By Sadhguru – Founder, Isha Foundation

1. Take Two “Heartfuls” of Love

The English expression, “Falling in love,” is significant because you don’t rise in love, you don’t fly in love, you don’t walk in love, you don’t stand in love. You fall in love, because something of who you are has to go. It essentially means someone else has become far more important than yourself. Only if you don’t think too much of yourself, you can be in love. When what you consider as “me” falls, a deep experience of love can happen within you.

2. Add a Liberal Dose of Understanding

The closer the relationship with someone is, the more effort you should make to understand them. Someone becomes closer and dearer to you only as you understand them better. If they understand you, they enjoy the closeness of the relationship. If you understand them better, then you enjoy the closeness. If you are expecting the other to understand and comply with you all the time while you don’t understand the limitations, possibilities, needs and capabilities of that person, then conflict is all that will happen.

In everyone, there are some positive and some negative aspects. If you embrace all this in your understanding, you can make the relationship the way you want it. If you leave it to their understanding, it will become accidental. If they are very magnanimous, things will happen well for you. If not, the relationship will break up. It is not that the other person is totally bereft of understanding. With your understanding you can create situations where the other person would be able to understand you better.

3. Work On It A Little

A marriage is not an absolute thing that you can do once and forget. It is an active partnership. Two separate people have chosen to come together for a common purpose and build a life together, live joyfully and multiply their well-being. Two human beings weaving their lives into one has a certain beauty.

In Indian culture, a marriage was renewed once a year just to remind you why you came together. It is a fresh marriage again on that day. Otherwise, you think you have been stuck in this forever. No. You came together consciously and you have to conduct it consciously too.

4. Warm It Up With Some Joy

If relationships have to be really beautiful, it is very important that a human being turns inward and looks at himself in a very deep way before he looks at someone else. If you become a source of joy by yourself and your relationships are about sharing your joy, you would have wonderful relationships with anyone.

Is there anyone in the world who would have any problem with you if you are going there to share your joy with them? No. If you want to experience the profoundness of being with another human being, your marriage should never be about you — it should always be about the other person. If both of you think like this, your marriage will not be an arrangement, it will be a union.

5. Offer It To Each Other

If your marriage is just a bundle of expectations about how to extract happiness out of someone who should make heaven for you, you will be disappointed. They say marriages are made in heaven. They say that because most people created a hell out of their marriage!

If your relationship is about extracting something out of someone, it does not matter how much you manage, there will be constant trouble. But if your relationship was an offering to the other person, then everything would be fantastic.

[Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, a yogi, is a visionary, humanitarian and a prominent spiritual leader. An author, poet and internationally-renowned speaker, Sadhguru’s wit and piercing logic provoke and widen our perception of life. www.ishafoundation.org]