The 10 Habits of Happy Couples: An Essential Guide on How to Create and Maintain a Loving Relationship

By Tina LeBlanc and Michael LeBlanc

Create Relationship Habits that Bring a Lifetime of Happiness

Our Habits run our days. And our days run our relationships. Learn how to establish the Habits that can transform your connection with your partner so you can finally have the loving relationship you’ve always dreamed about.

Tina and Michael LeBlanc, relationship experts and married couple, will guide you through the process of setting up a firm foundation of key relationship principles, and will teach you the 10 essential Habits you can build into your life to bring more joy and happiness. This book is a concrete guide with specific tips and exercises to complete with your partner.

The 10 Habits of Happy Couples will walk you through:

•The 5 Foundational Elements of a Happy Relationship
•The 10 Habits of Happy Couples
•Tina and Michael’s personal journey through the 10 Habits
•How to understand your arguments and learn how to exit from your negative communication patterns
•Learning the skills of tuning into yourself and developing emotional risk taking with your partner
•Incorporating our proven “CPR” Process to help you repair from arguments and disconnection and create a resilient bond
•Improving your ability to tune into your partner using our ‘ABC’s of Love’ method
•Determining if you and your partner are ‘Connection-Seekers’ or ‘Safety Seekers’ and the role these play in your relationship
•How to actively bring self-compassion and respect into your relationship

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798765230688

Tina LeBlanc

Tina LeBlanc and Michael LeBlanc are experienced Couples Therapists who have helped hundreds of couples bring peace, joy and connection back into their relationship. They are married and are co-owners of Better Yourself 365, a company that helps individuals and couples be their best selves and fully show-up in their relationships. For more information about their digital trainings and coaching/counselling programs, visit www.betteryourself365.com

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 Tina LeBlanc and Michael LeBlanc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

A Division of Hay House

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.balboapress.com

844-682-1282

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3067-1 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3069-5 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-7652-3068-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022911845

Balboa Press rev. date: 08/31/2022

Contents

Happy Couple Quotes

Who we are and why we wrote this book

Where the knowledge for this book comes from

What is your purpose for reading this book?

Why write a book about relationship habits?

How to read this book

Ensure that your partner is right for you

Five Basic Elements to Understanding Relationships

1. The Role of Adult Attachment

2. The Role of Emotion in Relationships

3. Individual Connection Styles

4. The Power of Vulnerability and Compassion

5. The Relationship Growth-Mindset

Seven Core Habits to Align and Grow as Partners

Habit #10: Better Yourself First

Habit #9: Have Realistic Expectations

Habit #8: Have Clear Relationship Rules and Organize Your Daily Life

Habit #7: Let’s Talk About Sex

Secret #6: Setting Goals and Dreaming Together

Habit #5: Respect Each Other

Habit #4: Prioritize Your Relationship

Three Core Habits to Navigate Conflict and Deepen Your Connection

Habit #3: Understanding Your Negative Communication Patterns

Habit #2: Always Repair

Habit #1: Talk Openly and Tune In

What to do next

How to get more help

Acknowledgments

About the authors

This book is

dedicated to our two boys -

Marc and Eric - for showing us that there is no

limit to how much we can love someone

AND

To all of the couples who have trusted us through the years

to help them navigate their journey back to each other.

Happy Couple Quotes

"Here are a couple of the habits that we established early on in our relationship. When it’s just the two of us, we always kiss before a meal that we are enjoying together. We like to always feel connected so we touch a lot. Sometimes it’s as simple as just holding hands, a hand on a knee, or a gentle back scratch while we’re sitting or standing close together. Just something that keeps us feeling connected. And when we get into bed at night, we always take time to look each other in the eyes and enjoy some meaningful conversation that is focused on us and our love for each other."

~Dwayne and Jenn

What works for us is the fact that we each have our own activities and hobbies that we share with friends outside of our relationship, but the fact remains that our best friend still is our partner. We still can’t wait to get back home to share the highlights of our activities with one another.

~Josee and Martin

"What makes us happy is being a team. We have a quote from a comedian we watched on Netflix: ‘My bulls--t is your bulls—t, and your bulls--t is my bulls--t!’ For some reason this stuck with us! It’s also important to take time for each other because it’s a busy world, so it’s important to take a break and focus on each other."

~Pam and Kevin

"Our rules for being happy together: 1. A kiss and a hug in the morning, keeps us smiling. A kiss and a hug at night helps us sleep just right. 2. Respect comes first, then comes love. You can’t have one without the other. 3. When we each give a little, we both receive a lot."

~Joanne and Euclide

"What makes us happy is having a consistent date night each week, even if it is just at home. Date night is a time where there is no TV - just music and time together. When our kids are young it’s so easy to fall into habits build around them, so we’ve often tried to reserve Friday night as the night to make a nice supper together with a drink and music!"

