Lean In, Invest, and Cherish

The heart of a thriving marriage comes down to three habits: lean in to the discomfort of growing instead of avoiding it, invest your time and attention because nothing pays back more, and cherish your spouse through touch, appreciation, and presence. Small, intentional choices compound into a deeply connected marriage.

Our goal with Get Your Marriage On! is to help bad marriages become good, and help good marriages become great. We want to inspire and encourage couples in three ways:

First, you can’t improve your marriage without good & healthy information. Through Get Your Marriage On! you get to hear from experts with thousands of hours of experience studying and teaching what can take your marriage from good to great.

I want to encourage you to keep an open mind and apply your hearts to understanding. Don’t be surprised if you feel a little pressure to change a habit or your way of thinking. Lean in to it. The gain will be worth the pain. I invite you to find at least one thing you can incorporate into your life to make your marriage better.

Second, nothing else in life will give you a higher return on happiness than investing in your marriage. And most marriages require work, tolerance, patience, forgiveness, and A LOT of…. “investment”. 

The most in-depth longitudinal study on health and happiness ever conducted is by Harvard researchers who tracked 268 individuals over 80 years of their lives. The study has found that healthy marriages & relationships are the single most significant factor contributing to health, longevity, and quality of life. The data shows those with happy marriages live 8 years longer on average! Your marriage matters tremendously. I invite you to commit to investing more in your spouse and your marriage.

Third, we want to encourage couples to hold hands, put arms around each other more, and to up the quantity and quality of healthy intimate touch in the relationship. We want to encourage couples to cherish each other, and show that you sincerely appreciate and care for each other.

You never know how long you’ll have each other in this life. I want to share two events that happened to me last week to illustrate this point.

Just yesterday I was at Orange Peel, a favorite smoothie spot. I got chatting with an older man waiting for his order. He told me he comes every other day to buy a drink for his wife, it’s her favorite breakfast. He says the drink is too sweet for him, and she’s not doing well health wise, so he comes and gets her favorite smoothie just for her.

Another inspiring event that has reminded me how fragile life can be has to do with my high school friend Spencer, a father of three with terminal cancer. He passed away last week. A little while before his passing I visited Spencer in the hospital and the tender care that his wife Jenn showed him speaks volumes of the special relationship they worked hard to create. They cherish each other. Decide right now to cherish each moment you have with each other.

So lean in, invest, and cherish.

What does it really mean to “lean in”?

For a long time, my version of “working on my marriage” was really just hoping my wife would change so things would feel easier for me. I scanned for what she was doing wrong and dressed it up as caring about us. But that isn’t growth—it’s a sophisticated way of avoiding my own discomfort by trying to manage hers.

Leaning in means staying present with the hard thing instead of retreating from it. When we hit a rough patch, my old instinct was to either fight harder or go cold. Leaning in looks more like pausing to ask, I notice I’m shutting down right now—what’s actually going on inside me? It’s the willingness to feel the discomfort of being wrong, of being seen, of wanting something my spouse isn’t giving without rushing to control her or numb out. I sometimes call it learning to stand in the fire long enough to actually learn something.

Why is investing in your marriage the highest-return choice you can make?

Taking responsibility for your growth doesn’t mean everything is your fault. It means your growth is your job, not your spouse’s. They can inspire you, challenge you, even frustrate you into growth—but no one can do the actual work of becoming more loving and honest for you.

The couples I see grow together are usually two people each doing their own work—asking What’s my pattern here? What am I bringing to this dynamic? Where am I hiding?—rather than cataloguing what’s wrong with their partner. That’s why the investment pays off the way it does. When your most intimate relationship is thriving, your parenting, your work, your sense of meaning, and even your health tend to follow.

How do you cherish your spouse day to day?

Cherishing isn’t a grand gesture; it’s a posture. It’s the slow, consistent practice of noticing who your spouse is—what they sacrifice, what lights them up—and saying it out loud, specifically, with no agenda attached. The man buying his wife’s favorite smoothie every other day understood this. So did my friend’s wife, caring for him so tenderly at the end.

Add more healthy, affectionate touch—hold hands, put your arm around each other, hug a few seconds longer. Tell your spouse one specific thing you appreciated today. None of it is complicated. It just has to be sincere, and it has to be chosen, again and again.

To go deeper, build your emotional intimacy, grow into a more secure, settled partner through your attachment style, and explore the art of cherishing your spouse.

If you’re ready to lean in and invest with some guidance, our Next Level program is built to help couples like you grow.

My real heroes with Get Your Marriage On! is you — the reader of this blog post. I want to congratulate you on being intentional about your marriage! This sends a message that marriages matter. Strong marriages lead to strong families, and strong families lead to a strong community. Thank you for being a part of this community. You inspire me!