Eight Secrets to a Happy Marriage

Eight Secrets to a Happy Marriage
What keeps a marriage happy throughout the years? How do couples survive the tough times—and manage to keep their marriage alive and growing? Here's an inside look at the eight key ingredients to keeping your marriage happy.
1. Use the right "super glue."Happy couples share a commitment to God. When a wife can share the deepest things of her heart with her husband, there is true contentment and lasting joy. When other factors in a marriage are weak, this one—a mutual love for God and desire to serve him—can keep two people determined to work toward a relationship that reflects God's love and power.
2. Be friends as well as lovers.Most women rate "love and affection" number one when they list what they desire most from marriage. Most men rate "companionship" at the top—even above sex. Doing things together—reading quietly, driving in friendly silence, sharing a joke, or playing tennis together—is vital. Happy couples play together, enjoy what the other enjoys, and laugh together.
3. Tune in to pillow talk.Happy couples make the time and effort to explore each other's soul: to openly share joys, successes, hurts, dreams, and fears without rejection. But for that kind of communication to exist, each partner must understand and accept the other's differences.
4. Refuse to win.One gauge of marital happiness is how effectively couples deal with anger, conflict, and frustration. When one spouse sets out to "win," both spouses lose. Happy couples solve their conflicts so they both win—with a mutually satisfying resolution.
Happy couples work through the majors, shrug off the minors, and are mature enough to know the difference.
5. Stay true-blue.Happy couples are faithful. Fidelity was a given for the one hundred couples Dr. Catherine Johnson, author of Lucky in Love, interviewed about the secret to their happiness: "For them, being faithful to each other was not what made a marriage happy—it was what made a marriage possible in the first place."
6. Make room for change.Happy couples realize that in marriage, "change is the name of the game." They see the truth in Proverbs 27:17, realizing that when two lives rub together daily, sparks can fly. But as changes occur, each person becomes more Christlike.

The key principle of our marriage is:
If God is first, everything else falls in line. Because my husband loves
God, I don't have to worry about him loving me.-CECE WINANS

7. Keep the flame burning.Happy couples know the value of time and romance. Sex is part of romance, but touching, holding hands, meeting eyes across a room, winking or smiling over a family joke are also part of it.
8. Act as one flesh.Happy couples realize that marriage is a team sport, not a competition. Each carries the other when he or she is down. Happy couples don't lead separate lives; they refer to "our money" and "our plans." They have grasped the significance of 1 Peter 3:8: "Finally, all of you should be of one mind, full of sympathy toward each other, loving one another with tender hearts and humble minds."

—Carole Mayhall