This Valentine’s Day, Give Your Spouse the Gift of “Us”

Over the past 20 years, I’ve sat down with more than 5,000 engaged couples. One of the great surprises is how few truly mismatched couples I've met. There have been some great couples who I thought would sail through life together, and other couples who I thought should not get married. But the great majority have been reasonably well-matched couples who could have a successful marriage. Yet many couples who could succeed at marriage have reached out to me over the years asking for help. Where did they go wrong?

One hint is found in what these couples share when I ask them about their difficulties. They will talk about this issue or that issue, but inevitably almost all these couples will conclude by saying, “and we have a baby.” Becoming parents is the first great challenge most married couples face and, sadly, most couples do not handle it well. According to Dr. John Gottman, two-thirds of couples experience a “precipitous” decline in marital satisfaction after the birth of a baby.

But it’s not all bad news. Dr. Gottman also found that some marriages—1 in 6—improve in quality after the baby is born. If some marriages get better after the baby is born, there must be something in the marriage that explains why some marriages improve and others decline.

To Succeed, You Have to Be a Team

Here’s my theory: marriage will test your love, and raising children together is one of its greatest tests. You need to be a great team to pass this test. Unfortunately, most couples are not a great team.

The engaged couples I meet with are usually at about a 4 in their teamwork. They think they are a good team, but it is only because their lives are relatively easy. Now, married with children, the degree of difficulty in their lives has risen, but their teamwork has stayed at 4. They are discovering—often daily—that they can’t rely on each other. Their happiness in marriage takes hit after hit.

Sadly, many couples never work on their teamwork. Perhaps they think, like I thought myself, that being “two good people” should be enough for a happy marriage. It isn’t. If we want to truly enjoy our marriages, we need to work at becoming a better team.

In this post, I’d like to address a crucial aspect of teamwork that couples often overlook: being a team in the “small picture” of everyday life.

Navigate Life’s Twists and Turns Together 

When my wife and I first got married, it was just the two of us living in an apartment. Today, we have two daughters, a dog, a house, and jobs that ask more of us. We have impossibly long to-do lists.

Even in the early days of our marriage, when times were easy, we were tripped up by such things as my failure to clean the dishes quickly enough. Today, with so much more to do, we could be arguing all day, every day, if we’re not on the same page.

Thankfully, we received a wake-up call when we read the research that becoming parents would likely lead us to argue even more frequently. We needed to get our act together if we wanted to enjoy having children.

We learned to schedule “business meetings” and “synchronize expectations” regarding housework. At one such meeting before our baby’s arrival, I offered to take over the grocery shopping so my wife could get some naps, and we agreed to switch to paper plates for the first six months of our baby’s life. Making these adjustments kept the bickering about housework at bay when we had a baby.

If we want to truly enjoy our marriages, we need to work at becoming a better team.

In the years since, we’ve called new “business meetings” in anticipation of major life transitions: the purchase of our house, children starting school, one of us taking a new job. Couples often get into a routine. A change in their lives can throw these routines into turmoil. Periodic meetings help couples navigate life’s twists and turns. My wife and I now have a shared plan for how we are going to manage our household. 

That’s great, but what do we do when life doesn’t go according to plan? My wife loves to cook and agreed to be the chef in our family, but should I expect her to make dinner when our baby gets sick and she hasn’t slept in a week?

Stop and Look at Each Other

Here is where couples make their biggest mistake. We are so busy, we move so fast, we get so comfortable at home, that we no longer take a moment to look at each other with fresh eyes. A friend of mine walked in the door one evening and asked his wife, a mother of three young children, what was for dinner. She threw a frying pan at him, shouting “You make dinner!” My friend is a good guy. If he had taken a moment to notice how tired his wife was, he might have offered to make dinner.

It’s not just husbands who run afoul. When I advised one couple to commit to a daily, two-minute greeting ritual, the husband told how he had come home several months earlier, excited to share news of a major job promotion with his wife—only to find she was too busy on her phone to acknowledge his presence. Deflated, he kept his good news to himself, and they missed a chance to celebrate. Several months later, I could still see the disappointment in his face. 

