Having a happy long-lasting marriage is the original intention of almost all the married couples. Sadly, reports find that only a small number of married couples are happy with their married life overall; by contrast, a bigger number of couples complain about a decline in affection for one another after years of marriage – in other words, those married couples start to feel incapable of keeping their long term relationships alive; and this raises the red flag about the future of their married life.
And if you feel your marriage has been in the doldrums, it is important to take action to turn around the failing relationship.
Here are 7 tips on how to keep your marriage alive:
(1) Keep intimacy alive:
When you think of intimacy in your relationship, you may instantly associate it with sex; but being emotionally intimate with your spouse is equally important to your long term relationship. Intimacy is a physical and mental closeness that allows each other to let down the barriers, and it is something that you can hardly achieve from another person outside your marital relationship. However, when one or both of you have to succumb to the pressure of working hard every day to meet all sorts of demands from your work and family life, you are apt to lose intimacy.
Numerous couples bemoan the lack of emotional intimacy in their relationships, and those marriages that lack emotional intimacy are often characterized by poor communication, secrets, hidden emotions, and a lack of mutual trust. No doubt, it takes time and conscious efforts to keep intimacy alive in your relationship, particularly emotional intimacy. And only when you are emotionally intimate with your partner, you can be confident enough that you can understand him/her at a deep level.
If you want to learn more about how to maintain emotional intimacy in a long term marriage, you might go on to read the post below:
7 tips on how to get back emotional intimacy in marriage.
(2) Restore/keep passion:
The Cinderella story tells us that the Prince and Cinderella were married and then lived happily afterward. However, reality tells people that wedded bliss has a limited shelf life. According to research that tracked couples who got married and stayed married during the next 15 years, the majority of newlyweds enjoy a great happiness boost that lasts 2 years averagely, then the special joy starts to wear off quickly, and then gradually revert to their normal level of happiness.
As passion fades in marital relationships, married couples may hang on for several years or even tens of years; although it is uncertain as to when they can recover the excitement of their honeymoon period, tens of years later, their children grow up and start to leave home and probably the “empty nest” can cause them to re-discover one another as well as their early bliss. Surely, it is a lengthy and drawn-out process to wait for the arrival of that time. And quite a lot of couples feel that they can’t go on living together and choose to divorce eventually after they feel the passion is already gone in their marriages.
In healthy long-lasting marriages, spouses tend to like to share their passion for life. Passion always plays a positive role in healing a relationship. It promotes feelings of trust, arousal, and pleasure, which helps maintain a good marriage.
Therefore, it is very necessary to take action to keep the passion flowing, rather than watch it slowly fade away in your relationship.
If you are a husband who badly wants to revive the passion in your marriage, you might go on to read the post below:
How to romance your wife again – Tips for romance with your wife
(3) More forgiveness is needed:
Happy marriages are based on humility and forgiveness. Of course, forgiving each other is not simply about taking a deep breath and lowering the voice when confronting your spouse’s mistakes or faults. For example, probably, your spouse often forgets some important tasks; because of such a grumbling habit, you may have had too many fights and arguments with him/her. But why not look at it from another angle: after you have lived together for a long time, you can totally anticipate that he may forget something important, and you know well that he is not intentionally malicious, and you acknowledge that he/she is the one who wants to spend the rest of his/her life with you; so when thinking about this, you accept your spouse as who he/she is;
After you hold a more tolerant attitude towards your spouse’s mistakes/faults/transgressions, you are more likely to solve problems by increasing your effort to take things into your own hands. For example, you might timely remind him/her not to miss certain important things.
When it comes to your spouse’s mistakes and faults, try to give him your forgiveness; and meanwhile, you should try to accept his weakness as well as his/her differences.
Remember, a happy marriage should be a union of two good forgivers.
(4) Keep unity in your marriage:
In a long term marriage, you have to face all kinds of expected and unexpected challenges; when dealing with major challenges that can do severe harm to your marital relationship, you should believe in one principle “United we stand, divided we fall”.
Remember, a married couple is a team, a unit. This means you should deal with all kinds of differences and disagreements together. In particular, more and more marriages break up because of the excessive involvement of a third-party. And this issue may be also worth your attention. The third-party may not only include a person who may have an affair with you or your spouse but also your or your spouse’s respective parents and friends.
In this post, let’s focus on the intervention from your or your spouse’s respective parents; surely, they do not belong to the part of your unit, but they will inevitably get involved in your marriage at some point. In modern life, people seek freedom in marriage. It is undeniable that your and your spouse’s parents can share valuable experience with you two, but at the same time they may also create extra stress and turmoil in your married life. How to get along well with the respective parents is up to you two, but make sure to keep them at your loving arm’s length while you two stick to standing on your own in your marriage.
Furthermore, to maintain the unity of your marriage, it is inadvisable to be emotionally or financially dependent on any outsider. Instead, just depend on each other to work out solutions.
(5) Maintain deep friendship:
A marriage without a deep friendship can not last long. As to whether a couple can extend past the newlywed years far into the mature years, marital friendship is an essential factor. And the research found that married people who treated their spouses as their most intimate friends are generally more satisfied with their married life.
