Over the past 20 years, I have sat down with more than 5,000 engaged couples. One of the great surprises for me is how few truly mismatched couples I have met.
I have met some great couples who I thought would sail through life together and some couples who I thought should not get married, but the great majority are two good people, reasonably well-matched, who could have a successful marriage.
Yet many of the couples who could succeed at marriage — and even some of the couples who I thought would sail through life together — have reached out to me over the years asking for help. These couples were happy when I first met them. Where did they go wrong?
One hint is to be found in what these couples share when I ask them about their difficulties. They will talk about this issue or that issue, but inevitably almost all these couples will conclude by saying, “and we have a baby.”
Becoming parents is the first great challenge most married couples face and, sadly, most couples do not handle this challenge well. The marriage researcher Dr. John Gottman has found that two-thirds of couples experience a “precipitous” decline in marital satisfaction after the birth of a baby.
But it’s not all bad news. Dr. Gottman also found that some marriages — 1 in 6 — improve in quality after the baby is born. If some marriages get better after the baby is born, the baby itself can’t be the reason why so many new parents struggle. There must be something in the marriage that explains why some marriages improve and others decline.
Why some couples thrive while others struggle
Having met with so many couples before and after they get married, here’s my theory: marriage will test your love, and raising children together is one of its greatest tests. You need to be a great team to pass this test. Unfortunately, most couples are not a great team.
The engaged couples I meet with are usually at about a “4” in their teamwork. They think they are a good team, but it is only because their lives are relatively easy.
Now, married with children, the degree of difficulty in their lives has risen to 8 — or even 9 or 10 — but their teamwork has stayed at 4. They are discovering — often daily — that they can’t rely on each other. Their happiness in marriage takes hit after hit.
Sadly, many couples never work on their teamwork. Perhaps they think, like I thought myself, that being “two good people” should be enough to have a happy marriage. It isn’t. If we want to truly enjoy our marriages, we need to work at becoming a better team.
In this post, I’d like to address a crucial aspect of teamwork that couples often overlook: being a team in the “small picture” of everyday life.
Navigating life’s twists and turns as a team
When my wife and I first got married, it was just the two of us living in an apartment. Today, we have two daughters, a dog, a house, and jobs that ask more of us. We have impossibly long to-do lists.
Even in the early days of our marriage, when times were easy, we were tripped up by such things as my failure to clean the dishes quickly enough. Today, with so much more to do, we could be arguing all day, every day if we’re not on the same page.
Thankfully, we received a wake-up call when we read in the research that becoming parents would likely lead us to argue even more intensely and frequently. We needed to get our act together if we wanted to enjoy having children.
My wife and I learned to schedule “business meetings” and “synchronize expectations” regarding housework. At one such meeting before our baby’s arrival, I offered to take over the grocery shopping so my wife could get some naps, and we agreed to switch to paper plates for the first six months of our baby’s life. Making these adjustments kept the bickering about housework at bay when we had a baby.
In the years since, we’ve called new “business meetings” in anticipation of major life transitions: the purchase of our house, children starting school, one of us taking a new job. Couples often get into a routine. A change in their lives can throw their routines into turmoil. Periodic “business meetings” help couples navigate life’s twists and turns as a team.
My wife and I now have a shared plan for how we are going to manage our household. That’s great, but what do we do when life doesn’t go according to plan? My wife loves to cook and agreed to be the chef in our family, but should I expect her to make dinner when our baby gets sick and she hasn’t slept in a week?
Stop and look at each other
Here is where couples make their biggest mistake. We are so busy, we move so fast, we get so comfortable at home, that we no longer take a moment to look at each other with fresh eyes. A friend of mine walked in the door one evening and asked his wife, a mother of three young children, what was for dinner. She threw a frying pan at him, shouting “You make dinner!” My friend is a good guy. If he had taken a moment to notice how tired his wife was, I am sure he would have offered to make dinner, but he didn’t take that moment.
It’s not just husbands who run afoul. When I advised one couple to commit to a daily greeting ritual involving two minutes of non-distracted communication, the husband said this idea would have helped them because he had come home several months earlier excited to share the great news of a major job promotion, but his wife was so wrapped up in her phone she never looked up and acknowledged his presence. Deflated, he kept his good news to himself, and they missed a chance to celebrate that night. Several months later, you could still see the disappointment in his face. All this could have been prevented if she had taken a moment to look at him.
As this husband’s disappointment makes clear, being a team in marriage isn’t just about getting things done. We want someone to celebrate life’s joys with. As Scott Stanley has written, we all want to be in a relationship that has this quality of “us.” But the sad reality of marriage for many of us is we’ve gotten so busy we’ve lost that feeling of being “us.”
