The pressures of life after having kids can slowly create a divide between you and your spouse. If you’re not careful, that divide can become so wide that the person standing right in front of you may seem emotionally and spiritually unreachable. It takes work to strengthen your marriage and close that divide but the payoff is invaluable.
Looking back at my marriage, our divide was the widest during the first few years of our daughters’ lives. Having marriage problems after a baby is not uncommon. The pressures of being a new mom, working a full-time job, keeping up with household duties, etc. takes a toll on a marriage. Over time and unintentionally, it’s easy for your husband to become the last priority.
Now that my daughters are older and the pressures have subsided, I’m able to clearly look back at the steps we took to close that divide. I’d like to share a few of the simple strategies that have strengthened our bond amidst the chaos of motherhood.
1. Put God First in Your Marriage
Strengthen your marriage by putting God first.
“Close in God, Close in Love” is the best advice I’ve received for my marriage. When you put God first in your marriage, he will cement your love in faith. He has the power to heal a struggling marriage.
Joining my spiritual journey with my husband’s has blessed our marriage in many ways. Although my husband and I may be at different points in our spiritual journey, when we do merge our faith, God strengthens our bond.
I encourage you to find simple ways to merge your faith with your husband’s. Go to church as a family, pray together, or share a bible verse or spiritual song that speaks to you. Continue to take steps towards God together and watch your marriage bloom.
2. Don’t Expect Your Husband to be Your Savior
Strengthen your marriage by accepting that your husband is imperfect.
Your husband’s job is not to make you feel whole. Only God can do that. When you put that unrealistic expectation on your husband, you set him up for failure. You begin to take note of all his shortcomings and then point to them in times of argument. Instead, find gratitude in what makes him wonderful.
The person you married is different than the person he is today and will be different twenty years from now. Stop trying to put him in the mythical box of the “perfect husband.” Let him be him.
Give each other the space and acceptance that you both need to grow throughout your marriage. We are all imperfect people and marriage is an imperfect journey. But if we commit to grow and change together, those imperfections can become something beautiful. This is key to building and maintaining a healthy relationship.
3. Escape the Noise to Reconnect
Strengthen your marriage by escaping the noise of life.
It’s easy to get caught up in the daily grind and forget to emotionally connect with your partner. I sometimes feel like my husband and I are two ships passing by in the night. We both get lost in checking the box of daily to-dos that we forget the one box that is most important – nurturing our marriage.
When you fail to emotionally connect with your partner, over time invincible cracks will erode your bond. Without this connection, you may form mental narratives of resentment and anger. These dormant thoughts will eventually emerge and erupt in harmful arguments.
The best preventive measure is to carve out time for connection often. This may be in the form of a weekly date night or simply creating a nighttime routine after the kids are in bed to talk about your day.
The key is to be consistent so that connection is nurtured over time. If you are having open and honest conversations often, you will prevent resentments from building and find ways to continually support one another.
4. Ask Your Husband for Help
Strengthen your marriage by asking your husband for help.
Prior to having children, I felt I could handle any amount of responsibility on my own. I was in complete control. It was only after having my first child that I learned to let go of this unrealistic expectation.
In the first few months as a new mother, I failed to adjust my standards. I thought that I could power through sleep deprivation, take care of a newborn, and stay on top of household chores. Then when my maternity leave was over, I could add the stresses of work to that. Boy did I crash and burn.
Over time, I built resentment towards my husband wondering why he wasn’t helping me more. Didn’t he know that I needed help? Didn’t he see me silently suffering in the chaos?
The truth was he didn’t know what I needed because I never told him. He wasn’t a mind reader. From his perspective, I was “okay”. He didn’t see my mental struggles below the surface. He only felt the aftermath of my stress when I erratically snapped at him.
Communication in a relationship is crucial. To be a mentally stronger mother, I had to let go of control and communicate to my husband exactly what I needed help with. When I did, he rose to the challenge. I finally dropped some of the balls I was juggling and let my husband pick them up. From that moment on, we became a team and my stress began to dissipate. All I needed to do was ask.
5. Just Be Kind to Each Other
Strengthen your marriage by simply being kind to one another.
In one of my bible study groups, we were discussing keys to a strong marriage. The eldest lady in the room, with over thirty years of marriage under her belt said, “Just be kind.” She said that through her many years of marriage, she noticed that if she was simply kind to her husband, he would light up.
The kindness we show to our partner is directly correlated to the gratitude we have for them. After many years of marriage, it’s easy to take one another for granted. When we constantly remind ourselves of all the reasons we love them, being kind to them becomes second nature.
Kindness is one of the most powerful tools in maintaining a healthy relationship.
I challenge you to think of ways to brighten your husband’s day. Think to yourself, “how can I serve my husband today?” It can be something as small as writing a note to say how thankful you are for him and putting it on his bathroom mirror in the morning. Make his favorite meal for dinner or just sit next to him and hold his hand.
6. Support Each Other’s Dreams
Strengthen your marriage by supporting each other’s dreams.
One of the greatest expressions of love is to support your partner’s dreams. When I think back to the moments that I felt the most love from my husband, they were times that he went out of his way to show that he believed in me.
On my 35th birthday, he asked me to shut my eyes and walk up the stairs to our bedroom for my gift. When I reached the top of the stairs, I saw a sign on the door, written in my daughters’ handwriting, “Welcome to the Smile Mamma Blog Office.” When I opened the door, there was a new desk with pictures of our family on the wall. I was speechless.
Knowing my husband is in my corner cheering me on gives me fuel to continue to pursue my dreams. Find ways to show interest in your husband’s passions and hobbies. Even if you don’t share the same interests, you can still be the quiet voice that urges him on. Show your love by making what is important to him important to you.
7. Problem Solve Instead of Fighting
Strengthen your marriage by problem solving together instead of fighting.
Every marriage has its fair share of arguments. Instead of viewing conflicts as failures in your marriage, view them as opportunities to problem solve together.
Many of us default to the win/lose scenario. We believe that only one side can win an argument, which means that the other side is losing. What if there was another option, an option by which both you and your husband leave the argument winning?
I learned a clever strategy in a Negotiations class I took in Grad School that embodies this win/win approach. It is called the “Common Enemy” approach. Instead of viewing the other party as the enemy, both parties identify the problem at hand as the enemy. They work together instead of against one another to address it.
Let’s walk through a practical example. Between taking care of kids, work and household chores, you start to notice that you have little to no time for yourself. You start building resentment towards your husband because you see that he has more time to spend on his hobbies.
Instead of defaulting to anger and snapping at him, why not calmly approach your husband with the problem (“the Common Enemy”) and work together to solve it. Start by telling him how you are feeling and asking him for help. Sit down and problem solve together. Can you both come up with a schedule that makes both of you happy?
The ability to work together as a team instead of going head-to-head as opponents is what builds longevity in a marriage. Problem solving takes time and patience. But the payoff is enormous.
Conclusion
True love lasts well beyond the initial feelings of infatuation and rapture that exist only in the world of first encounters and new relationships. It is forged in small moments of laughter, quiet moments of connection, and painful moments of sorrow.
I takes hard work each and every day. Do the work and implement these seven strategies within your marriage and close the divide that may have slowly formed between you.
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