The author of The Real Thing: Lessons on Love and Life from a Wedding Reporter’s Notebook shares her best advice.
Ellen McCarthy interviewed more than 200 couples and dozens of relationship experts during the four years she spent writing about weddings and relationships for The Washington Post. Here's what she told BuzzFeed Life about what makes the strongest relationships work.
Susan Biddle / The Washington Post
So many couples told me about the surprising rewards of sticking it out. Leila and Tony had been together for more than 30 years — struggling together through infertility, career changes, and the challenges that came with raising a daughter with severe disabilities. But, as Tony said, "We had the resolve to resolve everything that happened in our relationship." And Leila likes to tell younger women to hang in there. "Because if you can work through it, what you get on the other side is something you can't even imagine — it's very beautiful."
Real attention. The kind that can only happen when you unleash the death grip on your smartphone. Your spouse is changing every day. One groom, who'd been with his fiancée for five years, was amazed — and excited — to continually discover new aspects of her personality. "I'll probably keep learning about her for the rest of my life," he said. And, as Zen teacher John Tarrant put it, "Attention is the most basic form of love."
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