Your marriage needs this question answered.
Can you or will you?
Yes, you can wake up 30 minutes early to have coffee with your spouse.
You also can schedule a birthday reminder for your spouse.
Comes on the same day every year.
Did you know that?
You can plan ahead.
You also can plan that date.
The million-dollar question is, will you?
That’s where change happens.
That’s the real question that you need to answer for yourself.
Think about it for your marriage.
The next time that you’re tempted to say, “I can’t,” just remember this message.
You think your cute name-calling is harmless.
You might call your spouse something silly and say, “Ah, we’re just joking.”
But here’s the test.
Do you know what the test is?
If you both aren’t genuinely smiling, if one of you feels hurt in the end, let me tell you something.
It’s not working.
If your spouse is bringing it up in session with me, trust me, it’s not working.
Playful is only playful when you both agree that it is.
Otherwise, it’s tearing your spouse down.
It’s tearing down the trust between the two of you, even in the smallest of ways.
So maybe, maybe, just maybe, it’s time to let those cute insults go.
Are you in?
Do you want to know if your marriage is on track?
Check these five green flags.
You laugh together.
Check.
You can disagree safely.
Check.
You celebrate each other’s wins.
Check.
You feel seen, and you feel heard.
Check.
And check.
You support each other’s growth.
Check.
These are all signs of a healthy, connected marriage.
Which one do you already have?
What is already happening in your marriage?
Comment below.
Less than 50% of married couples take this to heart.
If you and your spouse hate fighting, hear me out.
Conflict isn’t the enemy.
Avoiding it is.
Healthy conflict, when handled well, that’s what leads to deep understanding.
So don’t be afraid of hard conversations.
Walk through them together, hand in hand.
Conflict is a doorway to connection.
It wasn’t a perfect conversation by any means.
But for once, neither of the two of them yelled.
No one walked away.
For once, no one shut down mid-conversation.
They both stayed in it.
They heard each other.
And at the end, they actually high-fived one another.
They laughed a little, even—because growth doesn’t always feel like fireworks.
Sometimes, transformation just sounds like, “We did it.”
Nobody is talking about this marriage strategy.
Stop and evaluate how you’re doing.
Whether you’re consciously working on something—and especially when you are—stop, look back, and evaluate how that event went.
How was date night last night?
What worked?
What didn’t work?
How can we do better next time?
I teach my couples how and why to do this with their weekends, with their vacations, with big family reunions, or with trips overseas.
If you don’t ever stop and evaluate, you keep doing the thing on repeat—whether or not it’s working for the two of you—without making any necessary and appropriate adjustments.
Make sure that the next trip, the next date night, the next dinner party for your 20 best friends goes by leaps and bounds better than the last one.
What you don’t evaluate cannot improve.
Your marriage included.
