How to Court Your Wife: 10 Everyday Ways to Keep Your Marriage Alive

Courting your wife means continuing the maintenance behaviors that build admiration, affection, and respect, the same behaviors that brought you together, applied every week of your marriage. It is not about expensive dates or anniversary gestures. It is about how you live with each other on a regular Tuesday afternoon. The ten ways to court your wife in this article are drawn from twenty years of clinical practice and the published research on what actually keeps couples close. The couples we worked with who recovered the warmth in their marriages did not start with a romantic getaway. They started with small daily behaviors. Over time, the felt sense of the marriage often began to shift. The research backs that up, and so does what Verlynda still sees every week in session. Why Courting Your Wife Matters After Years of Marriage Researchers Canary, Stafford, and Semic (2002) defined "liking" between spouses as the degree to which a person admires their partner. Liking is built from affection and respect, and it is the outcome of what they called relational maintenance behaviors. These behaviors are not extraordinary. They are small, repeatable acts that, over time, regenerate the feeling of being chosen. The reason this matters is straightforward. Marriages do not stay warm by inertia. Researchers Wilcox and Dew, working under the National Marriage Project, found that husbands and wives who spent intentional couple time at least once a week were three and a half times more likely to report being "very happy" in their marriages than those who did not. The size of that effect is unusual in marriage research, and it is not produced by grand gestures. It is produced by repetition. Think of these behaviors as planting seeds in a garden you tend year-round. Stop planting and you will not notice for a while. Then one season the marriage feels barren and you realize you are months away from anything growing again. Plant a few seeds every week and you have a near-constant harvest of warmth and connection. That is what courting your wife actually looks like in long marriages, and it is the foundation of the work we do in counseling for husband and wife. King Solomon wrote, "Rejoice in the wife of your youth." That line captures everything we are about to walk through. The job is to keep delighting in each other, investing in each other, and enjoying each other, on purpose, for the long haul. How to Court Your Wife in Everyday Moments: The 10 Behaviors The following ten behaviors are not ideas pulled out of a hat. They come from empirically validated research on what differentiates couples who stay close from couples who drift. Read them once. Then pick two to start with this week. 1. Be Generous With Your Words and Actions Generosity in marriage is a willingness to reflect on your spouse's strengths and work around her weaknesses to serve her. It is not jewelry or expensive vacations. It is small acts of service, affection, forgiveness, and noticing the good aloud. The Journal of Marriage and Family (2013) found that as generosity increased in a marriage, marital satisfaction also increased. Conflict and perceived likelihood of divorce both decreased. The reason is simple. Generosity helps you see your wife as someone you give to, not someone you keep accounts against. That shift can change the posture you bring to your interactions with her. Generosity is also one of the top five predictors of marital success, which is no accident. It compounds. 2. Be Sacrificial Without Strings Sacrifice goes a step beyond generosity. It is the giving of benefits when your spouse is in need, with no expectation of immediate reciprocation. A 2010 study in Psychological Science found that the higher individuals scored in "communal strength" toward their partner, the more they experienced positive emotions during daily sacrifices. They felt appreciated and reported high relationship satisfaction on the days they made sacrifices. They also reported better mood and self-evaluation. Read that again. The person doing the sacrificing felt better, not just the person receiving. This is the opposite of how most of us imagine sacrifice. Most of us bring entitlement to our marriages, a quiet ledger of what we expect out of it and what we are owed. That is the wrong scaffolding for a marriage you actually want to live inside. 