I bet you strongly desire to have a marriage that is committed, passionate, mature, and free of conflict. And this requires adequate knowledge because a marriage dynamic is so complicated that you will have to deal with a wide range of relationship issues. In the following sections, let’s discuss how to have a healthy marriage.
What does a healthy marriage look like?
Before talking about how to improve your marriage, first, let’s discuss a broad question – what a healthy marriage should be. In my opinion, it should be committed and mature, with a strong bond between two spouses that involves a series of factors like below:
1 Monogamy/faithfulness:
As we all know, faithfulness is a fundamental component of a long-term committed relationship. Therefore, a mature, romantic marriage should be free of infidelity, cheating, and any other extramarital flirtations. And cheating often ruins a marriage irreparably; in the wake of cheating behavior, couples tend to be increasingly mistrustful of each other. And a marriage can’t be healthy when a couple lacks loyalty to each other.
Avoiding sinful temptations and staying faithful may sound straightforward, but a lot of people have difficulty in maintaining their self-discipline. And if you consider yourself the type of person that easily gets wound up in extra-marital affairs/flings, you might go on to read the posts below to strengthen measures to prevent infidelity:
6 tips on preventing extramarital affairs – Protect your marriage.
How to deal with a spouse’s emotional affair – Save the marriage.
Simply put, for most couples who have ever been shattered by infidelity, they can not fully recover from those affairs. Although those painful events may drift away over time, they leave emotional scars in a marriage.
2 Total trust:
Without mutual trust, you can’t achieve a healthy or mature partnership because you and your spouse will butt heads regularly. For example, if a couple does not trust each other, when a spouse comes back very late, probably the other one may throw terrible and wild accusations at him/her; but what is worse, that further damages the balance of trust in the relationship.
Deep mutual trust allows you and your spouse to breathe easily; and it is crucial to marriage for many reasons; in particular, it gives each other the strength to quash unnecessary feelings of jealousy. For instance, when you are off on a business trip or out late with your friends, if you trust each other, neither of you will feel the need to worry and snoop around the other’s private matters.
When there is deep trust between you and your spouse, you can quickly realize that a lot of your feelings of jealousy are just running through your veins, not based in reality. Maybe, when your spouse fails to answer your call after a night out, some horrible fantasies of infidelity and cheating pop into your mind; but soon, the trust of your spouse can make you regain consciousness – you remind yourself that your spouse is trustworthy, you don’t want to go on to fantasize about sinister things, and you tell yourself that those fears are stupid, unrealistic, and totally unfounded; then you calm down yourself, and patiently wait for his/her response.
3 Complete equality:
As a married spouse, you need to understand that a healthy marriage should be a two-way street – every spouse needs to have equal responsibilities and rights. Being equal means equally sharing the burden of making a marriage work. Specifically, when fights occur, both sides should be to blame (you should both be willing to apologize, and be willing to listen to each other when knowing you are in the wrong); when the relationship hits a rough patch, you should both be responsible for the hard times; when your spouse has trouble in a “life issue”(e.g., trouble at work, with his/her social life, with his/her health), you should be understanding and supportive; and it is fair for a spouse to accept half of the financial burden, half of the household chores, and so on.
4 Plenty of privacy and alone time:
If you two want to stay together for the rest of your lives, you need to respect each other’s right to spend time alone, a sphere of privacy, and freedom to do what each other wants.
Maybe, you think it is unacceptable for your spouse to withhold his/her social media accounts’ passwords or not willing to give you a duplicate key of his/her safe deposit box. But if you can put yourself in his/her shoes, you are more likely to understand that those small bits of privacy can be reasonable; after all, you also do not allow your spouse to access to any aspect of your life; so there is nothing wrong with having some privacy and independence.
Likewise, it is also reasonable for your spouse to demand the right to have some time alone. It is never healthy to spend every minute together; and hence, you both need to learn to spend some quality time alone.
If you feel that you are too codependent in your marriage, you might go on to read the post below that aims to help you stop this toxic relationship pattern:
How to overcome codependency in marriage – Fix the marriage.
So, what to do to maintain a healthy marriage?
Building a healthy marriage is a quite complicated issue; anyway, you should not ignore the actionable items below that you can perform to improve your relationship.
1 Open and honest communication:
Maintaining open and honest communication with your spouse is paramount. The two of you should feel free to discuss any issue together, no matter how controversial or uncomfortable it is. In other words, as a spouse, you should not shut down your spouse when he/she brings up a topic that you are not fond of; you should not jump to conclusions before you exactly understand your spouse’s thoughts, and you should give your spouse the necessary opportunities to express his/her innermost feelings without fear of arguments or any other negative consequences.
Therefore, you need to create an environment where both you and your spouse are comfortable to share each other’s feelings and thoughts. If one or both of you feel like one will be judged by the other one or think one party will “get in trouble” as the party brings up a certain sensitive subject, then you have to admit that there are communication barriers in your marriage.
For more tips on how to improve communication with your spouse, you might go on to read the posts below:
How to have effective communication in marriage.
4 annoying habits that cause communication barriers in marriage.
