Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Table of contents
Marriage, like any friendship, begins with areas of commonality, but the stresses of normal, everyday life – children, work, finances, illness, caring for elderly parents – can tax the union and cause you to grow apart. Traditional marriage counseling is one way to build a deeper friendship with your spouse, but you can also engage in some simple practices.
Here are 12 suggestions to cultivate a deeper friendship with your spouse. I’ve also included quotes from average folks who have successfully built this kind of friendship:
- Recognize that building a deeper friendship with your spouse takes a lot of work – and time. Cut the fat out of your day.“We’ve made some significant concessions for the sake of our friendship. Phil lives close to his work so that he can come home for lunch as often as possible. The short commute has improved his mood and energy.” —Amy
- Establish a time each week to spend quality time together – then guard that time with your lives!
- Choose to spend time together rather than apart. This may mean sacrificing good things for a season such as small groups, ministry, or bonding time with guys or gals.
- Explore the interests of your spouse be it baseball, art, musical theater, gardening or hunting. Find out what they are passionate about and then join them. Often this takes a bit of sacrifice.“I intentionally study the things that are having an influence on my wife. If she takes up a new area of interest, or is reading a new book, than I need to do that as well.” —Bill
- Take time to find common interests and then engage in them for a deeper friendship with your spouse.“We’ve tried many things together over the past 35 years. We enjoy cooking and gardening, and for as long as I can remember we take time away from the kids to backpack during summer. Part of the fun is doing research on hiking trails, camp sites, packs, tents, and cooking stoves … it’s the planning together that has grown our friendship.” —John
- Use conflict to sharpen and purify your friendship.“I thought I was particularly fortunate because my husband and I rarely argued – we agreed on almost everything. The process of recovering from adultery revealed unhealthy communication on both our parts. Now we have more disagreements, but they come about because we’re being honest with one another, which is helping us get to know each other more all the time.” —Andi
Revitalizing Secrets of a Healthy Marriage
Did you know the Hebrew root word for “marriage” is the same as “mess?” Okay, maybe not, but it wasn’t a stretch to believe, right? Crazy Little Thing Called Marriage is the podcast for Christian married couples who are in the middle of a messy moment. They need to laugh. They need clear practical advice. And they need to hear from someone with an actual degree in this thing. Dr. Greg and Erin Smalley are those people. They’ve reached countless couples through their counseling practices, books, events, and work at Focus on the Family. Like, Follow, and Listen
- Nourish and care for one another. Be gentle with one another.“We lost our first child. We more than comforted one another. We held each other … lifted one another up … and we knew at a deep level that our best friend in the world was going through the same thing.” —Glenn
- Accountability and mutual respect, including in the areas of sexuality, finances, and relationships, should be priorities in building a deeper friendship with your spouse.“My wife knows everything about my brokenness. I have gone to her first in difficult situations. There’s a small circle of people who know me and know my depravity. My wife is in that circle. Having that transparency has given me strength, clarity, and tremendous freedom.” —George
- Establish daily habits, especially praying together.“Praying together every morning not only sets the tone for our day, and releases the burdens on our hearts, but it puts us on the same page in so many areas. God meets us in the midst of our friendship every morning.” —Justine
- Affirm one another every day. Be intentional in communicating the other’s strengths.“My wife and I make it a habit to regularly communicate those things we admire or value in the other. This practice has strengthened our friendship.” —Al
- For a deeper friendship with your spouse, be transparent with one another.“One activity I suggest to married couples is, at some point during the day, identify an emotional reality to your spouse. Label that feeling in a self-disclosing way such as ‘I’m angry, fearful, resentful.’ We often limit our conversation to the reporting of events rather than communicating how we really feel.” —Bill
- Communication. Most experts agree that regular communication builds a friendship that weathers the storms of life.“For us, communication, in part, is negotiating the rules that will make our relationship work better or flow more smoothly.For example, just recently, I had the implicit assumption that my bike tools should be placed on the kitchen table. My wife, Annie, challenged this assumption, and conflict arose. By the end of our negotiation, we had made a new rule: bike tools do not ever go on the kitchen table.