During the process of nurturing the friendship between you two, the marital relationship is also strengthened because friendship enhances physical and emotional intimacy significantly. Friendship helps married couples feel safe to be open with each other without worrying about feeling insecure or being judged.
Certainly, building and nurturing friendship in your marriage takes time and continuous effort. When you are trying to improve your marital friendship, it is important to note a series of basic points below:
- Spending more quality time together.
- Keeping talking and sharing about your daily life.
- Being loyal and honest.
- Seeking more common interests.
- Having fun together and laughing together.
- Recalling happy memories.
- Trying new things together.
- Setting and work towards a mutual goal.
- Letting your spouse feel like he/she is your top priority.
- Appreciating your spouse.
- Cheering on each other’s achievements.
- Respecting each other.
- Treating each other equally.
- Leaning on each other in times of need.
- Being considerate of each other.
- Not holding grudges against each other. Being forgiving of each other.
(6) Fight fair:
There are no long-lasting marriages that can be happy all the time because every marriage has its tensions at some point. That means you are bound to have a conflict with your spouse in your marriage. Therefore, don’t attempt to escape from conflict; instead, you have to learn to manage marital conflict in an effective and safe way.
Although conflict is unavoidable in a long-term relationship, don’t just see its bad part; from another perspective, it can also become a path to intimacy ultimately. Successful marital conflict resolution should be about fighting fair in marriage. Specifically, no matter how heated an argument is, don’t rake up the past, and don’t attack your spouse’s weak points to hurt him/her; no matter how emotional you are during an argument, just speak your mind and say your piece, rather than aim to fight on until you think you win; and you must have ever realized that your harsh words just add fuel to the fire; yet if you can learn to add a little humor to your speech, you will be amazed that many serious problems could have been handled in a peaceful way.
And don’t squabble endlessly over trivialities because a skirmish may escalate into a major battle if left unchecked; so as long as a compromise or solution is reached, you should remind yourself to stop fighting. Even if a fight is unavoidable, you should also learn to pick your battles wisely, rather than take things all of a lump without any discrimination; and before you get into an argument over an issue with your spouse, you had better confirm again whether the issue at hand is indeed worth arguing.
Last but not least, good humor, enough patience, and mutual respect are the solid bedrock for rules of fighting fair. If you want to get more tips on how to fight fair with your spouse, you might go on to read the post below:
How to fight fair with your spouse – Fight in a healthy way.
(7) Develop personal commitment:
A healthy long term marriage must be built upon the foundation of commitment. Without commitment, every marital relationship will become unsteady.
First, it is necessary to exactly understand what a commitment is in a relationship. It should be a willingness to accept responsibility and devote energy to something that you strongly believe in, or a firm promise or decision to do something.
And there exist 3 levels of commitment in your marriage: personal commitment, moral commitment, and structural commitment. And the following explains each level in details:
- Personal commitment:
This should be the act of fulfilling obligations due to a belief. The reason why it is called “personal commitment” is that such a kind of commitment is voluntary. Although it just has two words, it can be a promise that takes a lifetime to keep. A marriage is a union of one man and one woman, personal commitment is like the cement that binds the two persons.
- Moral commitment:
This is a clear sense that makes people separate the rights and wrongs of a case. A spouse with a strong moral commitment is much less prone to infidelity, because his/her strong moral judgment always encourages him/her to do things that are beneficial to the marital relationship, and constantly warns him/her not to do evil things; this kind of person condemns all sorts of promiscuous behavior and takes warning from other relationships that are affected by infidelity.
- Structural commitment (the constraints of external forces):
This refers to pressure or constraint that makes spouses remain together. Unlike the former two kinds of commitments that are built upon internal values, the structural commitment is generally made by external factors like social relationships, societal expectations, and financial situations.
So, which kind of commitment is the most meaningful to you?
Surely, it is the personal commitment. Arguably, in some cases, a structural or moral commitment may make a spouse stay more committed to the other one; however, these two kinds of commitments are not a necessary part of a happy long term marriage. By contrast, a personal commitment is more involved with an emotional bond between spouses, and that is what a happy marriage needs.
Surely, it requires a lot of work to develop a personal commitment. And if one spouse takes the initiative to demonstrate this kind of commitment but the other one does not reciprocate, it means this marriage goes bad; if things go on like this, it is hard to sustain the one-sided relationship over the long term. Spouses need to keep working hard together and showing affection to each other to keep this commitment alive in their marriages.
The final word:
Every marriage has its unique threats and challenges. Numerous couples, especially newly married couples, lack the security sense in their marriages. Their marriages are so fragile: those couples are very vulnerable to marital crises, and this is one of the main reasons why people divorce at a stunning rate.
If you need to get more valuable tips on how to keep your marriage alive, you might go on to watch the video below to follow the comprehensive guidance that is offered by Brad Browning, a world-renowned marriage coach who has 12+ years of experience working with problematic couples to repair and improve their marriages.
Maybe, you are also interested in the related posts below:
How to have a fulfilling marriage – Make your marriage last.
Top 5 common little things that ruin a marriage.
6 tips on preventing extramarital affairs – Protect your marriage.
How to be a team with your spouse – Develop teamwork in marriage.