Have you ever noticed that there are certain couples in your life that you love being around, and others that you dread or avoid? How do you think others experience your relationship? Do they want to be around you and your partner? Or, do you find that you each get invites to go solo? Is your Couple Brand™ what you want it to be? Does your Couple Brand™ need upgrading?
Your couple brand is the flavor of your relationship. It’s also how your relationship comes across to others, and how others think of you as a couple.
If your relationship were to be described by your friends and families, what would they say about it? Do you think this captures the essence of it? Do you feel it’s reflective of how you experience your relationship? What is congruent and what isn’t?
And, let’s say that they got it right on the button and that you agree with what they see. Is what’s captured the relationship you want to have? Is this your Best Relationship?
If you were to choose the couple brand from scratch, what would you want it to be? What kind of relationship flavor do you want? What does the relationship you desire, your Best Relationship, look and feel like?
Here are some Couple Brand™ characteristics:
Tumultuous
Train Wreck
Argumentative
Bickering
Lots of fighting
Drama
Sick
Dysfunctional
Disloyal
Unsupportive
Uncommitted
Ships passing in the night
Roommates
Parallel lives
Single parenting
Dual careers
Power couple
Supportive
Cooperative
Collaborative
Strong partnership
Solid
Committed
Loyal
Loving
Fun
Adventurous
Funny
Romantic
Playful
Service oriented
Growth oriented
Wellness oriented
Inspiring
Role model
What is the current relationship flavor you have created? Are you satisfied with it? Would you change or expand it? To what? Choose a flavor form the list or choose your own! What kind of Couple Brand™ do you want to have? Who do you want to be as a couple?
Upgrade your Couple Brand™
Just as with any branding, first you have to connect to or identify what you stand for, the values you embrace and how you express those values. What is the purpose, mission and vision, what’s unique and sets you apart, how you want to be known, how you embody and live by your beliefs, how you show up authentically, how you represent, how you embrace who you are becoming…
This is a tall order. Usually, the partners don’t even know the answer to the above for themselves and are not in touch with their own Personal Brand. They live their lives by default and cocreate a relationship dynamic, relationship flavor and couple brand by default as well…
So, first explore and develop these aspects personally and make sure your own personal brand is up to par… Make it your business to own yourself more every day and embrace your brilliance more and more each day.
Then integrate your individual brands to develop a joint version… This is where things get interesting.
You might each have amazing personal brands but might find a lot of disconnects and differences to develop a cohesive joint brand. Therein lies the challenge… This is part of your relationship work and development…
Hey, you might say, Why do I even need a couple brand? You don’t need one but note that you are creating one whether you know it or not. So why not create one that you can be proud of? That serves as a role model to your children, and/or others? Why not create an amazing legacy? Why not use your relationship to fully embrace your human experience…?
As you each become more known and more accepted by each other, you’ll create more connection, intimacy and flow… This in and of itself starts expanding and aligning your Couple Brand™… See what emerges and name it. This is not static so don’t worry about being accurate or precise in your naming.
Your brand is always evolving… Just be intentional about it…
And note that what you do with the differences is what matters in the end. For you will have plenty… This is what makes you unique.
How you make it work for you, how you get creative, proactive and progressive and create your own relationship flavor is in the end your Couple Brand™. Make it a good one!
ASSIGNMENT: Focusing on developing your Couple Brand™ will not only Align you to You, but also assist you more easily implement a Relationship Enrichment Lifestyle…
In other words, it’ll help you more easily create the relationship you desire, your radiant and successful relationship.
First, play with your Personal Branding. The more you own yourself the easier and more satisfying the relationship becomes…
If you are a Member watch this Deep Dive on our Member Center and complete the related exercises in the handout: Plan Your Best Year Yet, New Beginning or Reset
Then, play with your Couple Branding. Identify what characteristics are part of your current brand that you want to change and what your ultimate Couple Brand™ would be. And, take an action toward those changes and additions.
Finally, add a Connection Habit™ to lubricate the way as you expand your repertoire and your flavor…
As Valentine’s Day is upon us, now is the perfect time to be intentional about upgrading your relationship. Embrace a relationship enrichment lifestyle. Embrace creating your Best Relationship ever.
Copyright (c) 2021 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com
Couples usually have a challenging time coming up with fun things to do as a couple. They have difficulties having fun in their relationship. And, they might struggle having fun with each other. Do you know how to have fun together?
This is not unusual as partners have a tendency to focus on what they don’t like, an unfortunate product of our brain’s built-in negativity bias. They worry about everything that is not to their liking, about what their partner is doing or not doing, and how they themselves might not be measuring up… This are the scripts running in their head…
Top this with all the noise the partner’s might be carrying around as a result of everyday life. Unless they have a Mindfulness Practice to clear this and set their tune right on an ongoing basis, they are walking around as a radio broadcasting on multiple stations at the same time!
So, because the partners are distracted by all the noise and their dirty lenses, they are not able to see the possibilities available at the moment… They are not able to give grace to the partner’s and their own imperfections, creating additional blocks. This means the partners are showing up in a less than resourced state and not in a very receptive mode.
