Become Each Other's Best Friend

What are the secrets to creating a lifelong love? Well, there aren’t any real secrets, but there are a lot of things that you can do to make your marriage happy and fulfilling. Here is one of the most important ones. I will cover some of the others in future blogs.

Be Each Other’s Best Friend

Ask yourself, “How do I treat my friends?” and “How do I treat my partner differently?” Erma Bombeck once wrote a piece about how strange it would be if we treated our friends the same way we treated out family at the dinner table. We’d invite our friends to dinner, but before we ate we’d ask them if they washed their hands first – “did you use soap?. When they pass on the veggies we get gruff and tell them that if they don’t eat their spinach they won’t get any dessert, and so on. Of course we treat visitors a little differently than family, but overall we need to be as respectful to our spouse as we would anyone else – perhaps even more so.

How often do you play together? When was the last time that you shared a good joke together? How often do you plan time just to hang out, relax and enjoy each other’s company? What do you enjoy doing with your friends that you could also enjoy with your partner? How comfortable are you sharing personal thoughts and feelings with your wife/husband? How good are you at listening without getting upset at what is being said? These are very important questions to answer as the quality of your relationship depends on the quantity and the quality of your time together.

Plan time in your life to be your partner’s friend, and make a commitment to be a great friend to him/her. Act like you did when you were first getting to know each other, happy, vulnerable, energized. Marriage is a lot of work, and most couples will agree with that statement; but all too often we forget to do that work. We begin to take each other for granted and we fall into a routine that doesn’t include enough positive time together.

So, get out your date book and make a date, right now. Putting it off may indicate the beginning of the end. Don’t let that happen.