A healthy relationship is something you cultivate.

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They showed us how love does not waltz away with the currents of emotion.

This month, the Institute I work for invited all employees to a 25-year-old marriage celebration. We enjoyed the delicious food but those of us who attended the dinner party got something more valuable.

Insights that build lasting relationships.

It was not just me who took notes when the guests of honor told us about their 25-year marriage.

What do you do when your salt is tested? When the storm strikes? When disaster barges in?

Is your relationship made of fire or fantasy?

Here are 11 insights from an old couple whose bond is still strong and whose relationship goes beyond the electrified nights and the passionate love.

1. Patience is your friend

Someone in the audience asked the husband who in their relationship has more patience. He started explaining. We saw the wife’s patience as she waited for him to finish what he had to say.

Every time it looked like he was going to stop talking, she would lean forward to take her turn. But then he would continue talking about his wife’s patience. She would lean back on her sofa with graceful patience only people who have patience do.

We saw how patient they are with each other — even on their big day.

Patience is the sturdy rock that strengths your relationship.

The one you love processes his feelings slower than you, be patient. She says something you disagree with, be patient in letting her say what she wants to say. You want to say angry things to him, be patient and let time take away your angry words.

2. Shower your relationship with kindness

After their 2 children left for college 4 years ago, the wife stopped going to their offices. She was depressed. Both of them run big companies and she could not do any of her responsibilities.

Every night, he came home after a long, tiresome day. Her continuing silence and staying in their bed the whole day did not annoy him. He let her be. Being kind to her feelings did that.

Things at their company were not good at the time and he needed her support. He chose to take all their company’s responsibility. He chose to let her have time to process her feelings. Choosing to be kind did that.

Love does not do that. Commitment does. That commitment made him kind. To be kind regardless of his need for her brilliant mind and for her to be by his side.

“To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.” — Tiny Buddha

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3. Delight in your loved one’s success

What a shame when we suppress our joys with the success of our spouses.

If your girlfriend’s promotion creates jealousy in your heart. If the new position your boyfriend has steals your sleep. If the other person got something you have been working hard for.

Be delighted for them.

If anything other than delight enters your mind and heart, you need to reconstruct your thoughts brick by brick.

4. Exercise humility

“Relationships fail because one of you exercise power over the other,”

The old couple told us. You fight to be more powerful than the other as if you are on opposite sides of a team. You forget you are on the same team.

Power has no place in your relationship. If at any point in the description of your relationship, the notion of “power” is brought up, you are building fire beneath your home.

Your home will fall.

Power does not belong in healthy relationships.

5. Decide from the heart

20 years ago, when they quit their jobs to build their first business together, the husband’s family blamed her.

How could she think they could start a business when they had no prior experience?

Fear entered their home. They had never run a business before. They were in a new city. They did not know whether they were going to be successful or not.

That is what fear does to us. It prevents us from listening to what our hearts desire. It distracts us from what is important and that is love.

What this amazing couple had was a gut feeling. That they needed to take a leap of faith and build their startup from scratch. They needed to do that even though every member of their family warned them they were making a huge mistake.

They took action based on love — rather than fear. At first, it felt like something was choking them to retreat to their safe old job. It took years to find their safe ground on their business.

They did not let life pass them by because of fear.

This is important because decisions based on fear take the soul out of your relationship.

6. Love with non-attachment

“Love lightly, my children,” the old lady told us.

She continued:

“He spends weeks and months in another country, 3 or 4 times a year. If I hold him tightly refusing to let him go, I will suffer. If I cling to him suffocating the life out of him, we both suffer. You do not say you love someone when you put that person in a box where you hope they will stay and never change.”

You are not able to live your life outside of the other person. It ultimately takes the pressure off and allows you to be without depending on anything or anyone to feed your soul.

Clinging onto things — relationships, jobs, and material goods — does not make sense considering their evolving nature.

“You only lose what you cling to.” — Buddha

7. Do some things together

And no, she was not talking about watching TV together.

Her husband comes to her book club and participates even though it is not his thing. She attends company shareholder lunches and dinners even though it is not her thing.

And then there is every Saturday afternoon dedicated to themselves. Even their children are not invited. Sometimes they go outside of the city. Sometimes they spend the entire afternoon visiting a local market. Sometimes they go to college to surprise their children. Sometimes they go to a friend’s coffee shop and sit to gaze at each other.

8. Don’t take what your spouse does for granted

“I forgot how to prepare pasta,” she told us about one event that happened 10 years ago.

“My husband loves cooking. He prepares our meal every day and he enjoys it. But somewhere along the way, I took what he does for me for granted. When he had to go to America for 3 months, I could not even prepare a simple pasta. I had forgotten how.”