The filters find fault with everything creating the additional noise and murkiness, so the partners are not able to see the opportunities for fun, enjoyment and joy. They totally miss out on what the moment has to offer.
Even worse, because the partners operate in this mode most of the time, they don’t even get to plan, set up, or find themselves in moments conducive for fun and enjoyment…
Having Fun Is A Responsibility
That’s right, we have a responsibility to have fun! Why, you may ask? Because when we have fun, we generate good chemistry in our brain and good energy in our bodies. Good chemistry is needed for feeling good, for creating resilience, for staying healthy, and for overall wellness. Good energy is needed for creating an abundant and best life.
Now that we’ve been restricted by the pandemic, having fun and doing fun things is even more challenging. Add another layer to the complexity of enjoyment in our relationship, why not? [sarcasm] And, yet because we are together more and our life is more monotonous, we need to embrace a Fun Protocol more than ever.
I get that we have to be in a good mood, receptive and such to have fun in the first place… This could be a total catch 22!
This is where your personal responsibility is so important. You have the obligation to get yourself in the receptive mode. It is not your partner’s job to entertain you, give you fun or enjoyment… Fun is also an inside job!
It is your job to get yourself in the state to show up properly to your interactions, show up with your best self, and show up with the ability to transcend minutia and noise… To give grace. To be open. To be giving.
How do you do that? The simple answer: Owning your day, being intentional, and having a rich selfcare practice that includes a mindfulness practice.
Types of Fun
After you make sure that you are showing up to your life with your best self, to the best of your ability, the next step is to be proactive about creating fun opportunities.
Note, that you can plan and organize all you want, but will have a hard time having fun, connecting and enjoying each other if you are not fully owning yourself going in…
Make sure you have a variety of ways of having fun. Fun doesn’t necessarily need to be your partner’s way or your way. And, don’t get hang up on finding things in common. I too often hear how partners believe they are not compatible because they have nothing in common. You can work with this, believe it or not.
So, if it is not their way, your way or a common way, then what? The answer is not to over think it, and to cocreate as you go… You’ll be surprised where you can find fun once you get out of your own way…
Here are some ways to think about fun for inspiration (some for after the pandemic…):
Play with Buckets Lists – Seasonal, Things To Achieve, Places to Visit, Things To Learn, Things to Try
Create Different Experiences – From how you go places, to how you eat, to where you vacation, to personal touches added to your home, to different ways to nurture your relationship and your partner.
Set Out on Adventures – Take turns trying out adventures you each want to try or participate in.
Create Memories – Live life as if you are recording your best movie. Live it to the fullest. Be present, give it your all, take it all in. Create ritual and traditions. Celebrate.
Togetherness Flow – Create your daily routine to allow yourselves to “see” each other. To connect. To flow into Being with each other.
Enrich with Separateness – Don’t get bogged down with details about how much fun they have without you and why do they need to do stuff on their own. It doesn’t matter because they bring good mojo back. They create mysteriousness and allure. And, there is an opportunity to miss each other. It’s better this way…
Fun can be had anywhere and in any way. You don’t have to have fancy vacations, extreme activities and such to enjoy each other and live a full life. They are nice for sure, but not necessary… You already have everything you need…
ASSIGNMENT: It can be challenging to have fun alone or with our partner when we are not feeling so hot.
Your HW:
Turn your mood around
Seduce your partner into fun
Show up with your best self
Be genuinely gracious and open
Enjoy
Here are prior blogs on the topic for additional inspiration:
Copyright (c) 2021 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com
This time of year, and specially with everything that’s going on, we might be feeling raw, sensitive, antsy, edgy, anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, depressed, unmotivated, lethargic, detached numb, and such.
These feelings are more compounded when we are feeling disconnected, might be experiencing a bout of low intimacy, and have fewer opportunities for fun. This doesn’t help the low desire and lack of intimacy epidemic of the modern-day couple…
A challenging trifecta: Feeling disconnected from our partner is usually accompanied by low desire and intimacy.
We need connection to be physically intimate (usually women, female energy) and/or we need physical intimacy to be connected (usually men, male energy)… This creates a conundrum for couples.
This conundrum has a tendency to create an impasse for couples, for the partners might need the opposite of what the other needs to become intimate and feel connected… Made even more challenging by physical intimacy also depending on the partners’ desire (libido, sex drive) and their ability to be intimate…
You’d think it’d be easy to enjoy the benefit and gift of physical intimacy in our relationship!
There is so much that gets in the way of desire and intimacy for partners…
Stress has a huge impact on your wellbeing, lifestyle and coping choices which in turn also affect your libido. We all have our stresses, and our current world is just heaping it on. And no comment on the impact on lifestyle…
And of course, then we have the actual couple dynamics, and most likely your power struggle, at play to boot!
Not for nothing the modern-day couple (and specially during this pandemic times) has difficulties sustaining consistent and satisfying intimacy in their relationship.
There are a ton of entry points from where to address your current low desire and lack of intimacy. Addressing any (or combo as needed) of the items mentioned above will make a difference in your current state of affairs.
