Two weeks ago, I wrote of being challenged to make this column about marriage.
It’s something I’m no expert in, and if you don’t believe me, you may ask the lovely Carla. She’s been my wife for 15 years now and as such has the perfect eye roll.
As a society, we don’t talk a lot about how to be successful in marriage, which is a shame considering it’s something most all of us do. By age 30, three-fourths of all U.S. women will have been married according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Half of all Americans 18 and older were married in 2016, according to Pew Research Center. (That number is declining over the past 25 years, but that’s another topic for another day.)
I received a wonderfully sweet handwritten letter on the topic in response to my March 24-25 column.
“All marriages are different, just like the people in them,” she wrote. “What makes me happy might not make someone else as happy.”
This is a valid point, but I want to share her advice with all of you anyway.
1. Communicate with one another. “You are two separate people unable to read one another’s thoughts. You have to talk for them to know.”
2. Connect with each other every day. “Hold hands, talk about your day, send a text, slip a note in their wallet, enjoy a cup of coffee together before you go off to face the day. Make the effort to let your person know how important they are.”
3. Laugh! “Life is too hard and too serious not to make time to giggle. Have jokes to share. Don’t be afraid to be silly. Enjoy a big belly laugh with your love.”
4. Listen. “Truly listen. You’d think this was covered in the communicating but some people don’t know that communicating is the act of talking AND listening. Listen to your person. Put down your phone. Turn off the TV. Stop thinking about what you want to say or what you’ve got to do next. Listen to what they have to say and remember it.”
5. Make one another feel special! “Encourage and cheer for one another. Small gifts are not a bad idea. Just a, ‘Hey, I saw this and was thinking of you’ goes a long way.”
This is fantastic advice and I would have to imagine my correspondent’s husband is a very blessed man.
Granted, these five are hard to do at any one time. But maybe we can do even one at a time to make our other person feel special, even when we don’t feel so special? I don’t know, but it’s worth the effort, isn’t it?
David Clemons is the editor and publisher of The Covington News. His email address is dclemons@covnews.com. Twitter: @scoopclemons.
