Today we want to give you 10 simple but powerful ways to court your spouse in everyday moments. This isn’t going to be about going out for dinner or going to a movie – not that kind of courting. We’re talking about ways of being together. It’s deeper but still very concrete.

Here’s a little reality about marriage – marriage is hard work. That’s true, but what does it mean? It means is that couples need to continuously engage in behaviors and activities that promote the health of their marriage bond.

Think of it as a love muscle – Use it or lose it! Use this post as a day at the gym, complete with supplements, some cardio, and some strength training all for that love muscle. In fact, we even have a worksheet you can download to help you work through the content of this post.

There’s a little proverb written by King Solomon that speaks to this, embedded in a fairly steamy passage of the Bible. He says, “Rejoice in the wife of your youth”, and that just encapsulates what we cover in this post.

We want you to delight in each other, to invest in each other, and to enjoy each other!

Think of ‘marriage is hard work’ as ‘marriage is good hard work’. It can be fun and joyful to create this time of marriage, really! It won’t make the marriage perfect or free from stress or times of frustration, but you can have a really good time creating it. Enjoy being married!

Let’s start with why we need to court our spouse, and then look at 10 ways how to do it.

Canary, Stafford and Semic (2002) say that “liking is the degree to which a person admires his or her spouse.” It is made up of affection and respect and is the outcome of maintenance behaviors (like the ten things we’re going to give you!).

Think of maintenance behaviors as planting seeds in a garden. We need to be constantly planting these seeds in the soil of our marriage so that we can keep growing. If you stop planting, one day you’ll wake up and have nothing with which to nourish your marriage. At that point, you’re months from turning that around (just like seeds, maintenance behaviors take a while to germinate and bear fruit).

Think of your marriage as having a year-round growing season – we want to plant new seeds every week so that we have this constant harvest of love and romance.

Yes, this takes commitment, but it also creates commitment. When you have a great thing going, you want to keep at it! Researchers have found that if you do not engage continually in maintaining your marriage, things decline quickly.

Another incentive to keep at these maintenance behaviors comes from Wilcox & Dew (2012) who looked at the value of date nights as part of The National Marriage Project. They found that husbands and wives who engaged in couple time with their mates at least once a week were 3.5 times more likely to report being “very happy” in their marriages, compared to those who enjoyed less quality time with their spouse.

So, here are 10 ways to date your mate! These are not ideas pulled out of a hat but are pulled together from empirically validated research. This stuff really does work and will make a difference in your marriage.

1. Be Generous

Generosity is a willingness to reflect on your spouse’s strengths and work around weaknesses to serve him or her (JMF, 2013). It’s not surprising that this comes up again – it was number 3 of the Top 5 Predictors of Marital Success.

This is giving good things to one’s spouse freely and abundantly – not necessarily jewelry or expensive vacations, but things like service and affection. Notice and comment on your spouse’s good qualities and forgive your spouse.

The same study cited above found that as generosity increased in marriages, so did marital satisfaction. Also, conflict and perceived divorce likelihood decreased.

2. Be Sacrificial

This flows from generosity, but it’s more than that – it’s the giving of benefits when a spouse is in need, and immediate reciprocation is not expected [Psycholo...