But I want to offer you the most direct path for more immediate relief… You see, your libido, sexuality and physical intimacy with your partner is what you make of it… At the end of the day, desire and intimacy is an inside job…
You have control over your own desire… When you focus on what your partner is doing, how they look, how they are showing up, what they contribute and such, you are extinguishing your desire… Desire is not about your partner. Desire is about you!
Desire as an inside job has to do with How You Choose To:
So, you see, desire and intimacy are not something that are happening out there and that depend on your partner. Desire and intimacy are something you create…
When you shift to looking at desire and intimacy as something you create, then you can create as much of it as you want!
ASSIGNMENT: Watch what scripts came up for you as you read this post, and as you percolate with this concept…
1. Mind how you:
Victimize yourself
Get in your partner’s circle
Entertain your limiting believes
Sabotage intimacy
Have a hard time trusting and letting go
Are stingy giving, receiving, allowing
Are not fully Being…
2. Make a commitment to Be in your relationship…
3. Select the item that resonates the most as something that gets in the way of your intimacy and decide to address it full on!
Create health and vitality
Look at your partner (get out of their circle!)
Interact and bring Swag
Be available and have energy
Ready yourself for sexy time
Relax and show up
Be grace-full, grateful, and generous
Taking charge of your desire and intimacy is super empowering and exhilarating! What better time to embrace this as we continue to be impacted by the pandemic, are starting a new year, and are right around the corner from Valentine’s Day…
Make a commitment to reset your relationship and your marriage. Why not create a new marriage, or new relationship?! Let’s do this!
Copyright (c) 2021 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com
Being parented by imperfect parents/caregivers is considered a traumatic experience of childhood in some of the trauma and attachment literature and information I have come across. This includes being abused, abandoned and/or neglected to various degrees.
When trauma is defined in this fashion, it follows that most of us experienced traumatizing childhoods to some extent, and therefore were wounded rowing up. This has all kinds of implications for intimate relationships. Please note that I’m not a trauma or attachment expert, I’m simply integrating some additional concepts into my relationships working knowledge.
In very basic and crude terms, when we grow up in an environment where caregivers are not appropriately and consistently available to us, we learn to fend for ourselves for our emotional and sometimes physical survival and wellbeing. This does not give us a chance to develop the secure base necessary for our healthy development.
Instead, we develop coping, defense, mechanisms that allow us to do the best we can. The result is that our developmental tasks are barely accomplished and so continue our development with limited emotional resources.
To make up for this deficiency and manage our life as we become adults and involved in significant relationships, we continue using our defense mechanisms making them more sophisticated overtime. These can pick up any form: super-achieving, perfectionism, obsessions, compulsions, addictions, depression, anxiety, panic-attacks, and other forms of being over or under involved in our relationship.
This is great news in that we can have a better understanding of why we have some afflictions and how we can get stuck in dissatisfying relating in our relationship. According to relational and other theories, we would pick a partner with whom we can recreate the hurts from childhood.
Some of the reasons we do this are because 1) it is familiar territory so it feels more comfortable than the unknown, 2) to get now from the interactions what we couldn’t get then, and 3) to complete developmental tasks becoming healthier adults.
How do we use this information on our daily interactions? One way to start the healing process is to hold our own from a non-reactive place. When we react to something, become angry or upset, it is a sign that we have been triggered, that our boundaries have been compromised, that we are being hurt in some (old) way.
Therefore, it is our job to identify how we are hurt or how our needs are not being met, and to figure out how to meet them without trampling on someone else.
When we do this, we start to find ourselves, heal ourselves, complete our developmental tasks, develop healthy coping mechanisms, meet our needs, be present for our partner, and accept our partner’s love and nurturing!
Wow! Figure out those hurts and start feeling the love!
Happy Un-Wounding!!!
~ Your MetroRelationship ™ Assignment
Going back to growing up, identify how you were hurt or disappointed by your caregivers. Remember, we were all hurt to some extent. Identify and capture the flavor of the wound that was caused and name the feelings associated with it. Now find similar feelings in the present, in your current relationship. What is your partner’s behavior that engenders these feelings his is how you are triggered.
Translate these feelings into needs.
Create a list of very concrete and specific behaviors that you and/or your partner can do to meet these needs.
Finally, create a plan on how to have these needs met: schedule things in your calendar, hire services, ask your partner for concrete behavior changes or nurturing gifts.
Do this from a non-reactive stance. Keep your cool. Be respectful of your partner’s needs. You don’t have to agree but learn to accept and love each other for who you are.
NOTE: this might be intense work or create ripple effects in your relationship/life that might feel frightening. You don’t have to do this alone, get professional assistance if you feel you are on shaky grounds.
Copyright (c) 2016 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and a variety of Successful Couple™ content that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly Connection Notes in your inbox with Personal Growth and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com.
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Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT has been in the mental health profession in varying capacities for the past 20+ years. She is the Founder and Director of metrorelationship.com a psychotherapy and coaching practice specializing in working with busy professional and entrepreneurial couples who are struggling getting on the same page and feeling connected. The work helps couples create a radiant and successful relationship and meaningful life by becoming a strong partnership and increasing their connection, intimacy, and fun. Emma is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Relationship Strategy™.
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