Being in a long-term relationship can be one of the most rewarding aspects of your life, it can also take a lot of work to maintain success. If you’ve found a person that makes all that work feel worthwhile, congratulations! Follow these tips to keep your marriage strong to hopefully make it easier for you and your partner to create and maintain a strong, happy marriage in the years to come:
Table of Contents
Enable Open Communication
Being able to talk to each other about anything, good or bad, is critical to your relationship’s success. Doing so really allows you both to truly share in each other’s lives. And it can keep any issues from festering and growing into resentment or other problems.
Open communication should also still apply in times of disagreement. Even when you’re arguing, you both should still feel safe to talk to the other person without fear of extreme judgment or reprisal. In this case, when emotions are high, you should consider the rules of “fair fighting.”
Make Sure You Share Similar Values
You don’t need to have identical views on everything. But you do want to be copacetic on the things that matter to you. How important is having the same political opinions? Views on religion? The environment? How to raise the kids, or if you even want to have kids? With your foundational values in sync, you can navigate your way through less important issues as they come up.
Keep in mind that people’s values can change over time; even ones you both felt so steadfast about before. Such changes can be challenging to a marriage. But assuming you have open communication and mutual respect, they don’t have to spell the end.
Be Compassionate
If you don’t agree with everything your partner says or does, you should try to understand why they’re saying or doing something. Having compassion for your spouse is just another way of showing how much you respect them and their opinions. You care about what’s going on with them. And for you, being able to express compassion can help you to not always take things personally.
Like and Love Each Other
If and when your relationship’s passion slows to a simmer, you will hopefully find that you still like the person you’re with. You are genuinely happy, comfortable, and relaxed just spending time together. In other words, you should be friends as well as lovers.
Be Honest and Trusting
Being able to communicate openly with your partner should help with this aspect a lot. You need to be honest about how you’re feeling. And if you’ve done something wrong, you can admit it.
Conversely, you must trust that your partner is honest with you. This can be a challenge if you’ve been burned before. But if your spouse is the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, you should be able to tell the difference between your previous deceitful relationships and this open and honest one.
Laugh Together
Having similar senses of humor means more than just getting each other’s jokes. Finding the same things funny reveals a certain shared view of the world.
Ultimately, you and your spouse are in this together and it takes effort to maintain happiness within the marriage. It’s you two against the world. It helps if you both can laugh at it together.
