The One Little Habit That Keeps Marriages Strong

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They say, “Go big or go home.” But when it comes to keeping a marriage strong, that’s not always the best approach. In fact, sometimes it’s not even possible.

Take Marianne and Christopher. He is dealing with his second bout of cancer after suffering two strokes in the past year. Meanwhile, Marianne is working long days to support their family, including several children at home. At the end of the day, both of them are exhausted.

Marianne called in to a recent episode of More2Life to ask hosts Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak about how she and Christopher could stay connected as a couple, given their stressful circumstances.

Their situation is dramatic, but it’s not uncommon. Between full-time jobs and other family responsibilities, many couples face a similar dilemma: How do you stay close when all your time and energy is going to other responsibilities?

The Popcaks didn’t hand Marianne a grand plan; in fact, their advice was the very opposite of “go big.”

Why Small Gestures Matter

People often think that it’s the grand gestures that keep romance alive in a marriage: gifts, going out, romantic gestures. But relationship research has found that it’s the small, everyday turns toward each other, not the grand gestures, that most reliably predict which marriages last.

It’s not that the grand gestures don’t matter, but they are not as important as those small, everyday acts. Small and frequent beats big and rare, which is good news for tired couples.

Start by Reaching Out to God

Whatever challenge or stressful situation you might be facing in your marriage, the Popcaks recommend that you bring it to God before doing anything else.

“God has a plan for how he wants us to get through these things,” Dr. Greg told Marianne. “We can’t figure it out just by waking up in the morning and pointing ourselves at the day and trying our best. We have to start by saying, ‘Okay, Lord, teach us what to do. How do we show up for each other in this?’”

God wants to support you in your vocation to marriage, and pausing to pray opens the door for his grace to work more effectively in your situation.

The Popcaks offered a simple prayer template that couples can modify as needed: “Lord, help us get through this in a way that draws us closer to each other and to you. Help us be our best selves, and grow closer to one another and to you.”

Trade the Blueprint for a Simple Question

Prayer comes first. But couples still need something concrete for tired days.

Rather than a grand blueprint or strategy, the Popcaks suggest one question, asked daily: “What’s one small thing we could do to show up for each other today?”

In other words, what little things can you do for one another that are going to make you feel supported and connected? That small question does a lot to keep relationships strong, even on the hardest days.

“It can feel kind of like a big question at first,” Dr. Greg said, noting that sometimes it leaves couples stumped. Don’t settle for “I don’t know”! Take some time to really think about the little gestures that, in the past, have made you or your spouse feel supported and loved.

“I’m talking about tiny things,” Dr. Greg said: getting each other a cup of coffee, cleaning something up, putting something away.

Some couples even keep a running list of these small acts that make a big difference; that’s the idea behind the Love Lists exercise pastoral counselor Rachael Isaac often recommends.

It is also important that the question be asked and answered reciprocally. It could be tempting for Marianne to simply ask Christopher, since he’s the one who’s struggling more. But strong marriages are grounded in mutual self-giving, meaning that it’s important for each person to reach out to the other (with plenty of grace for someone’s limitations).

This simple daily practice may seem trivial, but the pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com have seen it transform relationships.

“It gives you that thing to really work toward and hold onto,” Lisa said, “knowing that even in that one small way, you’re serving each other in your marriage.”

A Stronger Marriage, One Small Step at a Time

Before ending the call, the Popcaks prayed over Marianne and Christopher by name, asking the Lord for Christopher’s healing and the intercession of St. Peregrine, patron of cancer patients.

But Marianne and Christopher aren’t waiting for their circumstances to improve before they reconnect. And you don’t need to wait, either, for a lighter schedule or an easier year; you can begin working on a stronger marriage now. You just need one small thing today, and the willingness to ask again tomorrow.

For more faith-filled tools for building a stronger marriage, check out Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak’s book For Better…FOREVER! A Catholic Guide to Lifelong Marriage or How To Heal Your Marriage (and Nurture Lasting Love) which is also now available on Audible! 

And if exhaustion has made it hard to feel close to your spouse, reach out to a pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com.

Family Conflict Doesn’t Have to Be Ugly. Here’s How to Reframe It.

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On a scale of one to five, how would you rate the way your family handles conflict?

If you’re looking for a benchmark, here are a few to consider: In the end, does conflict tend to bring the people involved closer together, or does it tend to push them farther apart? Put another way, do the people involved feel more secure in their relationship because of the way it’s handled or less secure?

If you feel like the way your family handles conflict is less than ideal, Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak have good news for you: the way your family of origin handled conflict doesn’t have to be the way your family handles it now.

“Whatever your experience of conflict in your family of origin was doesn’t have to be the experience of conflict in the family that you’re raising,” Dr. Popcak said on a recent episode of the CatholicHŌM podcast.

Conflict is an inevitable part of human relationships for the simple reason that different people have different wants and needs, and sometimes those differences bump up against each other.

So, family conflict is inevitable. But unhealthy family conflict that leaves people hurt and relationships strained isn’t inevitable at all.

