Since there are so many stories told here of painful separation with their SOs and the like… 
Any one wants to share , how they kept a relationship / marriage going ?? It will spread some cheer in the holiday season …
I have seen some very wise and pertinent replies to some asking for advice threads… May be they can share their experience… 
Honestly, this is hard to answer. We’ve been married 13 years, and the first couple were rough. I think one thing, though, was being ABSOLUTELY determined not to just up and quit the marriage without giving it one helluva fight. And I did give it one helluva fight, and it was worth it, because we’ve worked out most of the stuff (yeah, we still fight once in a while–we’re human) and things are so good at 13.5 years that we disgust everyone with our constant honey-mooner status. 
The one thing that saved my relationship (albeit of only ~2 years) was my finally realizing and then telling him all these little assumptions that I’d built up without even knowing it. Like, “Because you do A, you obviously feel B”. A lot of these turned out to be completely false, he didn’t realize his actions were speaking such false volumes to me, and we cleared a lot of the air, so to speak. I’m really glad I was able to self-reflect to the point where I could list, in a simple way, what I felt resentful of and what it was based in. A lot of the time, for me, anyway, it simply comes across as resentment, and I never (from laziness, or hurt, or inability) actually track it down to its origins.
I don’t mean to rain on your parade, indian, but “keeping a relationship going” does not necessarily equate to happiness. It’s misery in many cases. Sometimes, you have to cut your losses.
TLD,
Okay , understood …
Nice of you to follow the spirit of the thread, TLD. :rolleyes:
My parents were married for 60 years. They had occasional arguments, but were essentially happy.
Some of the things they told me that contributed to their success:
My husband and I will celebrate 23 years of marriage this month. December 30th, to be exact.
We’re happily married, and very content with our lives.
He treats me wonderfully, and with respect. I do the same for him.
Sure, we’ve had our rough patches early on in the marriage, as do all couples.
The only thing I can say is that you should be honest with each other, communicate with each other, and above all, treat each other with dignity, respect and LOVE.
If you do that, everything else will fall into place.
JustThinkin’ and I have been together for 18 or so years.
We make sure to tell and show each other how much we appreciate each other. We laugh, and share the things that make us laugh. We listen to each other. We are never afraid to let anyone know how special we are to each other. Seriously - I cringe every time I hear somebody disparage their partners to someone else… never a good idea.
This is my second marriage. I’m still blown away at how much FUN it is to be married to him. I seriously had no idea marriage could be fun.
I don’t have any nice tips or anything that make for good sound bites. I do think that part of why this one is working when the first one didn’t (his either, this is his second marriage) is that we each did the work post-divorce to figure out what went wrong, what our own accountability was in that failure, and what was not. Plus I know I did a lot of thinking and reflecting on where I wanted my life to go, and sorted out what was negotiable, what was minor and what was beyond major for me. He’s said he did the same thing.
We’ve been married four years, known each other for nine years for what that’s worth.