A Recipe to Keep Your Marriage Healthy

Back in February, I wrote a post highlighting the importance of accepting your partner for a successful marriage. (You can read it here.) In that post, I also briefly touched on what can be done to make a marriage succeed. I got requests from some readers to elaborate on this topic further, hence this post today.

I am not an expert marriage counselor, but I have personal experience of being happily married for last 33 years. I have also observed closely and learned from my family members. My parents have enjoyed 60+ years of marital bliss, My brothers have clocked 44 and 39 years of marriage respectively and my sister 36 years. Many of my friends have also celebrated their silver jubilee. I will attempt to capture the essence of all this learning and experience into a recipe for healthy marriage.

This recipe includes a set of do and don’ts and early warning signs of trouble that you should not ignore. It is in no way a comprehensive compilation of everything you want to know on this topic, but I will consider my effort fruitful if it acts as a good starting point for you.

The first and the foremost requirement is a change of mindset on a couple of fronts.

• Take active role in keeping your marriage healthy, and not just leave it to chances. It is your life, and you can shape it. Do not let life happen to you, but make it happen the way you want to.
• Take a proactive approach. Try to keep your marriage healthy by nurturing it regularly, and do not wait for trouble to erupt before you act.
• Stop seeing yourself as two individuals living together, and start thinking and behaving as an integrated unit. It is vital that we focus our energies on merger, and give preference to interdependence over independence. Don’t worry, there is plenty of space for individuality in a successful marriage.

The most essential ingredient for a happy marriage is a close bond between the two of you. The strength of this bond between you directly determines the health of your marriage. When you have a strong bond, you can even face major turbulences together and emerge stronger. On the contrary, even small challenges can take you to the brink of separation if you do not have this affinity.

How do I form a strong bond and what do I do to keep it healthy? Fortunately, it is not rocket science. Most of it is everyday common sense. If you just take one small step everyday to build a loving relationship, you would have moved 365 steps ahead in a year.

It is believed that there are four important parts of our being – physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. A healthy person needs to keep all four parts in good health. By the same logic, we bond with our spouse in all these parts. My recipe involves being aware of these four parts, and make regular efforts to nurture and strengthen the bond with your spouse in all the four dimensions.

Physical

This is the most visible part of your marital relationship. You live together, share things, set up a home, and over time learn to take care of each other. Sexual relationship is an important part of it, though not everything. With a healthy physical bond, you feel comfortable with each other, feel naturally attracted to your partner, and feel like being one physically. To nurture this dimension, consciously find ways to spend time together – take time to watch a movie together, or go on a dinner date, exercise together if you like, or play a sport.. there are numerous such possible activities. If you keep doing it regularly, you can strengthen the physical bond with your spouse. I know you are thinking now, “This is all OK, but I am too busy to make a career for myself to take time for such recreational activities.” I understand the pressures of modern life. As a minimum, you should make a practice to have dinner together every day and sleep together every night. This is not too much to ask, and it can make a huge difference in your life. The physical dimension also involves taking care of your needs as a family unit; e.g. if the husband loses his job, the wife uses her salary to take care of family expenses.

But we do tend to ignore this basic principle from time to time and it causes deterioration in our physical bond. Look for these early warning signs and take quick action to contain the damage before it is too late:

• You are not living together for more than six months due to job or education related issues. Act before ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ principle kicks in. Make every possible attempt to find a job closer home so that you can live together. In the worst case, if that does not work out, take time to travel periodically to be with your spouse and refresh your relationship.
• You have not gone out together for past three months. Think carefully, any activity may qualify here – a dine out, a movie, shopping, attending a party, etc. If you have not done any outing in recent months, it is time to sit up and correct it. Why not go out to the neighborhood shopping mall this weekend and have some good time together? I know as a wife, you may enjoy shopping more with your female friends, and as a husband, you may be more excited to have a beer with your male friends, and this may be keeping you from being together, but if you see this warning, it is time to force yourself to act.
• You do not share your stuff, and maintain strict separation between ‘his’ things and ‘your’ things. Pay careful attention to your language for next few days. If you habitually use the word ‘our’ more often that ‘your’ or ‘mine’, you can relax. If you find yourself in other category, work gradually on increasing your sharing with your spouse. An extreme red flag may be if the two of you have separate beds or bedrooms. Never go for individual bedrooms irrespective of the size of your house.

