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As a Sandwiched Boomer with changing family responsibilities, you have the toughest of balancing acts, attending to kids, parents and personal needs while still nurturing your marriage. You may envy celebrities like Madonna who seem to have it all - a personality that draws people in, the adoration of fans, an exciting life and strong feelings of omnipotence. However, this can be a mixed blessing, resulting in life experiences that are more seductive than the ordinary routine of a partnership - even if you are married to Guy Ritchie.

Can you relate to the possibility of a deteriorating relationship? While you were busy and preoccupied with growing children and aging parents, your marriage may have taken a back seat to the goings-on in your hectic household. And for the first time in years - without the buffer of family, now that your children are on their own - you realize that you and your partner have grown apart. Instead of considering divorce like so many superstars, now is the time to realize that your marriage can have a second chance. What follows are some tips to help you reconnect with your partner and reignite the spark:

1. More concentrated time together has many benefits. Even though it may cause long term problems in the marriage to surface, you can use this opportunity to finally deal with them. Marital issues are difficult to face head-on, but the rewards can be more honesty, a renewed sense of trust and greater intimacy. This may be the time to go on that couples’ retreat or marriage enrichment weekend you’ve heard so much about.

2. Give your relationship the gift of time. Create moments of calm and pleasure in celebration of your relationship. Feel more treasured as you watch the dividends of your long term emotional investment grow.

3. Invite your partner to set aside an afternoon to spend together. Plan an activity that you’ll enjoy: rent a bicycle built for two, leave work early and meet at a museum, enjoy a picnic lunch at the park. Take a long cut. Stretch out the event itself and make it last.

4. Create a romantic and intimate evening at home. This has likely been on your ‘to do’ list for a long time, so here’s your chance to make it happen, time and again. Turn on soft music, build a fire, light the candles. Cook a gourmet dinner together and share that bottle of wine you’ve been saving for a special occasion.

5. Decide to explore a new area of interest together. It could mean taking a cinema class at the local community college, becoming more active in your local government, writing your memoirs to pass down through the generations, taking ballroom dancing lessons. Discovering fields that are new to you both allows each of you to enjoy the process without being critical or competitive. You can laugh at your errors as you learn together.

Perhaps you think that infusing a marriage with renewed commitment sounds boring, compared to the antics of pop idols with pizzazz and charm. Yet in our celebrity-obsessed culture, know that there is real value in making marriage work. Although it will include making hard choices - like listening to your partner’s point of view, going straight home, saying you’re sorry - you will be glad you did.

(C) Her Mentor Center, 2008

Phyllis Goldberg, Ph.D. is co-founder of http://www.HerMentorCenter.com, a website for midlife women and http://www.NourishingRelationships.blogspot.com, a blog for the Sandwich Generation. She is the co-author of a forthcoming book about Boomers’ family relationships.

This question is something that would bother the minds of so many married couples at some point within their marriage lives. However much matrimony may seem perfect, there is always scope for improvement. For marriage to be kept animated and active, both the couples should do their part in giving out the best efforts that they can for the relationship. When matters crop up, here are some tips to help you both glide through the Problem successfully:

Identify the Trouble

Communicate with your spouse frankly without any inhibitions, involving the exact nature of the problem. This can tougher than you think, as this requires some amount of self-analysis. We may not always like what we see but by recognizing it, especially with your partner, is the first step to fixing things in your relationship.

Be more in touch with each other

The most efficient means to maintain a flourishing relationship is through an open conversation. Perhaps your lives have gotten hectic with work and kids and family responsibilities. It needs to become a daily habit of quality time and you need to make time for each other and communicate. Honesty with yourself and each other is also a major ingredient. We tend to become enhanced listener and bearer of our partner if we just see to it that we give time to better our communication with our spouses as we can also gain a lot of advantages from it thus it is really essential to work out this aspect of relationship. Communication is the best approach to be able to get to that conclusion.

regard

The kind of regard you have for each other is yet another major factor. Do you both quarrel often? Do you call each other names, abuse or blame each other all the time? It is easy to get to that space at times when things are not going well. One thing that has truly a huge effect on a relationship is the level of your regards to your partner which can in reality heal the wounds of the past and forget mistakes. Was there any difference with your manner of treatment as well as the degree of your affection to each other from the first time that you met until these days? Can you think of the things that may have made the changes?

