Avoiding the Slide to a Boring Marriage

My husband Gary and I know that if we let it, our marriage can get a bit dry and boring. I think of it as a garden. You have to constantly tend to a garden—watering it, feeding it, and stomping out anything that threatens your beautiful plants in order to keep them thriving and blooming. Gary and I have tended to our relationship in a similar way by …
Making Time for Each Other

Some of the ways we do this include:

Touching base and praying daily
Having a weekly uninterrupted “Talk Time” (for about an hour)
Spending a day off each week together, trying to include at least one or two fun date-type activities in that day
Go on an annual marriage retreat that, thankfully, our church hosts each February. (In fact, it’s this coming weekend!)
Take an annual weekend or longer trip together (without the kids) to a fun or romantic destination

2. Do “Different” Activities

There’s research to back this up that says when we do something new, it creates new pathways in our brains, helping us to banish boredom and invite exhilaration into our relationships and lives.

Some of the different things we’ve done over the years are:

Take a trolley bus tour of our very interesting nearby city, St. Louis, Missouri. We were told so much history and trivia, as well as, pointing out other exciting tourist destinations on the ride. This is especially astonishing since I’m a native of St. Louis. Check with your local city for something similar.

Go for a ride along a picturesque highway. We have one nearby that the locals call the Alton “Great River Road” that runs alongside the Mississippi River. The bluffs that crash down into the edge of the river make for a breathtaking landscape, especially in the fall and spring.

Visit a local wax or another type of museum. We visited a St. Louis wax museum and were left less than impressed. But it still made for a hilarious time of making fun of the terrible displays!

Go cemetery hunting. I know this one sounds weird, perhaps because it is! As I’ve confessed before, I’m a genealogy geek and love to hunt down my ancestor’s graves, but sometimes it’s just interesting to read the headstones of unknown others who’ve gone before us.

3. Encourage Conversation

Who said conversation is easy? They never lived in my male-dominated household! I think it’s very easy to become so familiar with each other that you don’t have anything new to talk about. So a while back, we bought a book, The Complete Book of Questions that we keep handy at our dinner table and often grab when we are headed out for a date. This book helps not only us to find out new things about each other but gets our teen sons into the conversation act at dinner time when they might have previously sat like bumps on a log. Since all the questions are numbered from 1 to 1001, our sons have become used to the question, “What number do you want tonight?”

These are just a few of the ways my husband and I fight the drift toward boredom.

This is an updated edition of a post originally published on Worthy Bible Studies

Featured Image by Duncan Dao from Pixabay

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