To Keep The Love In Your Marriage Alive, Make These 3 Tiny Changes
Your relationship needs your time and affection.
Eda Hoyman | Canva Remember falling in love with your partner? Think back to the magic of your head-over-heels relationship, when the feelings of connection and chemistry were off the charts. Then something happened. Maybe you got married and grew busy with children and a stressful career. You got distracted from the most important thing in your world: your partner. Or was it your partner who stopped focusing on you? Let’s be fair about it.
People don’t intend to make other things more important than their partner. It just happens. Nobody wakes up one day and says to themselves, “Today’s the day I’m going to ruin the happiness and intimacy in my marriage.” That’s not how it happens. It simply happens like this. We forget to value our partners in our daily lives. We often forget why we chose them, and why we love them. We forget the ideas about the shared life of togetherness we wanted to create with them.
We forget to make them the priority they were early on in the relationship. Instead, we become self-focused. I’m busy. I don’t have time. I’m stressed. I’ve got responsibilities. I’m tired. When your relationship is struggling and you feel neglected and unappreciated, the bitter theme that surfaces is this: "Can’t you love me more than this?" We point the finger of blame at what our partners aren’t doing for us. We get caught up in how they aren’t meeting our needs. We think about everything that’s missing. We feel unappreciated, misunderstood, and taken for granted. That’s when the feelings of disconnect kick in — and intimacy fades. Here are three things you can do to change that starting today.
Here are 3 tiny changes you can make to keep the love in your marriage alive:
1. Make your partner and your relationship the most important priorities in your life.
Your partner — boyfriend or girlfriend, husband or wife — will appreciate it, and as a result, your relationship will stabilize.
2. Initiate the repair of your situation by owning your role in it 100%.
Take full personal responsibility for your behaviors, including your tone of voice. This isn’t a 50/50 kind of thing. Stop keeping track and keeping score of who did — or didn’t do — whatever thing last was done wrong.
3. Stop waiting for them to do their part, simply do yours.
If you love and value your partner more — starting right now — you’ll be surprised by how they will love and value you more right back. Most marriages can be repaired more quickly than people believe — when both partners are willing and reasonably committed to learning how to do so. The sad reality is that too often unhappy couples do nothing, waiting and hoping for things to get better. But nothing ever changes that way. Will your marriage be happier or less happy one year from today? Will you feel more in love or less in love with your partner? It's all up to you.
Jeff Forte is a marriage therapist and author of The 90-Minute Marriage Miracle. He has over 15 years of experience with some of Wall Street’s top investment firms, including extensive interpersonal conflict resolution experience as a regional team development leader.