Dr. Gunsaullus gives readers 9 things to check in their marriage so their spouses won’t check-out
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His wife shakes her head back and forth with disbelief. “I’ve been telling you for five years that I’m not happy.”
“I didn’t know it was that serious,” he sighs.
Unfortunately, this exchange is not that unusual. I’ve seen it in my office more than once, and divorce statistics show that women are much more likely to initiate a divorce than men. When I’m counseling a couple with a deeply unhappy wife and a husband downplaying the seriousness of her concerns, I encourage the husband just to be empathetic. It can take a while for him to realize that her (or his) unhappiness is enough to bring down their marriage.
If you want to avoid a shock like this in your marriage, I suggest daily and weekly check-ins with your partner. While this structured approach to communication and connection might feel contrived at first, the initial awkwardness will pass. Over time, checking in can become a natural way of evaluating the health of your relationship.
DAILY CHECK-IN’S:
The intent of the daily check-in is to give each partner space to be heard and feel important about their day. Spend about five minutes each sharing any highs, lows, challenges, and successes from your day. After each person has shared, end the conversation by exchanging some words of appreciation about and for each other.
Talking about your day facilitates support by ensuring you’re aware of your partner’s struggles and celebrating their successes. The moments of gratitude help retrain your mind to look for the positive aspects of your relationship. Vary the kinds of things you appreciate from day to day: these can be observations about physical appearance, qualities, joyful moments, strengths, kind gestures, and feelings of love. Even if one of you is traveling, you can still maintain a routine of checking-in and sharing moments of gratitude together.
Now, if you’re thinking you don’t have time for this on a daily basis, stop and consider that. Are all of the other responsibilities, tasks, and activities you do throughout the day really more important than your marriage? Is your strong, healthy marriage critical to your happiness in life? Keep this big picture in mind as you read about weekly check-ins.
WEEKLY CHECK-IN’S:
Weekly check-ins are more in depth, and can focus specifically on whatever is important to your relationship. What are you struggling with or concerned about: communication, intimacy, happiness? If you find it difficult to measure concepts like happiness or to quantify how intimate you feel, use a ranking system from 1-10. For example, if clear communication has been a concern, keep a weekly log of how you each rank your communication for the preceding week, 1 meaning terrible and 10 meaning fabulous. Create a checklist of all relevant concepts and factors, and maintain an ongoing record of relationship statistics. This way, you can measure positive change and monitor for danger. This may sound like overkill or just plain nerdy, but I know some couples who thrive with this type of awareness.
Below I propose nine factors to consider in creating your weekly checklist. Some of these factors overlap, but each speaks to a different area for potential relationship problems. Weighing several factors at once can help you take an accurate pulse of your marriage.
1. Love (How loved did you feel?)
2. Intimacy (How strong was your emotional intimacy?)
3. Sexual Interaction (Did you experience enough sexual intimacy?)
4. Connection (Did you have an overall feeling of being on the same page with your partner?)
5. Communication (Did you communicate clearly as a couple?)
6. Respect (Did you feel respected in interactions with your partner?)
7. Teamwork (Did you feel like a team when planning and doing tasks?)
8. Nurturing (Did you feel cared for?)
9. Happiness (How much joy and happiness did you experience?)
The ground rules of the weekly check-in are to be open-minded, compassionate, and mindful. Also, agree ahead of time about the meaning of your scores. For example, a 5 isn’t comparable to a 50% grade on a test, indicating failure. It means that you felt average in that area—not great, but not bad either. Record your scores separately and then share them, one by one. Speak to what a 6 in intimacy means to you in the context of your week. Why wasn’t it a 3, and could it have been an 8? Be truthful yet kind, and take ownership that this is how YOU perceive your relationship. Recognize that your partner may perceive it in a different way. Indeed that’s the whole point—to voice these differences before they start breaking you apart.
It might seem surprising that a married couple living under the same roof could be so out of touch with each other’s happiness, but this happens more frequently than you’d expect. Daily and weekly check-ins have the potential to provide insights into your own motivations, learn what matters to your partner, and voice concerns in a timely manner. This is taking responsibility for the strength of your marriage.
