When is the best time to work on your marriage?

How many times have you seen a married couple complaining about the same thing about each other over and over again?

Relationship habits and patterns are developed over time in a marriage and they become fixed and predictable. That’s why we could already know what our partner would say to us if we forget to take out the garbage or how they would react if we say we are coming home late.

Our reactivity to our partner becomes our second nature (we don’t even need to think about how to respond, we just do). These fixed patterns of interaction can give us comfort because it’s familiar to us and we know what to expect. But if we ever want to change any unhealthy patterns in the relationship, it would become harder and harder to do so as time goes by.

The best time to work on our marriage is before it even begins because patterns tend to get intensified after we get married.

Working on our marriage before it begins means that we take advantage of the period when there’s usually more flexibility in the relationship, and therefore, making changes would be relatively easier at this stage.