How to Grow a Healthy Marriage, Even if You Are Already Happy

Everyone wants to have a healthy marriage that they can celebrate. No one goes into a marriage thinking about how bad it’s going to be.

But what is a healthy marriage?

What does it look like in real life?

If you can’t describe what a healthy marriage looks like, how do you know if you have one? And how do you know what to do to get there?

Working on your marriage doesn’t mean it’s broken! Even a healthy marriage has room for improvement. World-record-holding athletes try to improve too, you know.

What is a Healthy Relationship?

According to John Van Epp in Endgame: The Church’s Strategic Move to Save Faith and Family in America, you have a healthy relationship when you intentionally manage it with genuine relationship virtues and proficient relationship skills.

In other words, healthy relationships (of all kinds) require you to purposely care for the relationship, not let it drift or ignore what’s going on. If you want to take care of your marriage, you will have to develop both skills with your spouse and within yourself.

Realize Building a Healthy Marriage is for Everyone.

Every married person needs to focus on building a healthy marriage, even if you already think your marriage is great. You may have a good relationship, or your spouse may be struggling, and you don’t even know it. There could also be something coming over the horizon that will throw you for a loop and put stress on your relationship where there isn’t any right now.

Identify Small Cracks

Marriage is like an airplane.

The skin of an airplane is very thin, not much thicker than a credit card. It has to be thin so it can expand and contract when the cabin is pressurized. Over time, if not monitored closely, tiny stress fractures in the skin will grow, connect with other fractures and create a crack that can have devastating effects on the plane. On April 28, 1988, an Aloha Airlines 737 lost part of the fuselage roof when the cracks connected, and part of the top tore right off the plane.

Because of that accident, airlines are more diligent about checking for these tiny stress fractures and have developed better technology to identify areas where the cracks are growing. They could lose the plane and kill passengers if they ignore the fractures.

Marriage is like an airplane because the stresses of life can cause small cracks in the bonds that hold you together. Those cracks in your relationship can lead to the end of your marriage if not checked. A healthy marriage does check ups to catch any unseen dangers, just like the airlines do.

Don’t Get Lost at Sea

In January of 1982, Steven Callahan was sailing a 22-foot sailboat from Spain to the Bahamas when he ran into bad weather. He struck something, perhaps a whale, and his boat began to take on water during the night.

Before the boat sank, Callahan was able to grab a life raft, an emergency kit, and a solar still to make freshwater from saltwater through evaporation.

He had emergency supplies but no way to direct his raft. The boat was going to drift along with the currents and end up wherever they took him. He drifted for 76 days and over 1800 miles when he finally saw land (Guadalupe Island in the Caribbean) and swam to shore.

Steven Callahan had no choice but to let his raft drift, but you have a choice about whether you take control of the direction of your marriage or not. When you just let your marriage drift, it’s easier to get frustrated and do things that will make your marriage worse.

Don’t let the wind push your marriage around.

Change Happens

If there is one thing we all know, it’s that life is full of changes. But sometimes, we don’t pay much attention to how those changes will affect our marriages. We all go through changes in our lives, such as having children, moving, and becoming empty-nesters.

No matter how good your marriage is, those changes can cause problems in your relationship. You may be happy now, but how will you deal with those challenges and keep your marriage together? You have to prepare for them and make your marriage healthier now.

What to Do

Work on it!

Have you ever noticed that when you are busy and out of the house a lot, the house can quickly become a mess? Why does that happen? Because you haven’t been working at it. The habits you’ve created to keep your home clean have fallen apart. It takes effort to keep a house clean, and it takes time and effort to keep a marriage working too.

Marriages do not run themselves. They require commitment and attention.

You must create new and better habits as you move through the seasons of your marriage. It is possible that the habits you cultivated early in your marriage no longer work in your current situation.

Because it takes work, often a lot of work and sacrifice, you have to really want to bring something into being. — M.J. Ryan

Prayer is an essential part of keeping a marriage healthy, but it doesn’t work alone. You will rarely see God intervene on your behalf if you pray for your marriage to improve and then do nothing to make it better. God won’t run it without your active participation.

Make a Plan

If you’ve ever shot a bow and arrow, you know how important it is for you to aim before you shoot. If you don’t have a target, shooting the bow is pretty much useless, and you have no reason to complain that you missed the mark.

Your marriage needs to be goal-oriented. You need targets to aim for. What do you want to accomplish as a couple? What skills do you need to work on to keep your marriage moving forward? If you don’t know where you’re aiming, you’ll miss every time.

A Three-stranded Cord

The number 3 in the Bible means harmony, new life, and completeness. Many areas of our lives have three components to them. We are body, mind, and soul. I believe that children are healthiest when they have healthy relationships at home, school, and church.

One strand of thread is not very strong, but it can withhold a lot more stress when you wind three strands together. The Bible explains this concept within relationships.

And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him — a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Ecclesiastes 4:12

To have a healthy marriage, it is essential to reinforce three aspects of your marriage. These are:

• Interpersonal skills
• Intrapersonal skills
• Spiritual growth

Interpersonal skills are about managing the interactions you have with the other person. Like communication, conflict resolution, and emotional intimacy.

Intrapersonal skills are about how you manage yourself. Examples of these skills are self-control, commitment, and personal responsibility.

The other relationship you need to manage is your relationship with God. The closer you are to Him, the better your marriage will be.

You don’t have to be unhappy in your marriage to try to make it better. If you are not moving forward and working on the relationship, it will start to slip. If you don’t look for areas of improvement, those areas can come back to bite you when you least expect it.

If you have or want to have a healthy marriage, it’s time to be intentional about making it better.