Make These Tweaks to Reach Your Marriage Goals

So you and your spouse set about to make some positive changes in your marriage. You’re both feeling motivated, inspired, and capable of reaching these goals together – that’s great! Fast forward a couple months down the road. Are you still chugging along optimistically?

It’s okay if the answer is no. You’re not alone if that initial energy has worn off, your progress has faltered, or you’ve given up altogether. Truth be told, this is common when working towards anything – whether it’s completing a DIY home project or achieving your marriage goals. When you encounter some kind of obstacle or setback, it’s easy to get discouraged, lose motivation, or resign yourself to the idea that things can’t change – which often leads to giving up.

The good news? It doesn’t have to be this way! We’ve got some simple tweaks you can make to help you keep going and achieve the positive changes you’re striving for in your marriage.

1. Get realigned.

You probably assume that you’re on the same page and striving for the same things in your marriage, but are you sure? Imagine you’re both trying to work on being better communicators. However, neither of you are seeing any improvement from your spouse – what’s the problem? Well, it turns out that one of you is focusing on communicating better about practical, household-type stuff, while the other is working on sharing feelings.

Similar to how a coach might give a halftime pep talk to rally and inspire the team and confirm everyone knows the playbook, you and your spouse can benefit from coming together for a discussion when momentum is fading. It’s a great opportunity to make sure you’re aligned on both the “what” and the “why” behind it. When you’re in sync on that, you can avoid unnecessary conflict or misunderstandings that might prevent you from reaching your end goal.

2. See the smaller picture.

We usually talk about seeing the bigger picture, but in this case it can actually be helpful to do the opposite. Let’s say you’re goal is to prioritize date nights. Okay, great. Well, what does that actually look like? When your goal is big and vague, progress becomes hard to measure. When you feel like you’re not getting anywhere, it’s easy to lose motivation to keep going.

Avoid this by breaking that vague idea down into smaller, achievable “mini goals.” Maybe that means you strive for one date per week for a month, or four dates in the next two months. Mark them on the calendar as you plan and complete them. When you’ve reached the mini goal, acknowledge and take pride in it. Then decide whether you want to create a new mini goal or rinse and repeat. Before you know it, these smaller steps have added up to an accomplishment that would have been daunting to pursue outright.

3. Let habits help you.

You started the year with the goal of having a weekly relationship check-in. You both understand the value it could add to your marriage, and you’ve set a simple, achievable goal. But after a couple months, you realize it has sort of fallen off the radar. You’re already so busy, and it feels like just one more thing to try to squeeze in, making it unsustainable.

Here’s where leveraging your habits can come in clutch. Linking new habits to existing habits or routines is called habit stacking. It leverages the patterns and behaviors you already have built into your brain, helping you complete actions more efficiently while also building momentum that helps them stick. You can read more about applying habit stacking in your marriage here. Basically, you would stack a check-in with something that you already do on a weekly basis. Maybe after church, you grab coffee across the street and sit down to talk for 10 minutes. Or you always have some time to kill after dropping off the kids at swimming lessons. This allows you to incorporate check-ins into the flow of your life instead of having to rearrange things to accommodate them.

Having the desire and taking the initiative to set goals for positive changes in your marriage is something to take pride in. For one reason or an another, the execution doesn’t always happen. Sure, you can brush it off with an “at least we tried” attitude, but sometimes all it takes is a simple tweak to your approach to get past those roadblocks that pop up.