Anyone who has ever been in long term relationship can tell you that maintaining a successful relationship is not easy. When you are dating everything seems easy. You only have to focus ion having fun together, connecting and being intimate. You can focus all of your time and attention on making eachother feel special. However, after a few of years, reality sets in. Every day stresses of work, bills, coparenting, never ending house chores and trying to stay awake past 10 PM can definitely take their toll on your relationship. Often couples find them selves in “survival mode” just trying to get through another day without a major blow up with their spouse. Fixing a broken marriage is never an easy thing, but it can be done.

Often a couple’s first instinct is to try marriage counseling. Traditional marriage counseling has serious limitations. As well as being costly, it can be time consuming, demoralizing (really, who likes digging up past grievances) and requires both spouses to participate. Also, a recent study found that most of the time marriage counseling isn’t effective. More than 75% of couples who engaged in it ended up divorced anyway. So traditional marriage counseling is not effective in fixing a broken marriage. The main focus of traditional marriage counseling is to  improve communication between spouses. With this focus, many couples find that they are just able to argue more articulately.

Does that mean that if you are currently fixing a broken marriage you should just give up? No way! Take it from me, who suffered divorce after 22 years of marriage, even under the best of circumstances, the emotional and financial toll of divorce is overwhelming. When children are involved the effects are even more devastating. While my ex husband and I finally  moved on to very fulfilling relationships, it would have been a lot easier in the long run to have fixed the problems in our marriage than to simply end it and start over. So here’s what research and experience have taught me and many others in our situation.

Stop Fixating on Your Problems

Obviously serious problems such as abuse, addiction and infidelity need to be confronted. Serious iisues such as these are not going to just go away and they are “deal breakers” in most relationships. But these types of srious concerns are responsible for only a small fraction of divorces. Most relationships have simply just deteriorated over time. Bickering, taking eachother for granted, lack of intimacy, constant arguing, not being “in love” with the other person anymore. So what happens when youdecide to go to marriage counseling? You focus on your problems! These problems do need to be addressed, but not when your marriage is in “crisis mode”. When your marriage is starting to deteriorate the most imnportant thing to do is focus on the areas that made you fall in love in the first place. Try to reconnect by having fun with your spouse. Stop complaining to your partner, your parents, your co-workers and your friends about your relationship issues. Instead focus on telling your spouse at least one thing that you appreciate about them every day. Start listing of all your happy memories together and make discussing and trying to recreate those the focus. This should start to the energy in your relationship into a more positive direction.

Start Touching

Many relationship experts point out the problem that women need to feel appreciated in order to want to be intimate, while men need to be intimate before they can feel admired or appreciated. Obviously this leads to problems.

Men – please recognize that “ foreplay” is not the two minutes you spend groping your lady’s breasts before you go straight to intercourse. Foreplay starts with helping with chores, paying your lady some nice compliments so she feels appreciated and then offering to rub her feel or shoulders. If you start with these things and just some gentle stroking and cuddling it may well lead to your lady initiating intimacy with you.

Ladies - there is a famous proverb that says “the appetite comes while eating”. Probably the tension in your house is killing your desiore to initiate intimacy with your spouse, but you need to make the effort. Stop acting like you are doing your spouse a favor by being intimate with him! He shouldn’t have to feel like a dog waiting around just bothering and having to beg for a pet. Make a positive effort to initiate sex with your spouse. Commit to yourself to be intimate with your husband every day for a week. You will be amazed at how the dynamic of your relationship will quickly change and the tension of your issues will seem much more manageable, and your husband will seem much more willing to work on them.

Give Your Marriage a Performance Rating

Just like a performance review at work, you should rate your marriage and set goals. Start with completing a simple sentence about each other “I like when you do this…. I don’t like when you do this…let’s both continue doing this…” Discuss your goals for your relationship. Where do you want to be 6 months from now? Do you want to have less consumer debt? Do you want to have a special date night twice a month, just for you two? Be sure that you focused on the first two strategies above before you start formal goal setting. This exercise will only be helpful if you have cultivated some good will towards each other and “reconnected” with some of your earlier romance.

In summary, cultivating new healthy relationship habits is the key to fixing a broken marriage, not revisiting your old marriage grievances in a therapist’s officve. I am certainly not suggesting that relationship professionals aren’t of great value. Many helpful marriage courses and resources are conveniently available on the internet. They can be cost effective, confidential, immediately available. They also have the advantage of being able to help you improve your marriage even if your partner is unwilling to participate in traditional counseling.

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