Building a healthy marriage, like building and maintaining a home, means having a lot of tools in your toolbox to make repairs. The more tools you have, the better equipped you are to fix something that goes wrong in the relationship. But how do we gain these tools when relationship repair doesn’t come naturally to us? For us, we’ve gained a wealth of wisdom by observing other healthy couples in our lives.
Research suggests that couples who are friends with other couples have better marriages. We’ve found this to be true among our diverse group of coupled friends. Because we got married in our late 30s, we have many friends our age who have been married a long time, some as much as 20 years. We love chatting with them about our varying paths to relationships, sharing the challenges we’ve faced and the ways we’ve navigated them. Each of us has a dynamic that is uniquely ours, which allows us to learn from each other by talking about how we handle conflict, romance, and intentionality within our marriages.