The Most Important Ingredient For A Successful Marriage

“If we all were alike honourable and true, as I wish to be, it would be unnecessary to bind men and women together by law, since two persons who may have chosen each other from affection, possessing heart and honour, could not part.” ~ Harriette Wilson

I am a strong believer that in order to have a healthy, happy marriage is by not forgetting to play.  Really.  When you are dating, you are having interesting conversations, discovering new places, making each other laugh and appreciating everything about each other.

Then, you decide to get married, and you have bills to pay, dinner to make and garbage to take out.  Somewhere along the way, we forget to make time for pleasure.  It seems a logical place to cut when the kids need to be driven to sports and helped with the homework.

Don’t get me wrong, marriage is hard work, but it also should have daily laughter and playfulness.  Otherwise, year after year, the connection in the relationship can start to break down and we forget why we fell in love in the first place.  I know, it happened to me.

There was always something more pressing to do.  We had two kids, we were trying to run businesses, we were always broke.  We didn’t go on vacation for 7 years.  We weren’t connecting anymore and we were wondering why.  We didn’t have money to go to marriage counseling or weekend getaways.

When we realized that we weren’t making time or spending money for our marriage, we decided that it was time we did.  Bluntly put, if you get divorced, that’s a lot of money!  If you fell in love in the first place, maybe that is where to find the feelings you lost.  We used to pull out the wedding videos and talk about our first several dates.  That was always fun.

I always tried to think of new ways to connect.  Tell me 10 things you like about me and I’ll tell you 10 things I like about you.  Slipping love notes into his lunch and staying focused on all the things you like instead of all the things you don’t.  Perspective really is a choice!!

I really believe being talked into purchasing a time share saved our marriage.  We got a great deal and we began to go on vacation each year.  That’s when I learned the value of vacation and play.  We got to relax and enjoy each other and there were no chores to be done.  Every other year we would go without the kids and have a little honeymoon over and over.  We invested in weekend marriage workshops 1-2x a year to learn to communicate better.  We became strong together.

I really feel like we were put here to learn and grow.  Each day we need to find our joy and when you are in joy and gratitude, everything else falls into place.  So, my question to you is:  Do you want to spend thousands of dollars on an ugly divorce or do you want to invest in bringing happiness to your marriage?

“There’s no substitute for moonlight and kissing.” ~ Barbara Cartland