Unhealthy Conflict Wears Two Faces

Most of us continue to operate out of the lessons we learned about conflict (and other aspects of relationships) as kids. If conflict was handled poorly in our family of origin, that’s likely to shape our strategy for handing conflict in adulthood, the Popcaks said.

St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body offers a helpful lens here. Sin, he taught, disrupted the communion God intended between people—the free, mutual gift of self that marriage and family are meant to embody. In its place crept two distortions: domination, where one person tries to control the other, or a kind of fearful appeasement, where one person abandons their own voice just to keep the peace.

A “winners and losers” approach to conflict that features raised voices, slammed doors, or icy silence doesn’t, in the long run, strengthen family relationships. But neither does an approach that attempts to avoid conflict through appeasement.

In parenting, this second unhealthy way of handling conflict often shows up in parents who, instead of guiding kids from a place of calm authority, parent from anxiety, desperate to prove they’re doing it right and terrified of losing their child’s affection.

The irony, Lisa explained, is that this approach backfires. “When we parent from a place of, ‘please love me, please love me, please let me know that I’m a good parent,’ we cause even more dysregulation in our children,” she said.

Kids don’t want a parent who’s afraid of them, even when their behavior suggests otherwise. They want a mom or dad who can stay steady through their frustration and help them manage those feelings in a healthy way, Lisa said.

Four Tips for Healthier Family Conflict

If your family of origin didn’t model healthy conflict, spend some time thinking about the virtues you’re aiming for, Dr. Popcak suggested: “How do we approach disagreements in a way that’s loving, in a way that’s kind, in a way that’s supportive?” he asked. “How do we deal with differences in a way that’s curious as opposed to defensive?”

Here are four strategies they recommend for changing moments of conflict into something that actually builds your family up rather than pulling it apart. These strategies are especially appropriate for handling conflict between you and your kids.

1. Choose your guiding virtues

Before the next conflict arises, pray about who God is calling each of your children to be, and let that vision guide you.

“I’m going to take some time and pray about who I think God’s calling this particular child to be, what virtues I want them to live by,” Lisa said. Naming those virtues—kindness, self-control, courage—gives you something steadier to stand on than your in-the-moment feelings.

This reframes conflict from a threat to manage into an opportunity to teach. As Lisa put it, naming these virtues in prayer becomes “your guiding star, rather than how you’re feeling in the moment.”

2. Stop unsafe behavior first, talk later

If your child is in a full meltdown, hitting, or saying hurtful things, the first job is to calmly stop the behavior, not analyze it.

“You stop everything and you’re just saying, ‘I love you. I know you have a need right now, but this behavior is unacceptable and it’s going to stop now.’”

Depending on circumstances, you might help them calm down by holding them in a warm embrace on your lap or having them stay somewhere in your line of sight to calm down on their own. With adults or older kids, this might mean taking a cool-down break with the intention of reconvening once everyone’s emotional temperature has settled down from a nine or a ten to a level that makes productive problem-solving possible.

Only once everyone is calm does the conversation about needs and solutions begin.

3. Get curious about what’s really going on

In any conflict, curiosity about what the other person is trying to achieve is a good starting point, and that’s especially true with younger kids.

Behind almost every frustrating thing your child does is a need they don’t yet know how to express well. Instead of assuming they’re trying to manipulate or attack you, ask what they were really trying to accomplish. Dr. Popcak suggests asking: “What were you trying to do, and how can we work together so that the next time you can get what you’re looking for in a way that works for me too?”

In the conversation that follows, the focus is on problem solving. The parent helps the kid identify what their need or want was (“I wanted to keep playing,” “I was hungry,” etc.), why their chosen strategy isn’t a good way to solve their problem, and alternate strategies that might actually work the next time the situation comes up.

4. Don’t overthink it with little ones

With younger children, resist the urge to interrogate them about their motives. They often don’t know what they want—they just know they’re frustrated.

Dr. Popcak suggests simply naming the feeling for them and modeling the words: “I’m really frustrated. I didn’t want to have to do that.” A short, calm acknowledgment, followed by gentle encouragement, does more good than a drawn-out conversation a small child isn’t equipped to have.

Yes, Conflict Can Bring Us Closer

The bottom line: Healthy family conflict isn’t about trying to “win” or avoid uncomfortable feelings. Instead, it’s about adopting a curious, cooperative, problem-solving posture: We may want different things here, but we’re in this together, and we’re going to work to find a healthy resolution.

In a parenting context, this attitude shifts the goal from “winning” (forcing the behavior we want to see) toward teaching our kids effective, healthy strategies for meeting their wants and needs.

If you’d like to keep talking through what healthy conflict can look like in your family, join other parents and pastoral counselors in the discussions and coaching section on the app at CatholicHŌM. And for more parenting tips, check out Parenting Your Kids with Grace and Parenting Your Teens and Tweens with Grace available at CatholicCounselors.com.

Both of these titles are now available on Audible!