Be friends with your spouse
The following is an excerpt from some material I am writing for a marriage seminar next month. I hope you enjoy.
With the busyness of the world today, it’s very easy and very common for a marriage to fall into routines that are task-oriented. Go to work. Go to the gym. Make dinner. Go to small group. Clean the house. Attend church. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with these things in and of themselves, but in the midst of so many tasks, a lot of young couples lose the sense of friendship in their marriage. Over time, their spouse is less like a best friend or a lover, and more like a roommate that does the dishes and takes the trash out.
While this may become comfortable, it does not fulfill God’s original vision for marriage, and it does not help you when conflict comes. In fact, this pattern of separate-but-parallel functioning will often serve to exacerbate ruptures as it points to a lack of closeness and emotional intimacy.
If you did any kind of premarital counseling, you were probably told to “Keep dating your spouse” after the wedding. Don’t stop paying attention to your spouse and taking them on dates and doing nice things for them. I absolutely love this idea and I support it completely.
Bringing this down more to the ground level though, I often counsel people to restore their friendship with their spouse.
What friends do is they make the effort for each other. They check in on each other. They go out of their way to lift each other up, say what they love about each other. Friends are fond of each other, and they take steps to keep that fondness alive.
Often, when a couple has settled into this routine in marriage of just doing the things, checking them off the list, they stop trying in their friendship with their spouse. The thing is, when you act in friendship toward your spouse, you make a deposit into your relationship. When you point out what you love about them, or something that they do well, you’re making a deposit. When you send them a funny meme or laugh at their stupid joke, or grab their favorite snack at the grocery store, you’re making a deposit. And notice that these things are not intricate or expensive. They don’t require a lot of planning. They are tiny, momentary decisions that end up weaving the fabric of your marriage. And when conflict does come, you have a lot of reserves that help you ride the wave of tension, to trust that the fabric you’ve woven is strong enough to support you in this moment of pain.