~Cristel and Ryan

"We hold hands. Why is it that adults think holding hands is silly, immature, or inappropriate in some way? What a wonderful way to show that you are glad to be with this person at any time or in any place."

~Tina and Ron

Who we are and why we wrote this book

We are Tina and Michael LeBlanc, a couple married for nineteen years, parents of two teens, and experienced counseling therapists. We are also the creators of Better Yourself 365 (BY365), a company that helps people become the best version of themselves. This is a BY365 book that allows us another medium to share our knowledge about being our best selves within our romantic relationship.

This book is a culmination of all that we learned from our advanced degrees and copious reading, our work as couples’ therapists, conversations with our couple friends, combined with lessons from our own marriage. In short, this book offers a comprehensive look at relationships. That allows us to give you the best advice to create happiness with your partner.

And we know this works because we are very happy in our relationship and have helped hundreds of other couples get there.

That’s because, first and foremost, we’re partners in life. We’ve committed ourselves to each other and love spending time together. We believe that our strong relationship is the backbone of our family and our company. We work hard to stay connected and have each other’s backs through life. When we ask one another the important question, Are you there for me?

The answer is Yes! Yes, yes, yes!

This is the question that matters most to us and to the couples that we help. And when the answer is yes, couples have a real chance to live happy lives.

We are also the proud parents of two awesome teenage boys who bring us abundant joy and pride. Studies show that parents are not as stress-free as non-parents (due to fatigue, busyness, parental stress, and… the cost of braces?). At the same time, those studies show that parents have a tremendous sense of purpose and meaning in life.

And this is us.

Our sense of purpose as parents is a key part of who we are, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. We want our boys to learn everything they need to be able to truly feel loved, to love others and themselves, and to be valuable members of society.

We are also business partners. In 2020, we noticed the impact the COVID-19 pandemic was having on relationships, and the difficulty couples were having accessing support through online learning. So we decided that it was time to combine our skills and experience and form a company to help more people.

And, voila—BY365 was born!

Our unique combination of therapy skills and being in a happy relationship puts us in a position where we can combine theory with practice. One of our goals was to put our philosophy and learnings on happy relationships into writing so more people could have access to them.

One of the main messages of this book is that we have to work at making changes for the better by bringing awareness to our daily personal and interpersonal habits. These consistent habits run our lives, whether we realize it or not. We have learned this in our own relationship. We have spent a lot of our time identifying the things that work and the things that don’t. And we’ve put a lot of effort into working as a team to make progress and grow as a couple. We certainly aren’t perfect, not even close. And we make a lot of mistakes. And mistakes can be a good thing if we frame them through a learning and growth-oriented lens.

When we view mistakes this way they don’t define us. In fact, when we give each other permission to try things without the fear of being judged or for making mistakes, it opens the opportunity to learn. And learning leads to success. And we also learn from those successes. These become the habits we want to keep and build upon.

We believe that part of our purpose on this planet is to share our journey and learnings with you, so you can feel good about your days and build a happy life with your partner. In this book, you’ll read our stories around each Habit—some are failures and some are successes. We work to be as genuine as we can, just as we expect with the couples that we counsel.

As you read this book, we encourage you to frame your relationship failures through a growth lens. Adopting a growth mindset is one of our 5 Basic Elements and is discussed in detail in the next section.

We urge couples not to see a setback as a loss, but more like an opportunity to learn and improve. This way you don’t have to aim for perfection. We don’t aim for perfection, nor should you. Instead, we hope to make daily progress and to better ourselves 365 days a year. This long-term approach gives us room to grow, fail, get back up, and see our progress over time with a smile on our faces and self-compassion.

Where the knowledge for this book comes from

To create the 10 Habits of Happy Couples, we’ve pulled knowledge from three primary areas: Our many years of being happily married; our experience working with clients to help them in their own relationships; and the information that we gathered after asking happy couples about their own relationship habits.

With regard to our training as therapists, both of us have taken extensive training in an approach called Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT) (https://iceeft.com/). EFT is a leading-edge and internationally-renowned approach to couple counseling. EFT was created by Dr. Sue Johnson, a celebrated author, and educator also known as Dr. Sue. The EFT approach is littered throughout this book and in our counseling practices. Emotions rule in relationships, and this book is based on this essential belief.

We believe that happy couples are emotionally connected, and many of the interventions and strategies in our books, digital courses, and couples’ weekend retreats focus on helping couples understand their emotional patterns to find new ways of being with their partners.

What is your purpose for reading this book?

Why did you pick up this book? There are a lot of options out there—why this one? Tune in to yourself and ask: What is the real reason I want to read about relationship habits?

This reason will be the driving force for how you interpret the information here. This is what we will call your Why. Your Why is your purpose, and it determines the filter through which you’ll run the information in this book.

Maybe you picked up this book because you’re not happy in your relationship, and you’re hoping this book can shed light on why. Or, perhaps, it’s because you’re fine in your relationship, but you’re always trying to get better. So, maybe you’re looking for tips or ideas that you can share with your partner. Or it could be that you and your partner are in trouble, and you’re desperate, so there’s a lot on the line. We believe this book meets the needs of all of these scenarios. And we will highlight more options at the end of this book for those of you who need further support.

