If you’re feeling hopeless in your marriage, you’re not alone. It’s normal to go through difficult times in your marriage and ask yourself if this is how it’s always going to be. But, you’re in the right place to save your marriage and you’re doing the right thing by researching the next steps.
However your marriage turns out, you are taking the right step by finding out ways to change your marriage into the type of relationship you want and deserve. The chances are that you and your spouse want the same thing, but neither want to “rock the boat,” so to speak.
These 17 tips will guide you in changing your relationship, renewing your love for your spouse, and starting difficult conversations to forever change your marriage.
This post is all about how to save a marriage when you feel hopeless.
MARRIAGE TIPS:
1. Take a deep breath because you need to take care of yourself first
To put work into your marriage, you need to first put work into taking care of yourself. Breathe, read a book, take a bubble bath, or go for a walk. There are tons of ways you can practice self-care that will help you re-center and ground yourself for the tough work ahead.
Remember that you’re brave for working on your marriage when it feels tough and lonely right now.
So, now that you’re entering into the next phase of your marriage with good intentions, make sure that you also enter it as your best self. You can only be your best self when you take care of yourself and fulfill your needs.
2. Ask yourself the scary questions
When you start asking yourself how to save your marriage when you feel hopeless, you also have to ask yourself other hard questions. If you’re here, you have a desire to change your relationship and find a healthier, more fulfilling way to move forward as a couple.
So, the first question you need to ask yourself is “Why is your marriage worth fighting for?” These types of questions open up conversations that you don’t want to have because those conversations might lead to a big change in your relationship.
It’s scary to consider that you may not be in a marriage worth saving, but you’ll never make any progress in your relationship problems without asking questions like this.
3. Identify signs of emotional abuse before you go any further
Before you get any further in this new state of your marriage, you need to identify any patterns of emotional abuse. This means that you or your partner frequently resort to demeaning each other instead of working out your differences with helpful communication techniques.
If you notice this pattern in your relationship, it does not mean your relationship is over. However, you do need to ask yourself if this abuse exists constantly because that is when the relationship is likely causing too much harm for it to be worth fighting for.
Whether you are the victim or the aggressor, consistent abuse indicates that you will need professional help to work on the relationship.
4. Identify any areas of your marriage that lack of communication
Communication is key for a relationship to function. The moment you and your partner stop communicating, you lose the ability to adapt your relationship to fit the needs of both partners.
Every successful marriage requires flexibility and this flexibility comes from communication and mutual respect. It’s okay if you and your partner haven’t been open with each other for a long time. That’s something you can work on with them.
Open communication starts with getting vulnerable with your partner and telling them you want a healthy relationship by making necessary changes.
These types of sensitive conversations are terrifying because they cause major changes in a relationship that has been the same for a long time. So, start being honest with your partner and share your feelings.
5. Surprise your spouse with small acts of kindness
There’s nothing better than your partner surprising you with an unexpected act of kindness. Even if it’s a been while, you two know each other and you know what the other person appreciates.
If you don’t or you’re nervous their preferences have changed, ask them questions and listen. Take an interest in them and learn the most vital things you can do to make their day a little easier.
As you treat them to an act of kindness, avoid letting your feelings of insecurity, anger, and pettiness get in the way. They probably won’t reciprocate because they don’t know how, and that’s okay. This is all part of the process to create a healthier long-term relationship.
6. Do fun activities with your spouse
Remember fun. You and your partner, at one point, had fun together with regular date nights and fun things sprinkled into your day. The longer that you have been together, you gradually stopped doing that stuff until you woke up and felt like you were stuck in a failing marriage.
The good news is that you can start doing the fun stuff again. You have a long way to go before you can create a better marriage for yourselves, but having fun together is an important step in that process.
7. Build compassion back into your marriage
Comparison is crucial for marriage to work. In challenging times and easier times, compassion can make it so much easier to understand how your partner feels. It sucks to think about someone else’s painful experiences when you’re going through a difficult time.
Love and respect for your partner make it easier to want to think about their experience and have a little compassion for them. It’s far too easy to think of your partner as all good or all bad depending on how they treat you that day.
Rather than remembering all of the reasons your partner is not trying to hurt you when they forget to do the dishes or forget to celebrate your anniversary, it’s easy to think they want to hurt you or they don’t love you anymore.
Instead of remembering how much pressure their boss has put on them lately, you remember that they couldn’t make time for an anniversary dinner.
To be clear, if it hurts you, it’s not okay. But, that doesn’t mean that you can’t work on building compassion for your spouse when they screw up.
8. Figure out what the underlying issues are within your marital problems
Acknowledge that there’s always something deeper going on when you and your partner fight. Typically, fights don’t start with the deep stuff. They start with forgotten household tasks or pet peeves.
It’s only when they reach a breaking point do they possibly get close to addressing the real issue between you two. You and your partner have to work on bringing that issue to the surface faster, so you two can argue efficiently.
