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Are you entering your first year of marriage? What’s the best marriage advice for newlyweds to keep in mind?
Getting married is an exciting adventure, and your first year will feel like a rollercoaster. During that time, it’s important to take care of your relationship so it doesn’t get stale after the novelty wears off.
Let’s look at four pieces of marriage advice for newlyweds by relationship experts.
1. Keep Dating
The authors of Eight Dates argue that there’s a tried and true way to make sure your relationship grows stronger over time. Relationships last when both people support the evolution and growth of their partner, as individuals and as a couple. The authors argue that to support each other’s growth, you and your partner need to set aside time to continue learning about each other through intentional conversation and open-ended questions.
While there are many ways to learn about your partner, the authors’ marriage advice for newlyweds is to have a weekly date night. They define a date as a designated time that you get together with your partner to connect, talk, and learn more about one another (watching Netflix on the couch together doesn’t count).
How to Reignite Your Dating Life
When your life is busy with work, family, and daily logistics, date nights often feel like a luxury. According to the authors, the most common barriers couples cite are money, child care, and time.
If money feels like a barrier, the most important piece of marriage advice for newlyweds to remember is that date nights don’t need to be expensive. The authors suggest getting creative and brainstorming free and low-cost date options, like meeting up at a cafe, taking a walk in a park, or even snuggling up on the couch at home. You just need a place where you’re able to focus on each other.
If you have children, you can explore out-of-the-box and inexpensive child care options. For example, find a group of families willing to take turns babysitting each other’s kids, ask a trusted friend or family member to babysit, or just have a date night at home after the kids are in bed.
Finally, the authors acknowledge that many people already feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day. But the authors emphasize that people make time for the things that matter most to them. So if your relationship is on that list, they strongly suggest prioritizing a weekly date night no matter what.
Once you’ve set aside time for date night, make sure you use this time to learn more about your partner. The authors argue that learning more about your partner will depend on your ability to listen effectively. The goal of listening should be to better understand the other person.
Here are some strategies you can use to make sure you’re listening to learn:
- Pay attention. First, put away your phone and other distractions. Stay present in the conversation. Then fully listen to what your partner is saying without judgment.
- Remain curious. If you don’t understand something, ask more questions.
- Reflect back on what you hear your partner say. Repeating back what you hear lets your partner know that you understood them correctly.
- Stay connected. If the conversation gets tense or challenging, find other ways to connect. Express empathy for your partner’s experience and stay connected with physical touch.
2. Improve Your Marital Friendship
In The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work, John Gottman and Nan Silver argue that if you want a long-lasting and happy marriage, you must improve your marital friendship. In other words, their marriage advice for newlyweds is that you and your spouse must hold each other in high esteem and genuinely appreciate the time you spend together.
Gottman and Silver explain that a strong marital friendship supports a happy marriage because it encourages a phenomenon known as “positive sentiment override,” or PSO. If you have PSO, you trust that your partner is doing their best and assume that they have positive intentions. So you interpret your partner’s actions in the best possible way—which maintains positivity in the relationship.
But if you don’t have a strong marital friendship, you may experience the opposite of PSO: “negative sentiment override,” or NSO. If you have NSO, you assume that your partner is sabotaging you and has negative intentions. NSO leads you to interpret your partner’s actions in the worst possible way—fostering negativity that permeates and ultimately destroys your relationship.
How to be Friends With Your Spouse
Now that you know why improving your marital friendship is so important, how do you do it? Gottman and Silver say you must follow four principles: Keep getting to know your partner, foster and communicate affection, regularly respond to your partner’s overtures, and keep an open mind.
- Keep getting to know your partner. Gottman and Silver recommend that you regularly ask each other open questions that help you both reveal your inner thoughts and feelings. Answering these questions should require some thought; for example, instead of asking, “Do you like your job?” try asking, “What’s your favorite aspect of your job, and why?”
- Foster and communicate affection. First, spend a few hours discussing the history of your partnership—such as the details of your first dates or why you chose to get married. By doing so, you’ll unearth positive feelings about your partner that you may have forgotten. Second, practice gratitude toward your partner. Each day, look for things your partner does that are worthy of gratitude—then express your gratitude to them at that moment.
- Regularly respond to your partner’s overtures. First, notice any requests that are presented as complaints. If your partner snaps at you, take a few deep breaths to calm yourself and keep from getting defensive. Then, examine the complaint to see if there’s a hidden overture that you could respond to. If so, ignore the complaint and respond to the request. Gottman and Silver’s second strategy is to intentionally reconnect each evening. Take turns sharing the highs and lows of your days. Put your phones aside so you can stay focused on each other during the conversation, and always back your spouse—even if you suspect they’re in the wrong.
- Keep an open mind. Gottman and Silver suggest two strategies for learning to become more receptive to your spouse’s opinions. First, remind yourself that sometimes, giving in will get you what you want. Second, if you can’t give in all the way to your spouse’s request, look for places where you can bend to what your spouse wants.
3. Love Mindfully
If you have the emotional maturity to be a good partner to your spouse, David Richo says in How to Be an Adult in Relationships that you’ll create a marriage that is not only strong but also continues to help you heal and mature. Here are the reasons why practicing mindfulness in your relationships is great marriage advice for newlyweds:
Mindfully loving relationships encourage psychological growth in three ways: They provide the opportunity to process your issues, make compassionate validation possible, and improve your self-esteem.
- Mindfully loving relationships are a space where you can explore and overcome the consequences of your childhood wounds. Richo explains that during the course of a relationship, you and your partner will inevitably trigger old memories of emotional pain. When this happens between two mindful adults, you can healthily address the conflict and the inner turmoil that has followed you from childhood into adulthood.
