After you’ve spent a long time getting to know your partner and learning their personal traits and histories, the next step is to love all over your partner and snuggle into their yumminess.
This means compliment your partner, tell them what they’re doing right, listen to them telling you 100 times the same joke and still smile wryly.
Tell them you love them and you love the way they pick up groceries on the way home, or wash up all the plastic recycling on the weekend, or shake the water off their butt when they get out of the shower.
As John Flanagan a Gottman trainer says, the next step is to be your partner’s cheer leader.
Something my husband and I do is tell each other how much we love each other several times per day. I tell him he’s a good husband and I love him, and I say thank you to him for doing every good thing he does that I remember. Yesterday he tidied his cupboards, and he took the recycling box downstairs. I said thank you. Because he’s a good little kitten and I love him. Naaaaaw.
He tells me he loves me he likes my cooking and he’s proud of me for getting good marks at uni and he’s proud of me when I get a new client, and he thinks I’m a good wife. I love him and he loves me.
I also have an example of this from a friend, one of my friends and I start on the level of functional and we work to make each other more functional. I can talk to her about things I’m working on to improve, and she can talk to me too.