2 Put your pride on hold:
Accepting faults and admitting guilt is another important element in building a healthy marriage with minimal conflict. Surely apologizing is more necessary when you realize that you are in the wrong; but at other times, your apology can be perceived as a gesture that shows your spouse that you want to let go of the unpleasant past and heal the relationship. Therefore, even though you are not willing to admit to being wrong or accept your spouse’s point of view, it is also not bad to say sorry. Apologizing is one thing that requires integrity; when you are willing to apologize even though you are not at fault, this gesture shows your strength of character and your commitment to maintaining a conflict-free relationship.
Understandably, things tend to get out of control as an argument gets intense; and sometimes you are so stubbornly committed to the so-called righteousness that you are very reluctant to apologize; in this case, you might ask yourself a simple question, “Whether winning or being right is more important than having a harmonious relationship” Unless the argument is about cardinal issues of right and wrong, the answer to that type of question should be no; so you might as well try to swallow your pride and say sorry just for the sake of peace in the relationship.
When you fully accept the partial responsibility for marital conflict and say sorry, probably your spouse will reciprocate; then the fight will not create lasting damage to the relationship.
3 Be willing to sacrifice, and learn to embrace the compromise:
In any marriage, couples have to make certain sacrifices. When you feel the need to work together with your spouse to resolve an issue, you have to sacrifice some of your freedom; when you decide to live with your spouse for the rest of your life, you sacrifice the right to flirt with other people of the opposite sex; marriage is based on mutual respect and equal treatment; in your married life, you and your spouse are teammates, you should see your spouse as equal to yourself; so sometimes, you have to sacrifice the right to put yourself first…
And when you treat those sacrifices as a part of give-and-take in the relationship, you will feel relieved. I mean, if you give up some of your freedom for the sake of the long-lasting relationship, you will also benefit from it after the fact. When you choose to compromise on certain issues in your relationship, then you can leverage it to obtain something else afterward. This is also not to say that you and your spouse need to keep a daily tally of “who owes what”; and if you strive for complete fairness at all costs, sooner or later one or both of you will feel tired in the relationship. Being willing to compromise not just helps defuse or overcome marital conflict; take a long view of it: in doing so, you also earn the right to request your spouse to make a similar compromise afterward.
4 Develop a calm personality:
If one or both of you are accustomed to resorting to screaming, throwing a temper tantrum, or breaking things during an argument/fight, it will be difficult to have constructive conversations because nothing good can come of that kind of raw emotion. As long as you are committed to settling marital conflict constructively, there is a significant technique that you need to learn: try to postpone conversations or debates until the two of you are calm and thinking clearly.
When things get heated between you two during an argument, if you sense that your spouse has a tendency to overreact and throw a fit, you should try to remind yourself to stop this conversation in its tracks. Then later, you might clearly explain that you would like to go on to talk about those sensitive issues as long as he/she can calm down himself/herself and is also willing to continue the conversation with an open mind.
By retaining a collected and calm demeanor when dealing with serious disagreements in your marriage, it not just shows that you still value his/her opinion, more importantly, it avoids the type of pointless, escalating, and hurtful arguments that tend to develop when one or both of you lose composure.
Another way to defuse this sort of increasingly intense situation is to let your spouse know how you usually deal with it in advance. When you and your spouse are on good terms, you might bring up this issue and explain what you will do if an intense argument/fight turns into a screaming match.
In doing so, your spouse will not feel confused, offended, or slighted when you say nothing and walk away from a big argument/fight that has got out of control.
To keep calm during a fight, you need to learn to focus on fixing a problem, rather than take it personally:
Nobody likes fighting with the person he/she loves; and usually, nobody likes to inflict emotional harm on his/her beloved; but in your married life, sometimes it is hard to keep your jabs out of the brawl. And a simple, effective way to deal with this problem is to try your best to focus on issues at hand instead of your spouse’s mistakes/shortcomings/flaws; once you realize a fight becomes intense, you might pause for a moment to ponder on what is the main problem, and then bring it to the spotlight. This way not only helps avoid taking things personally but also helps keep you calm.
Surely, fights are inevitable in any marriage; and yet in happy marriages, couples stick to the fair fighting rules.
For more tips, you might go on to read the post below:
How to fight fair with your spouse – Fight in a healthy way
The final word:
Remember, no matter how committed a couple is to each other, marriage requires constant maintenance. If you want your marriage to stay healthy and happy, don’t assume that your relationship has already become solid and that you can “stop trying” or “stop caring” at some point. When you don’t want to put in your best effort in maintaining your marriage, then the relationship starts to deteriorate.
If you need more tips on how to have a healthy marriage, you might go on to watch the video below to follow the comprehensive guidance that is offered by Brad Browning, a marriage coach with 12+ years of experience:
Maybe, you are also interested in the related posts below:
How to have a fulfilling marriage – Make your marriage last.
How to keep your marriage alive – Maintain a happy long term marriage.
6 tips on how to survive in an unhappy marriage without divorce.
How to stay emotionally connected with your spouse.
How to have a long lasting happy marriage – Marriage-saving tips.
Must-have boundaries in marriage – Communicate your boundaries.
Don’t miss these subtle signs your marriage might be in trouble.
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