Five Ways to Keep Your Friends after Starting a New Relationship

Having trouble keeping friends after you've started your relationship?  Here are five ways that may help you to keep your friends.

1. Have confidence in the maturity of your friends and significant other. If your significant other and your friends both accept you then they will also accept the people that you have accepted in your life. 
2. Set the tone for your first meeting with honest discussions about feelings from both perspectives. Talk about your friends to your significant other. Equally, talk about your significant other to your friends.

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3. Introduce your significant other to your friends.  New introductions can be awkward but breaking the ice can go a long way towards revealing how supportive your friends and significant other can be of each other.
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4. Facilitate communication until your significant other and friends can get comfortable with one another. Communication isn't just for a couple. It's a necessary tool to develop the kind of relationships that will carry them through difficult times as well as the fun times. Help your new encounter be success by helping to translate the diversity of expressions given by your friends and significant other. 

5. Re-assure your significant other and friends in uncomfortable moments. Anticipating uncomfortable moments and pro-actively addressing them before they happen can be a relationship saving skill to master. Some uncomfortable moments might be, greetings, goodbyes, and "getting to know you" conversations. Times to show support, opportunities to demonstrate that everyone is safe, and fun to be around might be easier by sharing stories about how you became friends, your funniest moments, some of the challenges you have been through, that result in how you came to value the people before you.

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