Work on Connection and Intimacy

It is actually hard to become intimate with your spouse as well as restore that special connectivity that you had if your marriage reaches the level of hardship. Finding time to connect with your spouse will help greatly in most cases. The intimacy that was gone can still be restored by permitting yourself to be fully connected with your spouse in terms of physical contact or having sexual activity with a twist. It is hard to think about sexual activity when times are tough but making it a point to try to connect will help your marriage on many levels. Overall saving a marriage is tough work but it can be done if both partners are committed to making it work.

Michael Hehn is a specialist in (http://divorcepreventionsite.com) relationships. If you want more information about (http://divorcepreventionsite.com) relationships, visit http://divorcepreventionsite.com.

Wondering what you can do to help protect your marriage from an affair on the part of either partner? While there is a lot of self respect and loyalty that goes into a marriage, there are some things that you can do to insulate your marriage from the harmful effects of an affair on the part of one or both of you.

You both have to give yourselves permission to need one another. When you need one another you will find that you always go to them for all of your physical and emotional needs. It’s when married couples don’t allow themselves to need one another that they often turn outside of the relationship, making an affair much more likely.

Remember that many people who end up cheating cheat with a friend. Most married couples would be well advised to limit the number of opposite sex friends that they spend a lot of alone time with. Some experts believe that a man and a woman can never be “just friends” that over time a friendship between just a man and a woman will always turn physical.

Make sure that you both know what you want from the marriage. When you enter into a binding contract with another business you would make clear what you both need. You need to think of your marriage in the same terms, ensuring that you both understand what you need, want, and where you are going together. A shared vision is an important part of a marriage.

Make sure that you have a balanced work load. A marriage that is not built on equality will have a hard time standing strong in the face of temptation. Define your roles together as well as what those roles mean. Don’t settle for anything. When you get married you shouldn’t settle for your spouse and you should both vow never to settle for anything within the marriage.

Make sure that you always put your spouse and your marriage first. Many people cheat because they don’t feel like they ever come first, so affair proof your marriage by always putting your spouse and your marriage first, before kids, work, the house, everything.

Realize that your marriage will change over time. Change doesn’t have to be bad, just remember to go through the change together. Remember that sex is important. It is a true need of every human and that you have to be willing to give of yourself in many different ways to continue to have good sex.

Work to get along with your in laws. Tension with your spouse’s family can rip your marriage apart in a hurry. Stay true to yourself, but also work to get along and forge bonds with your in-laws.

Don’t assume that your children will negatively impact your marriage. In fact, children can strengthen a marriage because it will force both of you to work harder to make time for one another. A great marriage will enhance the life experience of your children, as well.

Rodrigo Rehn is a Relationships Expert, Linux Systems Administrator, Web Programmer, PHP Developer and CEO of http://www.faceromance.com Online dating services.

There are loads of reasons people give for staying in unhappy relationships. Here are a few of the most popular: I made a commitment, if I leave it will break my partners heart, I can’t afford to leave, it will hurt my children, and, my favorite, if I leave how do I know I’ll find something better. Do any of these excuses sound familiar to you? if so, then read on.

If you are unhappy in your relationship, there are 3 alternatives. First, keep the status quo. Do nothing. Continue to be miserable, make your family miserable by extension, and spiral downward into depression, despondency, or worst of all, emotional latency. Unfortunately, this is the path most often taken. Why? Because it seems easiest at the moment. It is hard work to reverse a bad relationship and if things have gone on long enough, you may not even have the will to work on it. There is a point of no return in which you just ‘even care. If you are in this category, you are doing yourself and everyone around you a disservice by “hanging in there.” You lack joie de vivre, your partner is robbed of a loving relationship, your kids have half a parent. You may think you are being noble and self-sacrificing by staying in such a situation, but isn’t that really just an excuse for fear and uncertainty?

The second alternative is to repair the relationship. Notice I did not say to try to repair it. There is no room for try if you commit yourself to this path. You simply fix your mind to do it. The trick is that your partner has to be in the same frame of mind, from the heart, 100% committed to fixing, compromising and finding new strategies of living. This path requires that both partners make some real change. Change that will be permanent. While this is the most challenging of the alternatives, it can also be the most rewarding, but only if both partners are fully committed to it.