Healthy couples argue, but they don’t argue for the sake of hurting each other. Instead, they argue because they’re trying to create a better way to meet each other’s needs.
They don’t always know what that is when they start an argument, but they know they need to dig deeper for the sake of their marriage. This is the habit you want to build with your spouse.
9. Spend quality time with your spouse
Think about the last time you spent quality time with your spouse. Ask yourself what you two were doing and why this was so meaningful for you. It doesn’t matter if this was two weeks ago or two decades ago.
The goal is to recreate those feelings of intimacy that come from quality time together. Once you identify the last instance of quality time between you two, you now want to ask yourself how your definition of quality time differs from your spouse’s definition.
If you don’t know the answer to that, just ask them. Ask them how they want to spend time with you and what quality time means to them. Then, make time each week for both versions of quality time to feel truly close to your spouse.
10. Enter this phase of your marriage with a positive mindset
When you feel like you’re at the end of your rope in a hopeless marriage, the last thing you want to think about is changing your mindset. Positivity can be painful to imagine when you feel stuck in your current situation.
However, keep in mind that your current relationship can change as much as you want if you and your partner both have the motivation to make it into the healthy marriage you both deserve.
You can develop a positive mindset by approaching your marriage with positive energy or the belief that positive changes are possible and so is the marriage you want.
Some people call this manifesting, and all that means is you start acting like you have the life you want right now so that you start making small, imperceptible decisions that help get you that life.
11. Define what a healthy marriage looks like for you and your partner
It can be difficult to get excited about a goal when you don’t know what the goal looks like. This is a good opportunity for you to figure out what you want out of marriage, which will help you figure out what changes need to happen for you two to make that marriage possible.
It’s easy to get stuck with the idea that you need a “perfect” marriage, like the ones on TV. But, when you stop and ask yourself what you want compared to what you have, you may realize the marriage work you and your partner need to do looks different than you expected.
12. Explore negative emotions instead of repressing them
No one likes to think about their negative emotions, let alone dig into them and figure out where they’re coming from. But, this is exactly what you want to do, according to couples therapists all over the world, including Dr. John Gottman.
Research psychologist John Gottman developed the concept of the “Four Horsemen.” The Four Horsemen are contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling, all of which help to determine how likely a marriage is to end.
In other words, when any of these show up in a relationship, they need to be addressed immediately. This means that you or your partner need to figure out where these behaviors are coming from and get vulnerable.
13. Remind yourself that all marriages go through rough patches
No matter how far along you are in your marriage, it’s normal to experience rough patches. You and your partner will inevitably change throughout your marriage.
Before you go into a downward spiral over the state of your married life, give yourself some credit and remember that unhappy marriages do not need to end.
You and your partner can work through any problem that comes up as long as you are motivated to stay together and develop healthier patterns of behavior.
14. Monitor your mental health and your spouse’s mental health
Working on your marriage is painful. It’s scary to ask questions that will change your marriage forever. Take care of yourself as you go through this process. Think of the activities that bring you joy now, and do those activities while you have hard conversations with your partner.
Keep a journal, too, so you can track your mental health for weeks as you work through these marital problems.
Neither you nor your partner can come into a relationship and do the marriage work without doing the individual work that it takes to contribute to a marriage. Watch out for yourself and notice any changes in your mental health.
15. Prepare yourself for the hard work to make this relationship worthwhile again
You are brave for taking the first step in changing your marriage. Humans want to remain in homeostasis (which is another way of saying comfort zone), even if that stable state of existence is hurting them.
Change is uncomfortable and scary and it goes against human nature. This means that most people would rather be uncomfortable in a familiar way than try a different kind of uncomfortable.
You and your spouse are trying to change a whole system, including you, your spouse, and anyone else who lives with you. You two must choose a healthier, more fulfilling way of living because it’s really easy to fall into old patterns.
It’s okay to fail and try again so that you slowly break those patterns. Remind yourself of your goal, why you’re working towards this goal, and how hard it is to achieve.
16. Get curious about your partner again
Curiosity is magic in a relationship. It’s the part of a relationship that is mysterious no matter how long you’ve been with someone. Plus, there’s nothing better than feeling like your partner wants to know about you and something you take interest in.
This is why curiosity is so important to healing a relationship. Listen to them when they talk and learn about them.
It may have been a long time since you did this last, so re-learn about the person you’ve loved for a long time. Stop the shameful thoughts that are coming up and get to learning.
17. Remember that professional help is always an option
You’re never alone in this process. It’s scary and requires a lot of work from you, so it makes sense that you are getting overwhelmed and thinking about the boxes you have to check to renew your marriage.
A couples counselor and family therapist can help you. Marriage and Family Therapists specifically view everyone as a part of the system, so you can see an MFT as an individual and still be relationship-oriented.
You can also see an MFT with your partner so that you both get the support you need to make changes in your relationship.