Mental

At mental level, a healthy relationship implies that you have respect for each other, can relate to the other at mental level, and can strike a healthy adult–to–adult conversation. (For details, read ‘Games People Play’ by Eric Berne). In fact, when this relationship matures, you may start enjoying such discussions and may eagerly look forward to it. Life presents us with numerous problems and challenges, and we are equipped with mental abilities to deal with it. When we join our mental faculties to solve a problem together as a couple, it multiplies our abilities, and makes our mental bond stronger. Similarly, there are many decisions to be taken on a daily basis, and every time we work together to arrive at a decision, we come closer mentally.

Remember that it is not necessary that the two of you have to think alike or agree on everything. If you find yourself disagreeing, it is good, since it means that you have different ways of looking at the situation. It is common management wisdom that when people with different mindset work together, they can be much more effective. You need to learn how to use synergy so that one plus one equals eleven.

But there are times this aspect of our relationship gets neglected. Look for the following early warnings signs that indicate that you are falling apart in the mental dimension and act immediately:

• One partner takes all decisions. In our male dominated society, it is common that the husband tends to believe himself to be mentally ‘superior’ and takes all the decisions. This is not a healthy practice, and a better way is to discuss and decide together.
• Each of you take own decisions. You may believe that this is better than the above situation, but it is not. It does not give rise to the feeling of being one unit. If you are doing this, try to force yourself to take at least one joint decision and see how it feels.
• You have not talked together on any topic for more than ten minutes for last one month. Take time to sit down and strike a conversation. It can be any topic, but it is important that the two of you talk regularly.

 
Emotional

This is a vital dimension, and most of us can easily relate to it when we think of love. A strong bond of love between the two partners can be the glue that can help keep them together and tide over any crisis in life. We human beings have an inherent need to connect emotionally with others, and a marital relationship provides an excellent way to address the need. We can take our emotional bond to a new high by regularly making small deposits in our ‘emotional bank account’.

If you see any of the following early warning signs in your marriage, it is time for some quick corrective action:

• You no longer feel love towards your spouse. If you face this, think carefully what you can do to come out of it. Remember that love is an action, not just a feeling that happens to you. So, love your spouse, reinforce the message, “I love you” with her every now and then, take every opportunity to express your feelings with little acts of love regularly, and you will find reciprocation, and a warm feeling of love growing inside you.
• You do not trust your spouse. This usually implies that the lack of trust is mutual, and the balance in emotional bank account is low. Work on building trust gradually by emotional deposits. Take time to understand your spouse. Take extra efforts to keep your promises. Be sincere and honest with your partner. Everyone makes mistakes, but be quick to admit your mistake and apologize.

Spiritual

The spiritual dimension relates to the bigger purpose and meaning of life. A good way to develop a stronger spiritual bond is to pray together. This gets you closer spiritually in the initial stages. But at the next level, you want to have a common mission statement for your family. Such a shared vision of future binds you so strongly that no force in the world can take you apart.

What is an early warning sign of a weak spiritual bonds? If the two of you have very different personal mission statements, and do not share a common vision of what you want to do as a family, treat it as the ultimate red flag for your marriage. It may eventually lead to a separation, even if you enjoy a strong bond at physical, mental, and emotional level. What can you do to correct it? Should you give up your dreams or get your spouse to give up her dreams? Such a thing will be unthinkable in modern times. Do pursue your individual dreams, but take time to weave it into a cohesive story of your family ‘dream’ that both of you can relate to. Let us take an example of a film actress marrying a cricket star. They both are ambitious, have their dreams of individual success, but it is important for them to have a shared vision of their family’s future. It is this vision that will keep them together despite all odds.

Look around and observe successful couples around you. You will notice that they all display a good balance in all four dimensions of relationship. They have learned by sheer experience and experiment to nurture a strong bond that keeps them together. They have invariably faced troubled times in one or more dimensions, but managed to tackle it based on the strength in other dimensions and emerged stronger from the encounter.

On the contrary, when a couple takes the unfortunate decision to separate, it is a result of gradual weakening of their bond over time in all four dimensions, till it snaps. If you ask them the reason for the split, very likely they would offer one of the following, can you connect these to the four dimensions we talked above?

• I do not like being with my spouse any more.
• We no longer sit and talk.
• There is no love left between us.
• We do not see any future for the two of us as a family.

We know now how to recognize the weakening of bond and act to reinforce it before it breaks.

Disclaimer: This post does not apply to the cases where domestic violence or dowry issues are the reasons of separation.