I no longer want to be good at marriage
When I first got married, I wanted to be good at marriage, and I thought we were good as long as we weren’t fighting. But with this mindset, my wife had to express frustration to get my attention. It pains me now to realize how many evenings I wasn’t there for her when she could have used a shoulder to lean on. I was satisfied with peace when what we really needed was connection.
I no longer want to be good at marriage. I want to do better. I want to be a husband who notices his wife needs support — without her having to ask for it. To be this husband, I need to get in the habit of stopping and looking at my wife every day.
I have come to view every day of our marriage as a “game” — a game we can lose if we’re not paying attention. Our opponent in marriage is formidable. Chaos and exhaustion are the “stars” of this opposing team, and each day they line up across from us and menace our marriages.
In the face of this daily challenge, I urge my couples not to settle for being “good” at marriage. Instead, strive to be a perfect team that wins every game. Strive to “win” every day of your marriage.
Striving to be a perfect team in marriage isn’t about being perfect. My wife and I know we’re going to make mistakes. Striving to be a perfect team is about embracing a mindset that we need to bring our “A-game” to our marriage every day.
Strive to win every day of your marriage
It’s vitally important that couples make this daily effort. You never know what’s going to happen — good or bad — on any given day. If you’re not in the habit of paying attention every day, you’re going to miss important opportunities to connect. Miss too many of these moments, and one day you’ll wake up and realize you’ve drifted apart as a couple. You’ll wonder how that happened.
But it’s not just the random day here and there that will test your marriage. There will be whole stretches of your marriage where the degree of difficulty will be 10. My wife and I suffered for years with one of the most difficult things a couple can struggle with: infertility. It was an extraordinarily dark time in our life.
There were days my wife couldn’t hide her devastation, but there were many days she feared being a burden on me and did her best to put a brave face on. On these days, thanks to our ritual of dancing with each other at the moment of reunion, I saw the hurt she was trying to hide and I would tell her, “I think you’re having a hard day.” Her tears would flow and I would offer to sit with her, giving her my shoulder to cry on.
Infertility, like parenting, is one of those severe challenges that put marriage to the test — with too many couples failing. Couples struggling with infertility are three times more likely to get divorced, but my wife and I were not driven apart. It took us four long years to come to terms with infertility, but thanks to our practice of taking time to connect every day, my wife was able to look back over those years and tell me, “That was hard, but you were there for me every step of the way.”
“You were there for me every step of the way”
Dr. Gottman has found that just one in six couples truly succeeds in marriage. One in six marriages improves after the baby is born. What sets these couples apart is that they are “in the habit of keeping up to date and are intently aware of what each other is feeling and thinking.” These couples are paying attention to each other.
My work with thousands of couples over these past 20 years has convinced me that a solid majority of couples can truly succeed at marriage. The key to their success will be learning to pay attention to each other — not just when marriage is easy but on all those days when the degree of difficulty in marriage is 8, 9, or 10.
Couples who embrace striving to be a perfect team in marriage are setting themselves up for success when life gets hard. They are the couples who can one day look back over their life together and say with great satisfaction, “We were there for each other every step of the way.”
Simple steps to boost your teamwork in marriage
Striving to be a perfect team in marriage might seem a tall order, but here are practical tips — eminently doable — that dramatically improve teamwork in marriage:
- Commit to simple daily rituals to start every day, greet every day, and end every day with a positive connection, stopping long enough to truly look at each other. In-person connections are best, but video calls and video messages are also very effective.
- Don’t wait for your spouse to ask for help. At least once a day, ideally as part of your morning ritual, ask your spouse, “What can I do for you today?”
- Incorporate appreciation into your daily rituals. Show your “teammate” their contributions are noticed and appreciated. When my wife takes just three seconds to tell me after a long day, “Thank you for working hard for us today,” I am more motivated the entire next day.
- Maintain a shared calendar so you’re both on top of all the things going on in your life. This calendar can also serve as a system of accountability to make sure you are spending quality time as a couple.
- A shared to-do app is “must-have” for couples who want to efficiently get things done. I programmed the app to nag me, so my wife doesn’t have to.
- Get in the habit of setting a time to talk so you are both fully present for your conversations.
Couples with systems, habits, rituals, and traditions do a better job of being there for each other consistently. They “win” far more days than they lose. Most importantly, they maintain that feeling of being “us” even when the challenges of life threaten to overwhelm their marriages and drive them apart.
Why not take your teamwork in marriage to the next level and give your spouse the precious gift of “us”?
Peter McFadden is a New York-based marriage coach who has worked with more than five thousand couples over the past 20+ years. This post originally appeared on the Institute for Family Studies blog.
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