1- Every day is a challenge and has to be received with a smile, at least, but a laugh is better.
And better yet if you laugh every time you get together. Not a silly laugh. A laugh like the one described here: "And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.” Friedrich Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra”.
2- Do not question your companion about your own frustrations. Do not accuse her or him for your dissatisfactions. Do not let the well spread habit nested in everybody of making feel everyone else guilty of their own pain, to spread on you like an spell, and infect your camaraderie. Do not let those defeated ones accuse you, or at least, do not let it make you feel guilty.
3- Be humble, compassionate, sympathetic, but do not stop challenging yourself. Do not allow the humility, the compassion and sympathy of your friend to make you lazy, insensible, and dormant.
4- Respect is corporeal understanding of freedom. Words often mislead and lock.
Remove from your habits the need for explaining everything and always demanding verbal explanations. Do not try to understand; let understanding come to you. Words are meant to make a beautiful threading above the absence of meaning.
5- Assume you are together to help each other. Challenging each other is the most generous way of helping each other.
6- Contemplate the possibility of not being together. Taking different roads is, sometimes, what brings you closest to each other. Remaining together by force -the force of unrealistic idealizations, of fear, of submission to expectations and compromises- is often what makes you real strangers. Being free to choose is what makes life worth it. Even when you are in a relationship, know how to be alone.
7- Celebrate being together! Look around: almost everybody is alone.
The most unbearable pain is not the result of our own wounds: it is to witness the pain of those who matter to us. We greatly lament that those who are close to us do not perceive our pain. Then, we choose to isolate ourselves from pain altogether, being alone. To be together is courageous.
8- How would you like to be treated? How would you like to treat yourself? Like a child, like a careful and loving mom treats her baby, or would you like to talk to yourself face to face as a grown up?
9- Lots of talent is lost because we demand from each other to be feeble, ignorant, lazy, insensible, distasteful, and if we choose to improve ourselves, we envelop such an endeavor with a rigid seriousness. We should, instead, challenge each other to excellence with a whimsical, witty, and mischievous wink.