When You’ve Been Married a While…

Dear Maggie,

I think you’ve been married for a long time. Do you have any good advice on building and maintaining a healthy marriage?

Sincerely,

Newlywed in New Orleans

Dear Newlywed,

First off, congratulations! My oldest son and his girlfriend will be getting married next month, and we are all so excited for them. In fact, he just recently asked me this very question, and I was truly flattered. Since I’ve been married for quite a while, I do have some words of wisdom and a few tricks of the trade that have helped to keep our marriage interesting all these years.

There’s a lot of good advice out there for couples, and maybe some of mine will sound familiar, but here are my personal top three tips…

Schedule time for each other. This might sound silly. After all, you’ll be living together if you aren’t already. You’ll be sharing a bedroom, meals, the toothpaste, etc., so it might seem like you’ll have a lot of time together. In reality though, this will likely be the busiest time of your life. You’ll be building careers, buying homes, maybe having children. Before you know it, years will have passed, and if you aren’t careful, you could lose your connection to each other along the way.

I’m a believer in establishing good habits. One of the best habits we developed as a couple was scheduling regular time for each other. Every week, we have what we call ‘downtime’ and some other friends call ‘office hours.’ Whatever you want to label it, this time should be set aside to discuss your relationship. Hopefully, when you have disagreements, you’ll be able to talk them through immediately, but sometimes this isn’t possible due to life getting in the way. Or maybe, it’s actually better to have time to think about the issue and let some of the emotions calm before having a discussion. Whatever the case, if you have a safe space where you both can come and speak freely to one another, hopefully those small issues will get resolved and won’t snowball into bigger ones.

Establishing a regular date night also falls under the category of scheduling time together. If ‘downtime’ focuses on the relationship, date night should focus on having fun. Once per week, or once every other at minimum, get out of the house and go on a date. Think pizza and beer, or dressed up for a fancy dinner. Take a blanket and bottle of wine to the beach, or hit the movies and go out for ice cream. You probably spent a fair amount of time and creative energy planning dates when you were dating, so why not continue the habit? It will remind you to play together regularly.

In addition to our scheduled downtime and date nights, we also take adult vacations together without the kids. Those trips away might have only been overnight when the babies were small, and they might have only been to the Motel 6 when our budget was tight, but the point was we did it. We focused on each other, on having fun, on uninterrupted sexy times.

Without the distractions and stresses of your daily lives, your full attention can be focused on each other.

Treat each other with respect. It’s easy to do this when everything is going well, but it becomes more difficult when we’re stressed, or disagree with one another, or feel out of sorts. Often, the people closest to us feel the brunt of our frustrations, and, just like we can create good habits with one another, we can create bad ones. Speaking or acting disrespectfully with one another is one of those dangerous slippery slope behaviors. If I find myself so frustrated, or so angry, that I’m tempted to devolve straight into disrespect, I do my very best not to say something I can’t take back. If there’s a real issue behind my emotions, I put in on the list to address during our downtime.

Find ways to speak to each other that don’t cross a line into disrespect, even when you’re angry or frustrated. It's really hard to feel valued or loved otherwise.

Be honest. It goes without saying that being married can be really challenging. Life will throw us curveballs, whether they come in the form of an illness, money troubles, career stressors, issues with the kids, or simply the fact that we will grow and change as human beings over the course of our married lives. There’s no way to sugarcoat this. However, I find that being honest without being disrespectful or cruel, is essential to building and maintaining a healthy relationship. My husband and I have, on more than one occasion, needed to be painfully honest with one another about our feelings, our needs, our fears. Every time we’ve had an emotionally honest conversation, we both agree that it took the sting out of the issue, or at least didn’t allow it to fester.

Your partner can’t read your mind. While I sometimes think my husband knows me better than I know myself, it isn’t fair to count on this fact! Honest and transparent communication is really a requirement of a healthy marriage.

I hope these thoughts are helpful. Thank you so much for the great question, and I wish you all the best!