We have a why for writing this book.

We aspire to help couples make positive changes that fit into their busy lives, and that lead to tangible results. We aspire to build a sense of hope and self-compassion that you can carry into important conversations with your partner.

We know first-hand how important relationships are in our lives. And we also know how hard it is to get our relationships where we want them to be—especially during the busy days and years of today’s lifestyle. More than ever, today’s relationships can get lost in the go-go-go-ness of our lives. The generations before us have not had to create lasting love in such an environment. So, it requires us to build habits into our lives to slow things down and be present with our partner.

And we have seen time and time again that people can transform their lives if they have the desire, the roadmap, and the support along the way. We believe that when decisions are made for the good of the relationship–rather than personal gain–couples can build strong bonds. We want to help you find a path to a happier relationship so that you can live a healthy and fulfilled life every day.

We know through our work with hundreds of clients struggling in their relationships that they’re often dealing with feelings of helplessness (I don’t know how to make things better!). Or, hopelessness (This will never get better!). Perhaps, even self-judgment (Why can’t I make things better?).

People in relationships put so much pressure on themselves to turn things around when it’s tough and they’re worried. We want to give them a sense of hope by providing the tools and strategies, as well as the critical piece of compassion and validation that can be missing in their lives.

We know it’s possible to make positive and lasting changes to your relationship because we did it. And we’ve seen our recipe successfully transferred to other couples!

Why write a book about relationship habits?

We believe that relationships improve when each partner takes personal responsibility for their part. Couples can’t make progress as a team when one or both partners have determined that it’s all the other partner’s fault. Everyone finds themselves blaming their partner at some point. But for progress to happen, there has to be a shift toward taking personal responsibility for our own words and actions. Growth only happens when both partners own their moves in the current state of their relationship and decide to make changes in themselves.

It made sense that we broke down Happy Habits into manageable, practical steps because we want couples to have a clear path with steps that are not too big and doomed for failure. Instead, growth sticks best when we ladder the steps—one rung at a time without jumps that are too large. When we try too big of a jump, we’re more likely to slip and fall back down to where we started. And the second critical piece to Happy Habits is to repeat these steps enough, so they become an automatic part of our relationship and get easier over time.

And that’s what habits are—things that we do often enough so they become natural, therefore creating room to grow the habit, or for new habits to be added without getting overwhelmed. The loving things we do for each other in relationships become habits over time whether we recognize it or not. So, we took our knowledge of how to build a loving relationship and broke it down into the habits that lead us there. And that’s what this book is about—showing you how to build loving habits that lead to happiness.

While reading, we encourage you to take notes and highlight areas that resonate with you. If you’re reading this separately from your partner, highlight the sentences and paragraphs that seem to describe what you’re both going through, then talk about what you highlighted. These are the crucial conversations that can transform relationships. Sharing passages and your notes with your partner can begin a process of alignment with them.

We want this book to help you and your partner figure out what is working, and what isn’t working. Then, you can design a way of living that includes daily and weekly relationship habits that deepen your connection and allow you to see and be seen by each other.

Don’t forget that the bulk of the work will be done whenever you lay the book down—either between chapters or after you finish reading the book. Make the important decision to prioritize conversations as a couple about how to make changes and decide on which habits you’re going to focus. If you don’t plan to make some time for regular conversations (we like weekly date nights), this will just become good information that you won’t use because life has a way of taking over if we’re not careful.

Create space to Prioritize Your Relationship (Habit #4), so that you can make your way out of your negative cycle (Habit #3), argue less and rebuild your connection (Habit #2), and tune-in better (Habit #1).

Before we get started there is one more thing that we want you to explore.

How to read this book

Odds are that one partner in a couple picked up this book first and will read it on their own. But to reap the benefits of creating healthy relationship habits, both partners need to be on board. Relational changes can’t happen or be maintained with only one person doing the work. Awareness needs to happen in both partners. Here are some ideas on how to get your partner to join you on this journey to a happier relationship:

1. Ask your partner if they would be interested in reading the book either with you or alongside you, and doing some of the exercises together to improve your relationship.

2. Read the book yourself from cover to cover and talk to your partner about things that you reflected on or that resonated with you.

3. If your partner doesn’t want to read this book, there are other options to have them join you: a) Work on one Habit at a time with them while you’re reading it. You can summarize what you understood from each Habit [the summary from the end of each Habit can help you with that] and complete the Conversation Exercise together. b) You commit to reading one Habit section together (or you read it to them while they listen and hang out beside you), and then complete the Conversation Exercise together. c) Take our ’10 Habits of Happy Couples Crash Course’ as a team and complete the exercises together.

You can find our ‘Crash Course’ on our website at www.betteryourself365.com. In this short course we