If your marriage is failing, you might feel like you’re drifting away from your spouse day by day. Maybe it feels like you’re living with a college roommate you don’t particularly like. Maybe you feel powerless to stop divorce and you’re scouring the internet for some secret code word that will turn your significant other into the man or woman you fell in love with.
Unfortunately, that secret code word doesn’t exist. But I can tell you from experience that you can bring back the person voodoo Love spells you fell in love with if you’re willing to put in a little effort over time.
The secret is to inject some regular displays of affection into the everyday life of your relationship.
The first thing you’ll need to do is talk to your partner and agree that you want to save your marriage and stop divorce. Once you’ve agreed to it, you need to talk things out with them. I’ve talked about this to death in my other articles, but it basically consists of locking yourself in a room with your spouse for several hours and being as honest with them about your resentments and appreciations as you possibly can. When all of this is done, start throwing in some affection rituals on a daily basis.
Start with a kiss goodbye in the morning. Throw in a few minutes of cuddling on the couch when work ends (or an hour or two later if your spouse’s arms aren’t the most appealing thing directly after a stressful day-they will be at some point). Try showering together, or trading back rubs, or even going to a book store and reading while sitting next to each other if you’re both bookworms.
This works because it helps to bring back to companionship in your marriage. Since friendship and enjoying each other’s company makes up a good chunk of the bedrock for your relationship, you need to work on that quite a bit. Spending comforting time together and making rituals out of little (even stereotypical) displays of affection can really ramp up how much you enjoy spending time with the other person. From there, the romance (everything from candlelight dinners to salsa dancing) will come naturally.
It may not be easy at first. The morning kiss goodbye may seem forced, and you might not enjoy simply because of that fact. This is why you need to make sure to discuss it ahead of time and view it as something that you’re doing to help your relationship. And once you’ve been doing it for a while, you’ll want to give your spouse that morning kiss and you’ll feel a little sad if you forget. It’s kind of like smiling: If you do it enough, you’re going to start actually feeling happy. The more you act like you enjoy spending time with your spouse, the more you’ll actually want to be with them and the stronger your drive to save the relationship will be.