Our tendency to divide roles and tasks bring unhealthy behaviors in our relationship.

Time went by and things she was not inclined to do in the first place became things she never does.

Whatever weak “muscles” she had become weaker.

The things her husband did fade into the background. She did not appreciate them anymore because they had become a given. She took them for granted.

When he was not around, she felt stranded, abandoned and unable to perform simple things.

Just because something is easier for the other person does not mean you can’t do it.

9. Don’t be so absorbed in your relationship that you allow every “me” to become “we”

Somewhere along the way, you lose yourself.

Loving fully is not at odds with protecting your sovereignty. You don’t need to give yourself over to love well.

Abandoning certain interests or parts of you (from your hobbies to your friends to your job), even leaving thoughts unexplored- is not how you build your relationship.

There are many things left for you to discover. Many things you are interested in. Pursuits that might become a part of who you are.

If you turn your back on this — for the sake of your relationship — you lose yourself. This is like saying:

I will diminish me.

What you must strive for is the result of who you are together to be something that expands both you and your loved one.

What you need is for both of you to grow, learn and stretch instead of wither.

You don’t want to arrive at a place where you walk around feeling invisible — or for your spouse to walk around feeling undesired. You both deserve better than that.

You want someone with his passions, compulsions, pursuits, and interests because you need time alone, to process, to do your thing. This does not mean you don’t want to be with your loved one. It often means you want time to think about your loved one.

Don’t buy into the notion that commitment has to mean detention, confinement, obligation or a burden. You are committed to who you are and to who you can be rather than committed to the things that bind both of you, or to the sacrifices you convince yourselves you must make for each other.

You don’t want to dedicate your lives to managing each other’s insecurities.

It does not have to be that way.

You want your loved one to inspire you to create, to express, to explore and to discover. And you inspire him in the same way.

10. Take time to “do you”

“He rises every morning at 5:30 am, leaves my warm body and goes outside. He has been doing this for the past 25 years. He does this because he likes hearing the sound of birds, the leaves blowing, the babbling of the creek, and the crackle of the earth under his feet.” She told us with a smile on her face.

What is your thing? What is your loved one’s thing?

Whether it is exercising before the sun rises over the horizon or you need time alone or you want to be left alone with your favorite book or you want to pamper yourself at the local salon, you do you.

Your spouse. Your boss. Your kids. Your friends. Your parents. Your siblings. Your bank manager. The nosy neighbor. All of them need something from you.

But there is one person who needs you more. And that is you.

11. Allow yourself to feel painful emotions and nurture yourself through them

“When we lost our son in a car accident five years ago, my husband sucked all his emotions in, where it bubbled like trapped, molten lava, until it erupted in spectacular bursts of rage. After the tragedy, he marched through life stoically, his heart neatly sealed, safe from the joys and sorrows of life….” She told us through tears in her eyes.

“Even though I was grieving, I promised myself I would not let my husband remain in emotional solitary confinement for the rest of our lives. I begged and begged for him to cry, to let me in. In time, he opened up. It was like a host of sinister bats leaving a subterranean cave at night. I kissed his tears away. This isn’t a Disney fairytale. We still cry and sometimes our pain is too strong that we can’t even breathe. It is a battle. But we have bared that beating, blood-red heart of ours in more ways than we can imagine and we have become a better, more loving human being thanks to that.”

I become angry with my boyfriend over a minor thing. And here they survived what life threw at them like losing a child — through taking time and processing their emotions — even painful ones.

If you allow yourself to cry, if you allow yourself to process your emotions, if you do not judge yourself, you will, in time, get up and can move on.

If you suppress your feelings:

They will bottle up inside of you and turn into frustration, anger, and irritation — one day erupting into aggression.

Your capacity to love and feel empathy, sympathy, and compassion for your loved ones will diminish.

You will be unable to participate fully in the grandeur and poignancy of life.

That is when you need yourself the most. When a pragmatic solution is neither feasible nor relevant; when you need the only thing appropriate to give — your unwavering, unjudging and fiercely loving presence.

If you allow yourself to go through painful emotions, you will find stable ground, perhaps even higher ground, on the other side.

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Love does not keep your relationship. Commitment does.

The commitment to put your relationship first and you next. The commitment to treat your partner with kindness, respect, and dignity.

This commitment plants its root in your home. It is the concrete that allows you in choosing to do the right thing regardless of your changing mood and flickering passion for the person.

This commitment looks like: patience, kindness, delight in the success of your loved one, humility, taking action based on what your heart says, loving lightly, doing things with your spouse together, never taking what your loved one does for granted, not confining yourself for the sake of your relationship, doing things you enjoy doing and processing emotions — especially painful ones.