How to Maintain a Healthy Relationship with Your Spouse

Despite romance movies and novels often making marriage seem like some effortless happily ever after, in real life, over half of all marriages are doomed to fail. Healthy and happy marriages require dedication and a lot of thought. Most relationships have a honeymoon period of life being bliss and having no problem love can’t solve. It’s generally a short lived moment, however. Those problems, worries, and obligations eventually do arise, and they often strain and break marriages that aren’t built on a firm foundation. So, how do you build this firm foundation to keep your marriage solid till death do us part?

Keep Your Marriage Honest And Open On Money Matters

According to this CNN report, money is the number one cause of partners fighting, and 40 percent of spouses say they’ve lied to their significant other about a purchase.

Many families go through financial hardships. It’s certainly stressful, but that’s not the real marriage killer here. Instead, it’s any dishonesty and inequality that contributed to the hardship that’s often the dealbreaker.

Family law attorney Steven Mindel described to Business Insider how financial infidelity can wreck a marriage even faster than sexual infidelity. If you want to maintain a strong, healthy relationship with your spouse, then you’ll need to continually be upfront and honest about your family and personal finances.

This means not stashing money in secret accounts and lying about spending habits and financial obligations. Don’t hide extra income, winnings, and inheritances. Job loss, promotions, and raises are all income facets that you should share immediately with your spouse. Make financial planning, budgeting, and bill-paying a group effort.

The ultimate goal should be a mutually beneficial financial situation whereby the responsibilities, rewards, and burdens are all shared openly and equally.

Establish Mutually Agreed Upon Family Rules

Having ground rules for how your family will function day-to-day and long-term is essential to keeping a marriage strong. Even if it’s just the two of you, being on different pages on the basics, such as who washes the dishes and cooks, what type of laundry soap is used, or what temperature the HVAC is set to can all add up to a lot of arguing and resentment.

Agreeing on family rules is of particular importance when kids are involved. Effective and consistent co parenting from birth onward via mutual beliefs, values, and attitudes is an essential component to a healthy marital relationship. Researchers actually found that spouses who have parenting conflicts over infants are likely to have a poorer marital relationship by the time the child is just three-years-old.

RSVP - Respect, Support, Value, Prioritize - Your Marriage

Respecting your partner isn’t about a perfect utopia where you never disagree. There will be times when feelings get hurt, mistakes are made, and actions are disappointing, but the thing to never lose sight of is that you’re a team. Teams communicate their strengths and weaknesses and develop a counterbalancing plan of action to adapt and conquer.

Supporting your spouse means understanding and acknowledging their needs, aspirations, and desires whether you agree with them or not. Manipulating a partner to follow the direction you want for your own life and/or their life is a recipe for regrets and resentment. Provide honest feedback, but you must make sure it comes from a place of love and support and leaves room for negotiation.

Never forget your spouse is a valuable member of your marriage. Everyone has flaws and defects, and you likely knew most of your partner’s weaknesses and strengths before you tied the knot. By keeping a positive mental attitude, you’ll keep sight of your partner’s virtues and their importance in walking beside, not in front or behind you.

One of the biggest keys to maintaining a strong and healthy marriage is to simply make him/her a priority, even over the children. It’s easy to get caught up in work, social obligations, and parenting to the point that you put your number one advocate and life partner on the back burner. Figure out when the best time to cruise to Alaska is and take your spouse on a lover’s vacation, put your daily thoughts about them into actions that show you care, and never forget to show up for their important moments.

In closing, you can maintain a strong and healthy marriage that lasts a lifetime, but it takes a lot of thought in each step you make. That’s not always easy to practice, but what worth having is ever easily gained?