The screen on my iPhone froze up the other day. The buttons worked but anything that involved touching the screen … nothing. I couldn’t even turn it off because that involved swiping across the screen! In my head I immediately went to a worst case scenario where I was going to have to use money I didn’t have to buy a new phone, but as a last ditch measure I did a hard restart (which is different on the iPhone 7 and took a long time to figure out). When the phone booted back up, everything was fine. It works perfectly now.
Sometimes our marriages stop “working.” Our sex life stagnates. Communicate stops. Resentment builds. Attraction fades. It’s easy in these moments to feel like something is fundamentally broken in your marriage … but what if you just need to do a hard reset?
What I’m talking about is going back to the basics:
- a regular date night
- a special gift your spouse would appreciate
- recommitting yourself to an act of service
- writing a heartfelt note and leaving it in an unexpected place
- surprising them with spontaneous sex or a hot bath
- taking the kids somewhere so your spouse can be alone
- praying together every morning or evening
- reading the Bible together
- spending time each evening celebrating the best parts of your day.
A hard reset is when you step back from your marriage and say “what did we use to do that we’ve stopped doing?” or “what are one of two things we could start doing that would benefit our marriage?”
So forward this post on to your spouse and talk about it tonight. Are there healthy habits you’ve lost? How can you get back to Marriage Basics 101? Maybe your marriage isn’t broken, it just needs a hard reset.