Published on November 27, 2018 and Last Updated on October 5, 2020
For many people, marriage is the source of their greatest happiness. We start out with a loving partner that is willing to help us, protect us, be with us, and love us – “till death do we part.” The feeling of love, companionship, and security is truly wonderful.
On the other hand, for many people, marriage is the source of their greatest sorrow and pain. Arguments, yelling, abuse, affairs, and more can cause serious emotional damage. And, it’s even worse because these issues come at the hands of the one that was supposed to be there with you, side-by-side in happiness, for life.
Just like any other major life accomplishment, having a mutually satisfying, lasting marriage takes time and effort. What kind of time and effort are we looking at here?
It takes a willingness to adapt to life and marriage as both go on. While it doesn’t have to, the head over heels in love phase ends or slows down for most people. To keep that alive or to rekindle the flame takes a willingness to change and adapt. And, not just a willingness but an actual change.
When the fantasy marriage feeling of newlyweds meets real life, adapting is often necessary to keep the love alive. For example, when the first child comes along, all the sudden it may seem that your wife loves someone else more than you. You may wonder why she isn’t up for the rolls in the hay of yesteryear. You may get lonely, desperate, or even bitter. It’s not that you don’t love your new child, it’s that you miss the time and sex with your wife.
Or, perhaps a new job opportunity requires you to move across the country. Maybe one or both of you face health challenges or you are faced with financial problems that seem impossible to overcome.
Perhaps, you argue too much or start to doubt your spouse’s faithfulness because of a situation. Maybe, you start to realize that the feeling of deep love that you once felt is slipping away.
These kinds of challenges are normal and most couples experience them throughout their marriage.
Those couples that can successfully navigate these rough spots in the road can become stronger together, can deepen their love, and can have a happy marriage despite these problems.
While this site is full of techniques you can use to overcome these types of issues, here we’ll discuss three.
1. Take responsibility for your situation. For example, you took part in doing what caused the baby to come. This isn’t something that your wife sprang on you – this was and is a mutual thing. Now that the baby is here, quit blaming your wife for being tired, inattentive, or otherwise not available. Learn how to be patient. The last thing your wife or new baby needs is a father or husband that is angry.
Likewise:
- You decided to move far away from your family. When they aren’t around to help, there is no one to blame but yourself.
- You decided to buy the new car instead of the used one. You should have planned better on how you were going to afford the payments. Now that you can’t, there’s no one to blame but yourself.
- You decided to keep eating the way you do so when you gain weight and start to have health issues, the responsible person is you.
No matter the situations you face, the same principles apply.
Even when someone does something to hurt us and we may feel like we are 100% innocent, we rarely are. For example, a lot of people get very frustrated and hurt when their spouse seems withdrawn or rebuffs their efforts to be intimate.
Instead of immediately placing blame, a more responsible approach to figuring out the problem might be:
- In a kind and patient way, try to find out if their spouse is facing stress or health issues or other concerns that may be contributing to the problem. Perhaps their sleep has been irregular, or they are facing huge stresses at work. Maybe they feel like you are never there for them or they feel lonely or unappreciated.
- Try to understand and help them overcome those issues in a non-pushy way.
- Ask yourself some questions. While the questions you ask will vary depending on what you are facing, you can get some ideas from this example. You could ask yourself what you could and should do differently to help overcome the lack of intimacy. Don’t put the blame on your spouse even if they do have health or other issues. The focus here is on you and what you could do to potentially make a difference.
- Ask yourself if you are you meeting your spouse’s most important needs in the way they want them met? Are you doing all you can do to keep the flame burning? (Note that this isn’t about intimacy it’s about other parts of your life together. Are you helping as much as you need to in the house? Do you spend quality time together doing things you both enjoy? Be willing to meet your spouse’s needs first.
- Ask yourself if you are still Mr. or Mrs. Right or are there things that you need to improve in. What are you willing to change or give up doing in order to overcome this problem?
Taking responsibility isn’t about beating ourselves up over our failures. It’s not about asking what could have been. It’s not about making ourselves miserable.
But it is about facing the facts and figuring out a way to improve our situation. You can’t change what you did yesterday, but you can learn things today that can help you avoid future problems. If you are responsible, that is.
2. Find win-win solutions. For example, after the baby is born, it’s clear that you and your wife still need alone time to keep your love alive. But how can you manage it with a new baby? How can it happen when your wife is exhausted most of the time?
Staying with the new baby example, what are ways that you can responsibly and fairly handle the situation?
- Take your turn with diaper duty and other childcare tasks. If you are willing to help more, then maybe your wife won’t be so tired and will have more energy to spend time alone with you.
- Don’t be selfish. Put yourself in your wife’s shoes. What if you just got out of surgery and were feeling awful even weeks later? What if you didn’t have the desire or energy to do things your wife wanted to do including have sex? How would you want her to handle the situation? Would you want her to get demanding, impatient, and continually remind you that you aren’t holding up your end of the deal?
- Don’t demand solutions that are not win-win. You may think that an easy solution is to just hire a babysitter so that you and your wife can continue your weekly date nights. However, your wife may be uncomfortable with this. Mothers are by nature protective of their babies and especially newborns. Many mothers don’t trust others to take care of their baby. This may even apply to family members or good friends. If you demand that she do something that causes stress, worry, or frustration you are guilty of one of the 4 C’s – Control. Control kills love and without that love, your wife isn’t going to want to spend alone time with you regardless of who takes care of the baby.
- Ask your wife what you can do to make some alone time happen? Ask in a kind and loving way. No sarcasm, no criticism, and no control allowed.
- Take note of when the baby normally sleeps the longest. Maybe you can find a couple of hours here or there to have your alone time. But, as mentioned above, if you aren’t handling the rest of the situation the right way, those 2 hours won’t do you any good.
- Serve selflessly and put your own needs on the back burner for a while. The key here is that you are looking for a win-win. If you hold off on your own needs but are angry, bitter, disappointed, etc. in your heart and mind, it will show and will ruin your attempts to prove you are willing to be a good teammate.
3. Keep going. Often, the difference between success and failure is that the successful person persisted just a little bit longer.
Marriage and life happen to us every day. Therefore, we must work at making the best of things every day.
If a person wanted to lose weight but only stuck to the diet one day out of seven or every other week, do you think they would successfully lose weight? Clearly not. Or if they do, it’s more by chance than by design.
Every day we do certain tasks such as bathing, changing clothes, eating, and sleeping. If we don’t bathe regularly, there are consequences. If we don’t get enough sleep, there will eventually be trouble.
If we do these things daily, then we realize the importance of consistent action. Yet, when it comes to achieving goals or fixing problems, too many of us never have the success we desire because we are inconsistent in what we do.
When it comes to building love, for example, we also need consistent action and we need to keep at it for the rest of our lives. We may need to:
- Express thanks to our spouse for the things they do to help us and our family
- Touch our spouse. This could be a kiss, being close, having sex, or holding hands.
- Spend time in conversation with our spouse.
- Do our part to help with the cleaning, cooking, and other family responsibilities.
- Spend time together in enjoyable activities.
- Much more.
If we don’t do these kinds of things consistently, there are consequences. And, if we don’t keep them going for a lifetime, we may find ourselves facing one of the ultimate negative consequences – an affair or divorce.
Marriage is tough and takes dedication, commitment, and time. But, we can affect the outcomes of our life and marriage by the things we do. Learn what it takes to turn your life around or at least improve it. Learn how you can stay in love for a lifetime.
In the end, even though marriage is tough, if we do the right things it will be all worth the effort. Learn more about what those right things are by subscribing today.