to stay out of my office. Let’s talk about how the body, mind, and heart work together, and how you can become someone your spouse will be a lot less likely to leave.

Introducing Oxytocin
Oxytocin is a hormone; it’s most widely known as the hormone that causes lactation in new mothers. But it’s far more ubiquitous than that — it’s also the hormone that causes you to trust and nurture someone that you spend time in skin-to-skin contact with. Cuddling, especially without clothes on, is one excellent way to increase your partner’s trust in you and desire to nurture your relationship.

But what do you do if your partner isn’t around to cuddle? As it turns out, recent research shows there’s another easy way to cause someone’s oxytocin levels to skyrocket: trust them. That’s right: the hormone that leads you to trust other people is triggered when they show that they trust you. Which leads to the challenge: how can you bring yourself to place your trust in someone who probably doesn’t trust you and might even have broken your trust just recently? Unfortunately, that’s not a question we can answer, because it’s unique to every relationship — but we can give this advice: putting trust in a partner that has betrayed you might be hard, but it is one of the best steps you can take to rebuild the relationship if that’s what you actually want.

The Most Attractive Trait (For Someone You’re Already Married To)
There’s a ton of writing out there about attraction and what makes people attractive. But literally 100% of it misses the mark, because no one states the most obvious possible thing: the people we are attracted to are the ones who are (or appear to be) willing to give us the thing we’re looking for.

If you’re looking to get laid, you’re going to be attracted to the people who look like they’re willing to have sex with you. If you’re looking to start a relationship, you’re going to be attracted to people who look willing and able to support you emotional and perhaps other ways. If you’re looking to start a business, you’re going to look for someone who appears to have the money, tenacity, and intelligence to get a startup off the ground. And so on.

If you’re already in a relationship, the thing that your partner will be most attracted to is the thing that they want the most. We can’t tell you what that is — it’s going to change from one relationship to the next. The important thing to note, here, however, isn’t that you provide the thing they want…it’s that you look like you could, and you do. (Just remember, though, that what people say they want and what they really want often aren’t the same — specifically, very few men are actually as focused on sex as they claim. Put on your best Sherlock hat!)

There’s more coming later this week — we’re not done yet. Come back then!