[From our archive]

“My Mother in law hates everything I do, always she finds fault in me, I don’t feel like talking to her”

“I am very unhappy with my daughter in law… all these time we looked for a nice girl for my son (and thought we found this one) but now she misbehaves with us!”

“That wife of his is not good for our son, he never behaved like this before, its all her doing…”

“I am the one work all day and my husband just lies down in the couch and watch TV”

“My husband never understands my feelings”

Dear readers, do these sound familiar to you? If so then you are not alone. There are millions of women out there irrespective of race and ethnicity have feelings like these. Not only the home makers, we have many women today studying Science, Engineering, Economics and are doing very well in their professional lives but struggling hard when it comes to dealing with relationship conflicts.

How many of us give any serious thought for improving our relationship health and analyze our feelings in a scientific way? Very few.

In Adhunika we think there are ways to think differently, to have a better relationship health. The best relationship tip we got from our mothers is “tolerance”, means just keep your mouth shut and say nothing or at most shed tears, blame your husband (in private or with a freind) if you want. This “technique” is known as “no confrontation”. Being extra nice, “ignoring” or “tolerating” everything doesn’t help. Anyone with a little knowledge in conflict resolution would know this seldom improves the condition, it just makes it worse day by day and might eventually lead to (unintentional) ugly exposure (termed as negative confrontation). It has so many negative consequences as well. In this adhunika forum we will be focusing on how to deal with day to day realtionship issues.

There are many things in our lives we can “let go”; it doesn’t help if we fight to have everything in our own way. At the same time there are a few things, if not taken care soon, really hurts in the long run. Sometimes there are things that becomes simpler when we see it from the other person’s eye. When you find something you didn’t like, try to see what your long term goal is, if that is something going to hurt in the long run then focus on the issue. We would suggest you to pin point your real issues. Deal the priority ones using what we call a “positive confrontation”. What is meant by that is to think in a cool brain, talk to the person you are having issues with, realize what his or her view points are, let them know what you feel and possibly come up with a middle ground. This sounds scary… right? Well, we don’t expect you to fix your worst relationship right now. Try baby steps, try controlling your emotions, try think clearly, do practice – apply positive confrontation technique on simpler situations. Relationships are built on trust and respect. When you build a relationship based on trust and respect, when you earn respect from your partner, you can fix anything that comes on your way.

Dear readers, lets form a team and see how we can think rationally. When we bring our brains together and leave the heart where it should be then we can really help make our lives much happier ones.

If you want to share your experience with us or have comments please drop us some lines either in this blog site or mail to blog AT adhunika DOT org. We will try our best to give you some constructive suggestions. From time to time, we will invite experts who have insights into the various topics raised by our readers in this forum to contribute their ideas.

-Sharmin