3. Be Grateful Out Loud Gratitude reminds your nervous system, and hers, of the good in the partnership. Research on daily diaries shows that on days when one spouse expresses more gratitude, the other reports feeling more satisfied with the relationship. The signal does not have to be elaborate. It has to be specific, frequent, and out loud. "Thank you for handling the school pickup today" lands differently than a vague "thanks for everything." Specific gratitude tells her you noticed the actual work. Vague gratitude tells her you are checking a box. 4. Be Open About Your Inner World Talk about the relationship and share what you are thinking and feeling about it. The things we think we need to hide to protect our wife from our worry or sadness are often the very things that, shared, would bring us closer. The pattern Verlynda sees most often in session is the husband who has interpreted his own emotional containment as protection, when his wife has been reading the silence as distance. If you want a soul mate, you have to bare your soul. Internalizing and not verbalizing creates a roommate, not a marriage. The husbands we saw turn this around almost always started before they felt like it. They named one feeling, on one ordinary day, before the rationale for naming it was fully formed. That is the move. 5. Be Positive: The Magic Ratio at Work This is different from gratitude. Be positive means giving compliments, assurances, and clear signals that the relationship has a future. John Gottman's research on stable marriages found that during conflict, healthy couples maintain roughly a five-to-one ratio of positive to negative interactions. During non-conflict moments, the ratio is even higher. Positivity is not a personality trait. It is a deposit. Tell her you are in this for the long haul. Tell her she is the person you want to come home to. Tell her something specific you admire about who she is, not only what she does. The point is to make commitment audible. 6. Be Together in Daily Life Share your social network. Include her in your recreational interests when you can. Share tasks. You can court your wife by doing dishes together, by working through the budget at the kitchen table, by walking the dog at dusk. The structure matters less than the proximity. One caveat. If you have to do everything together, or one of you panics when the other has independent time, that is not closeness, that is enmeshment. Healthy togetherness assumes two differentiated people choosing to spend ordinary time in the same room. If anxiety is driving the togetherness instead of choice, that is worth bringing to a therapist. 7. Be Playful, and Tease Each Other Some couples grow up believing you should never tease or poke fun at your spouse. We disagree, and so does the research. Playfulness is one of the first casualties of a busy marriage. If your weeks are work, bills, dishes, and sleep, you have no room for play, and the relationship becomes a logistics meeting. Beyond teasing, couples who do novel activities together, hiking, dancing, travel, card games, anything fun and slightly arousing, report higher relationship quality. Novelty can wake up some of the same reward systems that made the relationship feel exciting early on. Build some of that back in. 8. Be Aware of Who She's Becoming Notice what is new about your wife. We are all changing constantly, but we get so familiar with each other that we stop seeing the change. We start treating our partner as a fixed entity. That is one of the quiet ways admiration dies. People have core values that stay anchored, but environment, work, parenting, and time stretch them in new directions. Watch how she is responding to those forces. Notice the good and reinforce it by saying what you see. "I noticed how you handled that conversation with your sister. That took something." That kind of observation tells her you are still paying attention to who she is becoming, not just who she has been. 9. Be a Poet on a Sticky Note A University of Texas study found that participants who wrote about their relationships for twenty minutes at a time over three days were more likely to still be together three months later. They also expressed more positive emotions in instant-message conversations after the writing. The act of putting feeling into words consolidates it. Translation: when you think fondly of your wife, write it down. A sticky note on her steering wheel. A two-line text mid-morning. A short note inside the cookbook she will open Saturday. The point is not the eloquence. It is the evidence that she occupied your inner world during the day. 10. Be Touching: The Oxytocin Effect Non-sexual affectionate touch, hand-holding, a back rub, a long hug, a kiss on the forehead, releases oxytocin in both bodies. Oxytocin reduces stress and increases pair-bonding. Sue Johnson, the developer of Emotionally Focused Therapy, calls these "hold-me-tight" moments and considers them foundational to attachment-based marriage repair. Without regular physical reassurance, many people begin to feel less secure in the relationship, even when nothing obvious is wrong. The practical anchor is the six-second hug, every day. Long enough to feel each other land. The neuroscience of touch is also why we wrote about the neuroscience of dating your spouse. The body keeps a more honest record of the marriage than the mind does. How to Pursue Your Wife When the Spark Has Faded ...