Tips for a happy marriage from a couple who've been married for 20 years.

We've learned a lot about relationships by working through the ups & downs that 20 years of marriage brings.

Have you ever tried to control your partner? Well we found ourselves in the mess of thinking everything we did had to be done in complete agreement.

One of the biggest lessons we learned is that we can't control each other. When we got married we took it very literally that we became "one." We thought we had to agree on everything and that each others actions reflected on the other person. We were quite judgmental of what the other person should do, believe, & how they should act.

A book that really helped us to let go of the judgement & control was The 4 Agreements. This book was very helpful in changing our perspective of how we saw each other & how we saw the marriage. We became one family when we got married but we were still our own individuals.

If you're not familiar with the 4 agreements they are -

1. Don't take things personally

2. Don't assume

3. Be impeccable with your word

4. Always do your best

Another book I recommend in regards to dealing with control & judgment is The Judgment Detox by Gabby Berstien.

Jeremiah recommended the book The 5 Love Languages.

Another thing that really helped us was working with our own self awareness to understanding ourselves & then understand each other better.

Self-awareness is the ability to objectively view yourself, your actions, thoughts, or emotions & assess whether they align with your core self. If you're highly self-aware, you can objectively evaluate yourself, manage your emotions, align your behavior with your values, and understand correctly how others perceive you.

Some of the ways we developed self-awareness were:

• Meditation

• Asking introspective questions

• Keeping a journal

Self awareness really helped us with communication. I know for our marriage when we are enjoying each others company our conversations go better.

And the last thing that we feel helped our marriage was making sure we had have fun regularly.

You know you're in trouble if you can't have fun anymore. We have been known as the couple that has fun. We will definitely drop everything to have fun but there was a time that having fun together was difficult so we made sure we had fun as a family.

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

We've learned a lot over the last 20 years, it's amazing we are here to talk about it. I'm glad we found happiness in marriage.

I'd like to leave you with an exercise you can do with your partner that may bring you closer together.

Exercise:

share something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share five items each. Give us your favorite marriage tips in the comments.