[Utah]

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1. You have to be prepared to compromise
2. You have to be prepared to trust
3. You have to shake off any selfishness, and be prepared to put the needs/hopes of the other ahead of yours (sometimes, not all the time). Removing selfishness is extremely important if you are intending to have children, cos then, what's good for your children becomes paramount to pretty much anything.
4. You do have to find a place/space for your own time - even if it's 15 minutes in the bathroom each day reading the paper.

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If it were that easy how come most marriages end in complete disaster? Respectfully, that advise sounds good on paper but almost never really works in practice.

Also, in regards to the original poster, I believe working on inner feelings and crap like that will have about zero success in helping future relationships. At the core of a person's desire for a relationship is their instinctual needs - which is primarily finding a mate with strong genes. The emotional state of the partner has little to do with it except in how that emotional state signals strong or weak genes.

I think KingOtter's comment reflect this well. He and his wife have little in common and they do not communicate well. Yet, they stay together and my guess is that it is because of the primary need to reproduce effectively. I am guessing his last comment about Milano was a bit of a joke but I think it is illustrative - for most men they would risk a happy marriage to fulfill their primary instinctual need to have sex with the perfect woman.

I am very happily married - fantastically so. However, I am about 100% sure I would risk it all to have sex with Sunny Leone. We are just built like that.

btw - today is Mrs. Utah's and my 10th wedding anniversary and we have been together for 13 years.