Bush Ashley Davis - 75 habits for a happy marriage: marriage advice to recharge and reconnect every day

ASHLEY DAVIS BUSH, LCSW

AND

DANIEL ARTHUR BUSH, PHD

Dedication

To our children,

Elizabeth, Channing, Setse, Victoria, and Inle

May you know the joys of extraordinary love

and may you nurture it with happiness habits every day

Imagine being together with the one you love without negativity. Imagine a rich, loving relationship built on the foundations of kindness, appreciation, compliments, affection, support, honesty, tenderness, and attention. Imagine experiencing these fulfilling qualities on a daily basis.

The key to a great marriage is the quality of the habits you share together. Healthy, positive habits create an extraordinarily happy marriage. Negative habits create chronic dissatisfaction.

Fortunately, healthy habits can be learned. This book will help you learn and integrate them into your daily life. You can read the chapters from start to finish or simply choose one habit at a time from whichever section interests you the most. The four parts of this book include the following:

Part I, The Fundamentals, offering a thorough grounding in the essential elements of understanding extraordinary love and the nature of habits.

Part II, Connection-Building Habits, offering two chapters of habits that are useful on a daily basis to help you connect emotionally and physically.

Part III, Communication-Building Habits, offering two chapters of habits to help you talk to each other when youre out on a date and when youre experiencing conflict (which is inevitable, by the way).

Part IV, Intimacy-Building Habits, offering three chapters of habits that focus on the senses, heart, and spirit as gateways to taking your relationship to a new dimension, both deeper and higher.

We know that these habits work for couples because they are based on cutting-edge marriage counseling techniques, mindfulness science, energy medicine, positive psychology, neuroscience, attachment theory, spiritual principles, and common sense.

Each of the 75 happiness habits is triggered by an ordinary prompt in your life, such as when youre eating dinner or when youre watching TV together. Youll find that the habits take almost no time to absorb into full and busy lifestyles. Adopting even a handful of them will make a huge impact on your marriage.

Each habit is also illustrated with an anecdote, either personal or clinical. All client names and identifying characteristics have been changed in order to protect privacy. Many of the stories are composites based on Ashleys twenty-five years of clinical experience. Any specific case or situation that you may recognize is purely coincidental.

This book is generally written in the first person based on my (Ashleys) long career as a therapist, but it is very much a mutual collaboration. Daniel is not only a vigilant editor and contributor but has also developed, tested, and continues to live the habits with me. This book simply wouldnt have been possible without both of us.

Daniel and I have been fortunate to experience a wonderfully rich and healing love together. Our marriage sustains and enriches us both individually and jointly. However, we know that we cant take our relationship for granted. Even a wondrous love will wilt away if it is riddled with habits of neglect or abuse. Our marriage is only as strong as the happiness habits that we cultivate every day.

If you long for a deeper connection with your mateif you crave more intimacy on a daily basisthen these habits are for you. Read. Learn. Practice. You deserve to be deliriously happy in your marriage. And with these tools, you can be.

If you were asked to define what constitutes a happy marriage, you might be puzzled for a minute. Its sometimes easier to recognize one than to actually explain what it consists of. We all know couples who are happily married and probably know marriages that careen from crisis to crisis or that stagnate into a sullen partnership without passion or even love.

But what do we really mean when we say two people have a happy marriage?

One thing we dont mean is just that theyve been together a long time. (A client once told me that she was glad her husband of fifty-three years had died, since shed been miserable for the past half century.) A long marriage does not necessarily equal a happy marriage. And yet, we almost always assume they are synonymous. A silver anniversary, a golden anniversarywe usually take these benchmarks as great accomplishments, rare achievements in a society littered with the corpses of failed marriages. But the truth is that a long marriage is only thatlong. It just means that two people have stayed legally bound for a lot of yearsmaybe joyfully, maybe miserably, or maybe both.

A happy marriage, however, has a certain effervescence as well as a quality of emotional sanctuary that makes your world a better place.

This section looks at the fundamentals of what actually creates such a happy union ().

Ahhh, I love weddings. Big or small, elaborate or simplethey are so full of hope and the promise of love. To find someone and make both a personal and public commitment to join your lives togetherwhat an amazement!

During the early stage of a relationship, you are intoxicated with intimacy. You think about your beloved eagerly. You cannot wait to see if he or she called, e-mailed, or texted. You fantasize about him or her during the day and happily spend nights and weekends together because theres nowhere else youd rather be. Its as if a protective bubble surrounds you in a private loving world. In this couple bubble, you dwell effortlessly every day. Focusing on your beloved is so natural and spontaneous that you hardly think about it.

Every couple has a falling in love story, a time when the relationship felt fresh and exciting. When a couple comes to see me for counseling, although they are eager to tell me everything that is going wrong in their relationship (or everything thats wrong with their spouse), I am particularly interested to know about their courtship. What drew them to each other? How did they behave when they were falling in love? Can they tell me the story of their early time together with a twinkle in their eyes?

Daniel and I first met in Emerald City in the land of Oz; it was literally magical. I was Glinda the Good Witch and he was on the tech crew in a community theater production of The Wizard of Oz. Ill never forget when I first laid eyes on him. He was up above the stage, leaning over a gaping hole thirty feet above, looking down. I was sitting in the front row of the theater when I looked up and our eyes locked. He broke into a huge, Cheshire cat grin as he looked down at me. I believe that I blushed. What is he smiling about? I thought. That smile was a foreshadowing of a great love soon to be discovered.

But of course for all couples, the falling-in-love euphoria fueled by a steady dose of feel-good hormones (oxytocin and dopamine) eventually starts to wear off (generally after a period from six months to two years). What happens when love settles down into real life? Are you doomed to a stale, pale version of the initial brightness?