When you’re in the process of building trust and getting to know each other, hopefully you’ll also start building a close friendship with your partner. If you’re going to commit to a long-term relationship and work at building true love, make sure you’re doing it with someone who you not only love, but also like and enjoy spending time with.
In an extended relationship, it can be this sort of deep friendship that holds things together when times are tough or you feel like the spark is gone. One of the best ways to build a friendship is to pursue common interests. When you’re specifically working at making a casual relationship deeper, working to build common interests from the ground up can be especially effective. Thus, it will pay off for the two of you to spend some time learning something new together.
Make Sure the Interest is Common
While there’s definitely a place for both of you to pursue something that only one of you is interested in, when building a new interest you should make sure it’s something that you both really want to do. Most likely, one of you will be more interested in it than the other one is, but it still should be something both parties have a legitimate interest in.
Find Something to Learn
The possibilities for interests you can pursue together are endless. You can learn everything from dancing to pottery to gardening to a foreign language and more! If you’re not sure where to start, it can help to look through the catalog of a local community college. While you might not want to do something as serious as taking a class together, it will give you a good idea of the different interests you could pursue.
There are also lots of ways for the two of you to pursue your interests. You can take a class, hire a tutor, find a friend who knows what they’re doing and convince them to work with you, or try to teach yourselves.
Some interests, like learning a foreign language, will be better pursued through some sort of formal means while others, like learning to cook Thai food together, are things you could probably teach yourselves.
Get Serious
It’s easy to say that you’re going to pursue learning something new, but that’s much harder to do in actual practice. If you’re serious about building a solid friendship with your significant other, though, you’ll also want to be serious about learning your new thing together.
Ask your partner to keep you accountable and be willing to do the same for them. This doesn’t mean that you have to hound one another, but it can help you remember to do things like scheduling time focused on your interest and collecting materials between times.
In the process of learning something new together, you will not only find knowledge you didn’t have before, but you’ll also build part of the foundation for a close friendship with your partner. This friendship will help you commit to each other, forming another aspect of true love.