Being a team in marriage isn’t just about getting things done; it’s also about celebrating life’s joys together. As Scott Stanley has written, we all want to be in a relationship that has this quality of “us.” But the sad reality of marriage for many of us is we’ve gotten so busy we’ve lost the “us.”

Don’t Settle for Being “Good” at Marriage

When I first got married, I wanted to be good at marriage, and I thought we were good as long as we weren’t fighting. But with this mindset, my wife had to express frustration to get my attention. It pains me now to realize how many evenings I wasn’t there for her when she could have used a shoulder to lean on. I was satisfied with peace when what we really needed was connection.

I no longer want to be good at marriage. I want to do better. I want to be a husband who notices his wife needs support—without her having to ask for it. To be this husband, I need to get in the habit of stopping and looking at my wife every day.

I've come to view every day of our marriage as a “game”—one we can lose if we’re not paying attention. Our opponent in marriage is formidable. Chaos and exhaustion are the “stars” of this opposing team, and each day they line up across from us and menace our marriages.

In the face of this daily challenge, I urge couples not to settle for good enough. Instead, strive to work as a team that “wins” every day of your marriage. Striving to be a perfect team in marriage isn’t about being perfect. We are going to make mistakes! It's more about embracing a mindset that we need to bring our “A-game” to our marriage every day.

It’s vitally important that couples make this daily effort. You never know what’s going to happen—good or bad—on any given day. If you’re not in the habit of paying attention every day, you’re going to miss important opportunities to connect. Miss too many of these moments, and one day you’ll wake up and realize you’ve drifted apart as a couple. 

But it’s not just the random day here and there that will test your marriage. There will be whole stretches of your marriage where the degree of difficulty will be 10. My wife and I suffered for years with one of the most difficult things a couple can struggle with: infertility. It was an extraordinarily dark time in our life.

Striving to be a perfect team in marriage isn’t about being perfect. It's more about embracing a mindset that we need to bring our “A-game” to our marriage every day.

There were days my wife couldn’t hide her devastation, but there were many days she did her best to put on a brave face. On these days, thanks to our ritual of dancing with each other at the moment of reunion, I saw the hurt she was trying to hide. Her tears would flow, and I would sit with her, giving her my shoulder to cry on.

Infertility, like parenting, is one of those severe challenges that put marriage to the test—with too many couples failing. But my wife and I were not driven apart. It took us four long years to come to terms with infertility, but thanks to our practice of taking time to connect every day and work as a team, we made it. 

How to Improve Teamwork in Your Marriage

My work with thousands of couples over these past 20 years has convinced me that a solid majority of couples can truly succeed at marriage. The key to their success is learning to pay attention to each other and striving to work as a team—not just when marriage is easy but on all those days when the degree of difficulty in marriage is 8, 9, or 10.

Couples who do this are setting themselves up for success. Striving to be a perfect team in marriage might seem to be a tall order, but here are practical tips—eminently doable—that can dramatically improve your teamwork:

• Commit to simple daily greeting rituals. Start and end every day with a positive connection, stopping long enough to truly look at each other. In-person connections are best, but video calls and messages are also effective.
• Don’t wait for your spouse to ask for help. At least once a day, ideally as part of your morning ritual, ask your spouse, “What can I do for you today?”
• Incorporate appreciation into your daily rituals. Show your “teammate” his or her contributions are noticed and appreciated. When my wife takes just three seconds to tell me after a long day, “Thank you for working hard for us,” I am more motivated the next day.
• Maintain a shared calendar. A shared to-do app is also a “must have” for couples who want to efficiently get things done. I programmed the app to nag me, so my wife doesn’t have to.
• Get in the habit of setting a time to talk so you are both fully present for your conversations.

Couples with systems, habits, rituals, and traditions do a better job of being there for each other consistently. They “win” far more days than they lose. Most importantly, they maintain that feeling of being an “us,” even when the challenges of life threaten to overwhelm them and split them apart.

This Valentine’s Day, why not take your teamwork in marriage to the next level and give your spouse the precious gift of “us”?

Peter McFadden, a New York-based marriage coach who has worked with more than five thousand couples over the past 20+ years, blogs on marriage at MarriageFun101.com.

*Photo credit: Shutterstock