- Richo says that in addition to helping you work through your childhood wounds, your partner can support you through your adult wounds. For example, if you feel hurt after the end of a friendship, your partner might invite you to express that pain and make an effort to show you some extra affection when you need it. Compassionate validation from your partner ensures that you don’t feel alone and overwhelmed in your pain—instead, you feel connected and supported, which makes the pain more tolerable.
- Intimate relationships also improve your self-esteem because when someone shows a romantic interest in you, it proves to you that you’re lovable. And, as the relationship deepens, you reveal your flaws and weaknesses, and you continue receiving your partner’s love, you’ll affirm that you’re worthy of love regardless of your imperfections.
In addition to supporting your healthy changes, mindful loving helps you withstand changes. Richo argues that all successful relationships happen in three phases—the honeymoon phase, the discordant phase, and the devotion phase. Mindful loving enables you to navigate and transition between these phases and transition between them in a way that makes your relationship stronger.
How to Apply Mindfulness in Your Marriage
Richo says that mindful love has five key aspects that can be applied in all kinds of relationships: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing. We’ll call this the GREAT model—Gratitude, Respect, Engagement, Affirmation, and Tenderness—to help you remember that these practices are key to a great relationship.
Let’s look at each of these practices in further detail:
- Gratitude. When you show gratitude for your loved one, you make them feel that they’re valuable, you like them, and you’re glad they exist. For example, if you appreciate that your child is kind, you might tell them that you feel lucky to know such a kind person. Richo says that gratitude is an important aspect of loving relationships because it helps the recipient feel worthy of being loved.
- Respect. When you show respect for someone, you support their intrinsic right to live freely rather than trying to exert control over them. For example, if your partner adheres to a different faith than you do, you respect their religious practice, even if you disagree with the principles of their religion. Richo argues that respect is important because it encourages your loved one to show up in the relationship as their true self.
- Engagement. When you engage with someone, you show sincere interest in them. For example, you might engage with your friend by listening to them talk about something they’re excited about. Richo says that engagement is important because it helps your loved one feel like they matter to you.
- Affirmation. When you affirm someone, you let them know that you welcome their true nature: their strengths, weaknesses, flaws, and talents. For example, you might affirm your partner by telling them they’re a great cook if they make you a delicious dinner. According to Richo, one reason affirmation is important is that it makes your loved one feel that you understand who they really are.
- Tenderness. When you show someone tenderness, you display feelings of devotion and care for them. For example, you might show your partner tenderness by making a point to tell them you love them every day. Richo explains that tenderness supports healthy relationships by making both physical and emotional intimacy possible.
4. Handle Disagreements With Care
Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence says that marital success isn’t determined by how often a couple sleeps together, opinions on how to raise children, or how each person handles finances—it’s determined by the skill with which a couple discusses disagreements in those categories. Agreeing on how to disagree is the key to a successful marriage.
John Gottman, one of the foremost American scholars on marriage, found that harsh criticism is an early warning sign of a marriage in danger. When either party complains in a destructive manner, such as personal attacks on their spouse’s character, it’s a telltale sign that all is not well.
- In a healthy marriage, both parties are comfortable expressing complaints about actions the other person has taken. They identify the action and describe how it made them feel. “When you forgot to put gas in my car, it made me feel like you didn’t care about me.” They try to view a partner’s mistake as one made due to circumstances that can be changed–an action separate from their personhood.
- In an unhealthy marriage, one or both parties attack the personhood of the other, not the actions they take. They turn single actions into black-and-white statements on the other person’s character. “You forgot to put gas in my car. You always do that, you’re so selfish, you don’t care about anyone but yourself. Why do I ask you to do anything at all?” This makes the other person feel like they’re the problem, not that they made a mistake.
How to Deal With Conflict
Goleman offers some great general marriage advice for newlyweds looking to improve their relationship in the way they handle disagreements:
Give each person a chance to explain their perspective at the forefront. This will help resolve any fundamental misunderstandings right away before the argument has a chance to take hold. At the very least, it will give each person a chance to understand the other person’s point of view, which will make it more productive to continue discussing the issue.
Show your partner you’re listening. Most people in the throes of any emotional distress just want to be heard and understood. Empathy is an excellent reducer of tension. You can repeat the other person’s feelings back to them in your own words to confirm you understand them correctly. If you’ve misunderstood their feelings, you can try again until you get it right.
Try not to get defensive. If you find yourself getting defensive, remind yourself that what feels like an attack to you is really just your partner having strong feelings about this issue—they want you to pay attention to it, though they may not be asking for that in the healthiest way.
Validate your partner. Articulate to your partner that you can see things from their point of view and that their perspective is valid—even if you don’t agree with it yourself. You can even simply acknowledge their emotions if you don’t necessarily agree with their argument: “I see I hurt your feelings.”
Take responsibility or apologize if you’re in the wrong. If you have the self-awareness to admit that you did do something wrong, admit it to your partner. A simple and honest apology can go a long way to smoothing over the worst disputes.
Agree on a time-out. If nothing else, both partners should be able to call a time-out and cool off if they need to, but this needs to be discussed when emotions aren’t high so it can be used in times of need. Agree on a phrase or method of calling the time-out that both partners will recognize, and then actually use the cooling off time to cool off.
Wrapping Up
The first couple years of marriage might be hard for some couples. You learn a lot about your spouse during that time period, and problems may arise. With these pieces of marriage advice for newlyweds, you’ll be able to confidently navigate any conflicts and keep your relationship invigorating.
What other marriage advice would you give to newlyweds? Let us know in the comments below!
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