Unfortunately, here is the scenario that occurs too many times. You, the unhappy party will complain of being unhappy and maybe even threaten to leave if things don’t change. Your partner will promise to change and does, in fact, make some changes. Things seem to be better for a few weeks, but then the old habits and behaviors start to reemerge. You are back to where you were in the first place, only now you have lost time and energy. This happens because your partner is not committed from the heart; s/he just wanted to shut you up for awhile. At this point you may give up and return to the first category and do nothing, or you might repeat this scenario, over and over. Either way, you are headed for that emotional downward spiral.

The final alternative is to end the relationship. This is where the excuses kick in. It is hard to end a relationship. That does not mean that it is not the best thing to do, for everyone concerned. If you are in a state of constant bickering or outright fighting, unhappiness and depression, you are not being noble by staying in your committed relationship. You are harming your kids, yourself, your partner and other people around you. You are not teaching your kids what a good relationship is, you are cheating yourself out of a rewarding life and you are even preventing your partner from moving on to something better (even though s/he may not have the wisdom to see it).

The trick is to overcome the fears you have so that you can move forward. Sometimes people find the inner strength to do this on their own. Things become so bad, it becomes a matter of survival. Other times you may need help to get started or someone to talk to in order to set goals and be accountable to.

People will often turn to a therapist for relationship difficulties. However, therapy is designed for people with mental illness and often focuses on the past. If you are looking for new strategies to build and renew your relationship, or if you are stuck and cannot move out of your relationship, you might benefit from coaching. Coaching is uniquely positioned to help people move forward by setting goals, overcoming fears, changing perspectives and achieving success. Coaching does not look backward. Coaching is a forward moving process that will get you on a path to a new life.

Pat Cheney is a life coach working with gays and lesbians who are coming out in midlife and with couples for relationship enrichment. To find out more about her services, visit Pat’s website at http://www.discoveringpride.com.

Are you are engaged or married and you spend a lot of time apart, or If you are in a serious relationship with someone you have met online and you feel disconnected sometimes. There are lots of way to spice up your relationship.

It is not always easy to keep the romance in a long-distance relationship, and the less frequently you see each other, the harder it is to keep the romance alive.

If you are not a plan ahead kind of person, it is even harder to ensure that your lover or spouse knows you are thinking about them.

Not to worry, With a little creativity and the resources provided by the information highway, you can keep in touch and remind your partner that you are a couple, even if you do not get to spend a lot of time together.Use your phone and your computer to keep in touch!

By Phone: Call the house or your partner cell phone and leave a message. Tell them to pick up an item you ordered for them before you left. Give them the name of the store and the person to see and tell them when the store closes. They will be thrilled to pick up the item, even if it is not expensive. It is a great way to surprise your partner!

Send them on a scavenger hunt, calling every day to give them things to look for in the house. Tell them you want them to find all the items before you return and if they do, be sure to plan a great surprise for them when you get back.

When you get home plan a nice dinner, or a romantic evening in front of the fire, or just share a glass of wine and have him tell you the story of how he looked for and found the items you hid.

Leave your partner a message with the name of a book of poems to get at the library.

Give your partner the name of the poem or the page number and let them go get the book and read the poem you are sending them long distance.

Leave your partner a message with the name of a movie that will be on TV or one you want them to rent at the video store and watch.

Tell them what you love about the movie that reminds you of your partner, or the part of the movie that you watched together and loved.

Just pick up the phone and call your partner when you know they will be home or at their desk at work. Just say hello and I love you. It means EVERYTHING.

By Computer: Agree on a time you will both be online and IM or open a chat with your partner, sending romantic pictures or notes.

Have a friend take pictures of you, or take a timed picture of yourself. An inexpensive digital camera is a great tool for exchanging photos online.

You can take a picture of yourself at work, at play or in locations you both love and write silly or romantic captions. Send the pictures by email or during an IM session.

Or post them on a free online photo gallery and send your partner the link. Send free online email cards with romantic messages or send a sound file with a copy of a song you both love or a romantic song you want your partner to hear.

Send an email diary every day with your thoughts from the day and the places or times you thought about your spouse or partner.

Send links to websites with beautiful pictures or love poems or quotes about love.

Written by Shelly Samuel. To learn more tips to spice up your relationship or marriage visit http://www.romanceideas.icomp.mobi