Sex & Relationships

3 Tips to Get Your Marriage Back on Track

How to keep your marriage from becoming just another chore on your list of to-dos

The straw that broke the camel’s back was a brass monkey lamp. My wife, Julie, and I had saved for a year to refurnish our living room and dining room. It was final-decision time, but since we both work—and our weekends were already booked with errands and kids’ soccer games—we had to squeeze a final shopping spree into a 60-minute window in the middle of a workday. Apparently, I had run out of steam. “Can’t you decide on one little thing by yourself?” I spat. Whoops. Our lunch hour quickly derailed into an ugly argument. We turned our backs on the shiny lighted primate and stormed out of the store empty-handed.

Psychotherapist and best-selling author Mira Kirshenbaum calls ours one of the big mistakes harried couples make. We substituted time for us with time for taking care of business. According to Kirshenbaum, we were confusing the satisfaction of intimacy with the satisfaction of completing a project together. In her latest book, The Weekend Marriage: Abundant Love in a Time-Starved World, Kirshenbaum lays out guerrilla tactics for harried couples who have so little time together during the week that they’re forced to try to cram all of their intimacy into the weekend—which, of course, is already booked with those errands and soccer games.

The secrets, she says, grow out of the need to create more positive energy and reduce negative energy. Once couples tip their energy back toward the positive end of the scale, they rediscover just how well-suited they are. (And for most modern marriages, that happens just in time.) How do you do that? Here are her top three tips for getting your marriage back on track.

Take care of yourself first. “Do something for yourself to recharge your batteries and you’ll have more energy to give your partner,” says Kirshenbaum. Recently, I took the kids out to dinner and a movie so that Julie could go swimsuit shopping alone for a luxurious three hours. The result: Julie got a blissful break from the kids, and I got a sneak preview of summer skin—plus a serious make-out session during the show-and-tell.

Don’t rehash the negative. Kirshenbaum says that “problem talk”—conversations that focus only on the negatives of your situation—will grind away the joy in any relationship. Julie and I have agreed to cut down on gripe sessions about lousy days at work. Instead, we’re identifying the positive aspects of our days, which has led to more enthusiastic time together at night.

Grab time-outs for sex. One of Kirshenbaum’s most fascinating guerrilla tactics is “love on the spot.” Here’s how it works: Find a small flat stone and write the letters LML on it (for “let’s make love”) with a marker. The deal is that whoever holds the stone hands it over whenever he or she feels the urge, and unless there’s a really good reason not to, you have to make love right away. Then the other person gets the stone. I was the first to play rock hound. The result was some groping in the guest-room closet, from which, we learned, we could still keep tabs on the kids. Talk about a win-win.

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