Three tips for improving your relationships in 2022 …

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As we begin a new year, we find ourselves near the end of a global pandemic — really, we’re already at least ankle deep into the “new normal.”

From all of the trials and trauma of the past two-ish years, one of the many lessons we’ve had the opportunity to learn is the great value of relationships in ALL of our lives.

Would you like to see those relationships improve in 2022?

Here are three tips that might help see your relationships blossom in the new year:

1. Make the value and priority of relationships more real and less theoretical. Prior to the pandemic, so many people around the world assumed most of the relationships in their lives were healthy — or at least “okay.”

Then a global pandemic hit.

We were either isolated from some of those relationships, or forced to spend much more time with them in ways we weren’t used to.

Ultimately, an overwhelmingly important life lesson from that experience is that relationships are far more important than the way we often value or prioritize them in “everyday” life.

Did you know a leading cause for the failure of relationships — and that’s any kind of relationship — is due to the fact that we commonly fail to adequately nurture our relationships?

People boast all the time on social media that a great friendship is one that you can ignore for years, then “pick up where we left off.” That’s more fairy tale than reality for most, something many are now learning the hard way.

If you neglect relationships — fail to nurture them — the outcome more often than not is that those improperly nurtured relationships will begin to fail if you don’t make consistently nurturing them a priority and properly value them.

2. Create more time to nurture your relationships. I understand the great complaint of humanity is a “lack of time,” but hear this simple truth clearly: If you want healthy, lasting, mutually beneficial relationships, you must create time to adequately nurture them. That will usually include two things:

    • Talk more. Read that again, more slowly. T A L K   M O R E! I know, not welcome advice in 2021, an era in which people tell their most cherished and closest relationships (family, “BFFs,” etc.), “If you can text it, don’t call.” In an era when we push our closest connections into communicating in a sentence of text — not even a paragraph, certainly not a conversation — we won’t like hearing that what we really need is more REAL conversation with each other, rather than less. Do you want to nurture your relationships? Talk more.
    • Adequately nurturing your relationships will also likely require you to make face-to-face opportunities a priority. Yes, using technology to “face time” or otherwise connect can often be effective and valuable, but the pandemic should have taught us by now that nothing connects us so deeply and richly with another human being than being with them, “in person,” face-to-face.

3. Make sure the person(s) experiences your love rather than being left to assume it. Have you ever been in a relationship (again, of any kind) where the other person might often say, “Love you!” but as they continued to say it to you, you suddenly realized that you hadn’t actually experienced love from them in quite a while?

We treat a lot of our relationships that way, leaving people to assume our love for them without consistently demonstrating it with lived experiences.

If you want to improve your relationships in 2022, I encourage you to try the steps above and see if they don’t help your relationships blossom.

I pray your relationships will be blessed and God-honoring now, and throughout the coming year.

Scotty