Healthy Ways To Help Your Marriage Last

Esther Perel, a world-famous couples therapist, states that “it is the quality of your relationships that determines the quality of your life”. The health of your relationship can be pervasive and interfere with all aspects of life- and healthy relationship building skills are conducing to a much more fulfilling life.

Couples often opt for counselling once habits are ingrained, problems are at crisis point, or after years of unhappiness have soured the water. Even still, good quality couples counselling is highly effective in helping the vast majority of unhappy marriages resolve major issues.

Many faltering relationships are simply suffering from a lack of energy in the relationship. If you are looking for ways to re-energise your relationship or start conversations about hard things, there are some tried and true skills that both researchers and happily married couples consistently model as well as contacting our marriage counselling service.

Think of these as handy tools in the marriage toolbox, which when practised or used regularly, can buffer and boost the energy in a relationship to help make it last, even when instabilities arise.

4 areas that commonly help couples significantly improve their relationships

Make deposits in your marriage well regularly

Keep depositing goodwill and gratitude in your relationship well when you can. Even tiny but regular deposits help for when the cage gets rattled; the little moments of joy, the tiny acknowledgements and thankyou’s, the simple bouts of gratitude for a delicious dinner made. As life’s blows and changes and transitions drain from this well over time, having enough little regular deposits and joyful/grateful memories to draw on becomes a surprisingly sustainable force.

Every single marriage is dealt blows, rattles, struggles as well as joy, beauty and pleasure. When the blows do knock, it you have fortified and replenished your well with the buckets of goodwill, gratitude and faith, it may be drained somewhat; but you’ll have reserves and something still to draw on and put the fires out. If there is nothing in the well when those fires come, the marriage lacks protection.

Start some conversations around the following: work hard to pick out tiny moments of sheer gratitude: and say them out loud, and feel them.

• If you could wake up tomorrow gaining any quality, what would it be?
• Remember the last time you felt extreme desire for your partner?
• Recount the last time you experienced something hysterically funny together

Know when to cool it

We are capable of having successful relationships with many people, provided we have learned relationship skills. Conversely, even the most compatible people can be unhappy in a marriage if managed poorly. Relationship skills are learnable, like tools added to a toolbox, and become honed when used regularly. All couples and marriages will find points of difference and points of struggle. A key relationship skill is learning when to exit an argument, to protect both its victims – you and your partner.

Fighting, to the point of losing awareness of the other person’s perspective or in the pursuit of finding a winner and loser, activates our deep seated survival responses. This response protects us from threat, but also hijacks our brain’s ‘higher’ responses. This usually stops us from being able to represent our thoughts clearly and eloquently or from being able to hear or absorb. Our body and primal brain works to survive the ‘attack’, while our partner is often left wounded.

Learning how to ‘step out’ of a conversation when it begins to escalate into something unhelpful is a skill that will go a long way to protect a marriage. This is what psychologists and couples experts call ‘emotional regulation’, while others call it cooling off.

Emotional regulation involves checking in on yourself and being able to change the heat on the thermostat to match what is actually happening and with whom. Anxiety, dizzy rage and a thumping heart can quickly hijack a well-meaning brain, if not checked and regulated. 

Having the insight to physically feel your mood and watch where your thinking state goes can help you reset and walk away from an altercation so that you have space to make a considered response and avoid needless damage.