Forget your grandmother's advice on how to maintain your relationship - trust me, it's got nothing to do with having dinner on the table every night or obsessively shaving your legs. Here are three surefire tips to help you keep you and your significant other happy and your partnership healthy and strong.

Relationships are amazing in their potential for growth opportunities. At the same time, relationships can provide challenges for each party -- offering the possibilities to learn to live in harmony and to learn myriad ways to express caring.

The following are 3 tips for setting your relationship on a solid foundation:

1. Be Prepared for Challenges: One of the most reliable predictors for a long-lasting relationship is the commitment to a long-lasting relationship! This doesn't mean that you and your partner just "put up" with one another and settle for status quo. Rather, it means that you are both proactive and work on a daily basis to nurture your partnership.

Being committed means that you both are dedicated to find a way through troublesome problems. And it is THIS very commitment that makes finding the solutions that work for each of you possible. When boredom or weariness challenges your love, it is commitment that pushes you both to renew the partnership by investing it with variety and new shared interests.

2. Befriend Your Partner Each Day: Relationship partners need to talk -- a lot -- about one another and about the relationship. Try making a habit with your partner to give each other one compliment a day. This is a step toward ongoing encouragement and love. Go ahead -- put on your creativity cap -- and devise a new, true, concrete compliment for each other each day.

If this sounds contrived, go ahead -- do it anyway. It has magical effects! Looking for the good in one another has a way to bring out MORE good! It sets the stage to having your relationship focused on positive, loving traits .. and, thereby, evoking more positive, loving experiences between you.

3. Accept the Other's Differences: The differences between the two of you are often endearing. You may love the way he takes charge of complicated situations while he may admire the way you deftly defuse tensions between colleagues. You may be good at reading maps while he is good at asking directions.

What once was perceived as attractive and a strength can, over time, turn into an irritation. The take-charge personality might be perceived as stubborn and controlling. The peacemaker might come to be viewed as wishy-washy and/or a people-pleaser. Acceptance can go a long way toward creating harmony between the two of you. It can be difficult to let go of thinking that your way is normal and right. Doing so, however, can pay dividends. By seeing that there can be TWO right ways, you both get the benefit of having more options to solving what could otherwise be problematic outcomes.

I encourage you to use these tips over and over to strength the depth of your primary relationship.

And I invite you to learn more about positive creation and dealing with anxiety and stress by visiting our blog. Here, you will find other beneficial articles, additional tips, research ideas, case studies, and much, much more. Visit us and enter your email to Sign Up for the Blog or by going to http://www.mentalhealth-online.com/mentalhealth. 

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Presented by Dr. Marlene Shiple, the Life Coach Pro & the LifeCoachPro Network.