It sounds silly, but her demand felt like a threat to how I operate, and therefore a threat to my personhood, my masculinity. In that encounter I had to learn that I was no less Jason, no less a man, no less a person, to concede to my wife’s demands that certain spaces are set aside for certain purposes. My personhood goes beyond and deeper than that.” —Jason
Recovering Friendship in the Wake of Broken Trust
They were close friends first, having met in a fellowship group, then playing in a college Christian rock band. Somewhere in the mix Ruthie and Jacob fell in love and married three and half years later and moved to Massachusetts. He worked from home as a building manager, she as a social worker. They remained the best of friends … or so Ruthie thought.
Next door neighbors Mark and Chrissie provided the bulk of their Christian fellowship in the largely secular city of Boston. So when Chrissie started struggling with depression, Ruthie encouraged Jacob, who was home during the day, to reach out. “She was vulnerable, and I basically gave her my husband,” said Ruthie. According to Jacob, he and Chrissie spent a lot of time talking.
“At first it was an emotional relationship based on her need and my concern,” said Jacob “Within a year, however, it turned physical.” Unbeknownst to Ruthie, the relationship would carry on for three years.
Feeling Betrayed
“I thought everything was fine,” said Ruthie. “I felt like we had a good marriage, and we were good friends on all levels.” When Jacob finally did confess the relationship, her world crumbled. “The betrayal was incomprehensible to me,” said Ruthie. “I don’t know what felt worse, that my best friend had stabbed me in the heart, or that I encouraged it.”
“For both of us, there was no question whether or not to salvage the relationship,” said Jacob. “We decided we would do whatever we could to repair the friendship and honor the commitment we made to each other and God.”
“We also committed to the process of reconciliation because we saw value in each other and in our relationship,” said Ruthie. “Neither of us could imagine living without the other. I remember telling Jacob that I loved him in the midst of horrible, painful, tearful conversations.”
Taking the First Step
The first act Jacob and Ruthie took was to spend a week in the Colorado wilderness. It was a time of simply being together and building new memories. They spent a lot of time talking and crying.
Jacob and Ruthie did all the right things to repair their shattered friendship. They went into marriage counseling and found support from their church. “I don’t think we would have made it without professional help,” said Ruthie. “We learned how to communicate, and we learned about the brokenness and behavior patterns we brought into the marriage. Clearly there were issues that had lain dormant for years.”
Seeking Accountability
The couple also cleared their lives of all time commitments outside of work, “We needed intense face time,” said Ruthie. “We had to face deep, painful and uncomfortable things about one another, and we had to do it alone.
“Jacob said over and over to me through tears, ‘I can’t be trusted.’ I checked in every day to see if he was being honest and faithful. I policed his Internet use. This kind of exercise fueled my suffering. Finally my counselor told me that Jacob needed someone else to monitor his thoughts and activities. He entered into a transparent accountability relationship with our pastor.”
Ruthie knew she also needed accountability, a compassionate ear, and encouragement. A mature Christian woman from her church stepped forward and provided that support.
Prayer and Reading the Bible Together
“Jacob and I became a lot more intentional about reading the Bible, said Ruthie. “We read it out loud every night, and we prayed every morning together. And seven years later we still do! Our prayers then were cries of desperation; we knew we wouldn’t make it without Jesus in the mix.”
“I didn’t know who I was anymore,” said Jacob. “I was dependent on God for everything. Every step that actually worked was a miracle and I knew that God was in it. God also gave me patience. My wife turned into an angry, bitter woman, and I didn’t know if and when she would ever heal from the wound I inflicted.”
On the sexual front, Ruthie did not know how she was ever going to be naked in front of her husband again. “We took small steps toward intimacy,” she said. The betrayal took a long time to get over.” It would be years before she didn’t think of Chrissie during their most intimate moments.
Their Relationship Today
The couple credits the affair and its aftermath with the creation of a transparent, vulnerable and rock solid friendship. These are the hallmarks of their relationship today:
- They spend significant “face time” together, taking care to connect when life gets hectic.
- They’ve made a habit out of thanking one another for the mundane, such as doing the dishes or taking out the trash.
- They engage in little every day kindnesses. They serve the other at every turn.
- They are accountable to one another.
- They’ve found many common passions and they engage in them regularly.
- Jesus is the center of their marriage.
Jacob and Ruthie remain best friends.