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image credit: Flickr/robstephaustralia
Other articles by Jennifer Gunsaullus:
A Female Translation of “I Don’t Want Sex!”
Dr. G, Great article, thanks! Having come through the near death of my 18 year marriage, I can say that the items on your checklist are very important to stay plugged in to. It does seem a little strange, though, to sit down every week with score card and discuss whether your feeling of emotional intimacy (for example) is a 6 or a 7. I agree talking about these things is important, if you are clueless about how your partner feels in these areas, like I was, you are setting yourself up for divorce. I’m just not sure a checklist… Read more »
These are all great comments and I appreciate your thoughtful questions and responses! I think a lot of your hunches are probably part of the big picture: the fears men have of sharing concerns, a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude, media depictions directed towards women that maintain dissatisfaction, and more emotional options for women outside marriage. Speaking to that last point, sociological research finds that marriage has health benefits for men (mental, emotional, social, physical) but it’s not comparable for women. I also have a different perspective, that is just a theory on my side, that negative… Read more »
Hi Dr. Gunsaullus, I also have a different perspective, that is just a theory on my side, that negative emotions seems to weigh more heavily on women. They hit deeper and stay longer. This made me think… Do you think it’s possible that, even if women have more emotional options outside of marriage, they also in general have higher expectations than men have, to have their emotional needs met within the marriage? And that could be part of the reason why negative emotions seems to weigh more heavily on women? I mean, I’m a man, past 40 years old, and… Read more »
Hi, FlyingKal~
You bring up an interesting point, which makes me think about how marriage has changed in the past 100-150 years. We’ve been taught to believe that our marriage partner should complete us, meet all our emotional and physical needs, and feel passionate for us forever. These romantic notions set most folks up for disappointment and resentment. Perhaps this speaks to your point, FlyingKal.
Hi Dr. Gunsaullus, and thanks for your answer. I don’t know, but personally I think that the expectations of a relationship should be more about complementing than completing each other, and I think that most people realize this as well. (There was an article about that here on GMP not that long ago.) As I said, I have certainly not expected to have all my needs, emotional or physical, met in a relationship. But is it wrong to expect to have any of them met? And would you agree if I say that women in general have higher expectations on… Read more »
These are good things to consider for any relationship…married or not.
I wonder if women have higher expectations. And more emotional options outside of marriage (like friends they can share feelings with). And less power in the marriage – they get their way less often. All making them more likely to separate from their partners.
Just a thought:
Are women more unhappy about their relationships than men are (manifesting itself in initiating more divorces, etc)?
Or are men just less frequent in expressing their dissatisfaction (out of “fear” for the cold shoulder)?
Are men even expected to be happy in a relationship?
My feeling is it’s closer to the second question you posed – that men don’t express their dissatisfaction as often, or perhaps as well, as women do. Whether it’s fear of the cold shoulder or a simple “good enough is good enough” attitude, that’s hard for me as a woman to judge. What I can say is that I’ve encountered plenty of men who seem to adopt and profess an attitude of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” when it comes to much of their life, while I’ve encountered plenty of women who seem to have an endless list… Read more »
I think your hunches are right. Women seem to be much more analytical about their relationships than men, assessing the state of their relationship, and assessing their own happiness, on a much more frequent basis. That’s a good thing, but go too far and it’s a bad thing. I keep thinking about all those magazines and websites geared towards women where women can test their relationship. There are enough out there that a woman could spend all day every day taking those quizzes. The bad news is that “if it bleeds, it leads,” so these evaluations tend to bring up… Read more »
P.S. Maybe a better analogy. There’s that old story about the farmer who pulls up his crops every morning to see how well they’re growing. They don’t grow so well when he does that.
KKZ and Wellokaythen, Thanks for the replies, both of you.I think you’re both onto soomething with the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and the “not pulling up the crop to check it” analogies. In my experience, there’s also seem to be a certain attitude that whenever a long-term relationship is broken, the social circle will more often assign the blame and responsibility on the man for the failure. If he’s the one to break up, you get to hear that “How could he do this to her, he wasn’t good enough for her anyway.”. While if she breaks… Read more »