“Here’s a secret my wife, Susan, and I use: Whenever one of us says, ‘You’re right,’ the other immediately asks, ‘Will you repeat that?’ It feels good to hear something positive from your spouse, and it feels even better twice.”
— Scott Haltzman, M.D., author of The Secrets of Happily Married Men

“We’ve noticed that when we’re getting impatient with each other, it’s when we haven’t dated for a while. So we start doing date nights again and, voilà, things are great. Weekly dates are ideal, but I’m running at every other week myself. For a while we took turns planning dates, but our real system for remembering is, ‘Are we getting crabby?’?”
— Scott Gardner, a marriage and family therapist in Brookings, S.D.

“We wash each other’s backs in the shower — so we ‘have each other’s backs’ literally as well as emotionally.”
— Linda Young, Ph.D., a relationship psychologist at Seattle University

“My wife and I believe deeply in the key biblical principles of communication: Be quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger. We also enjoy a drink together before dinner and eat together every night."
— Michael J. McManus, president of Marriage Savers, which trains mentor couples on how to help young couples

“We strike deals. For instance, I’m the messy one. So one day my husband asked me, ‘Why do you leave your stuff on the floor?’ I told him, ‘To me, it represents freedom!’ After he rolled his eyes, we reached a compromise: I would keep the floor clutter-free all weekend. Moral of the story: We find out each other’s motivation (or lack of!), come up with a compromise and each stick to our part of the bargain."
— Monica Mendez Leahy, author of 1001 Questions to Ask Before You Get Married

“Once a week, we create a ‘love bubble.’ Our rules are that we have to be positive and loving, and we can’t talk about the kids. We’ll often stay at home and hire a babysitter. Of course, we have many funny stories of the ways our kids have found to interrupt us!"
— Lisa Cohn, co-author of One Family, Two Family, New Family

“Our secret? We both would rather be married than right.”
— Wendy Allen, Ph.D., a marriage therapist in Santa Barbara, Calif.

“I find humor breathes life into our partnership and heals. When I get annoyed that my husband hasn’t cleared his dishes away — and he still forgets after 32 years — I remember he has always dealt with the car insurance and I never have. When he gets irritated that I haven’t a clue why my computer has crashed, he remembers that his meals would have been meager had I not been around all this time. How do we know we each do this? We tease, once irritation has safely passed: ‘Just imagine how much pasta with pesto from a jar you’d have packed away by now!’ I might warn. ‘A computer expert wouldn’t even know where to start!’ he might just as easily joke.”
— Janet Reibstein, Ph.D., author of The Best-Kept Secret: Men’s and Women’s Stories of Lasting Love