7 Steps to Revive Your Marriage whether You Work On It Alone or as a Couple
Updated February 3, 2026
Marriage restoration means making your marriage enjoyable for both of you. That doesn’t happen by repeatedly talking about problems. Instead, it happens by building your relationship with the same behavior that made each of you want to marry in the first place. Taken step by step, these steps are no conflict, enjoyable, and your fastest route to real togetherness.
Small steps can make big relationship differences
The difference between a good runner and a great runner is often just a few seconds. The difference between a lifeless, routine marriage and a satisfying relationship also is often very small.
You don’t need to do anything risky to your relationship to add interest, attraction, and connection. You do need to be willing to break from stale and disconnected routines.
Just you or you and your spouse can work on these steps to reinvigorate your marriage. Over the past 30 years I have helped thousands to reinterest a disconnected spouse using these steps.
Step one: Make yourself interesting to your spouse
If your strategy is to continue to do what you always do while hoping your spouse becomes more interested in you, disappointment will be your only reward. If you want your spouse to be more interested in you, then you need to become more interesting.
It works this way with all feelings, by the way. If you want your spouse to love you more, you need to be more lovable. If you want to get trust, you need to be more trustworthy, and so on. If you want your spouse to be more interested, you need to be more interesting.
You may not like it that you don’t just get these things naturally by being married, but it’s a reality. Your success depends on a clear understanding of that.
Step two: Learn by looking back at the beginning of your relationship
A boring marriage has usually become that way because people replaced what they used to enjoy with what they do not enjoy. It’s like taking the chocolate out of a chocolate cake. You would just be left with plain vanilla. You need to put the chocolate back into your marriage.
What was it that first interested you in your spouse? Your spouse in you? What have been the most enjoyable dates the two of you have had? What has your spouse consistently shown interest in over the years? Do you have a guess what your spouse would likely want to do if he or she became involved with another person or made a new friend?
If you know what another person could do to interest your spouse, then you know what you could do to interest your spouse. For even more insight, ask yourself what kind of person definitely would not interest your spouse as either a friend or romantic partner. Gather the puzzle pieces, and you will get more of a picture of what you need to do.
Step three: Think big and think small
Maybe you know some big things you and your spouse used to do that were really enjoyable, but you also know that your spouse would not go for it now. In that case, start with the small things and introduce them gradually. If you start with small enough things, you will get little or no resistance. And, as your relationship builds, you can add in the bigger things.
So, what do I mean by big and small? Having more sex might be a big thing if you don’t even kiss anymore. But holding hands as you walk into a restaurant would be much smaller. Going away for a weekend, just the two of you, might be a really big thing. Taking time out of your weekly shopping trip to get a coffee together might be a small thing.
Of course, connection skills are going to be a necessary part of whatever you do, so your spouse can look forward to your next interaction. Connection skills are the things you would do to make a first date with someone go well–friendliness, looking nice, being a good listener, validating, and so on. Move no faster if you are not getting good “go” signals from your spouse.
If you think your spouse would want to do something, then start just a little bit smaller and work your way up. That’s far better than getting rejection because you tried to move too fast.
Step four: Do whatever it takes
Success in relationships, like everything else, requires doing whatever it takes to be successful–whether you feel like it or not. This means being nice even when you feel irritated, agreeing when you would rather argue, complimenting even when you think it isn’t that great, helping when you are already tired, and so on.
There is no way to just take it easy, do as you feel, and make close friends, be a good parent, or be a good spouse. Your success in marriage will be directly related to how disciplined you are at staying attractive, being loving and enjoyable, and having loving boundaries. If you have a customer service job, you need to show up every time in a pleasing way for your customers. This is no less true for your spouse.
I have a social skills quiz on my website in the Learning Center, if you want to check how you are doing with this.
A little more skillfulness makes a big difference
Besides disciplined social behavior, you also have to learn skills or strengthen skills. I’m a coach, and from a coach’s perspective, everything in life is skills. Listening is a skill, validating is a skill, praying is a skill, leaving your kids with a babysitter is a skill, as is having sex, and cooking dinner. Sure, we can do these things well enough to survive even without study, but we will never excel at anything without proper technique and learning. And, if we don’t do it, there will always be other people who will do it better.
You don’t have to become an expert to do better. Just becoming ten percent better at connecting and attracting can make a really big difference–usually enough to save a marriage that would otherwise fail. No one I have ever worked with has had to become an expert in order to reconcile. But, they all needed to do better.
Stop enduring, start living
Do not think that you are doing yourself, your kids, or your spouse any favors by living a life of quiet desperation. Get the kids out of your bedroom, get a sitter, buy some tickets, make some reservations, get some nice clothes, join an activity, and simply refuse to live a life of routine anymore.
Learn how to be better at sex, take dance lessons with or without your spouse. Do not stop making changes in your life until you are enjoying your life. Invite your spouse to join you each step of the way, but do not stop making your life better for you. Eventually, your spouse will start to join you.
Invite, don’t convince
Do not nag your spouse into doing anything with you. Don’t try to convince or cajole. That will just get you resistance. Invite nicely and then do it, whether your spouse joins you or not. If you can have a good time without your spouse, your spouse will develop more of an interest in joining you.
Go for heart change, not lip service
There is a big difference between your spouse always saying he or she loves you and one that actually looks like he or she loves you. If you are getting the words but not the look, you have a socially disciplined spouse. If you are getting the look, you are doing a good job. If not, then changes are needed. The good news is that they are all enjoyable changes.
Don’t wait for a perfect time
Let me add one more piece of advice here. Many people wait for the perfect time to make changes, but there is no perfect time to do anything. Just get started, and your life will adjust to your changes.
Step 5: Attract your spouse with a single mindset
If you are like 99% of married people, your spouse was more attracted to you before you were married. Do you know the number one reason for that? After marriage, many people start behaving like married people. They follow a marriage script about how they believe married people should behave. Most of the time it is helpful, but unattractive–similar to how we feel about our parents.
Ditch the script! Create a marriage that is more like how you were before you were married. Sure, you still need to pay bills and do chores, but don’t spend your life talking about them. Think of your spouse as your girlfriend or boyfriend. Trade in your sympathy for empathy, and don’t sit together on the sofa looking at your phones.
Many small improvements are better than one big one
Think about what you can do to look and feel younger without getting surgery. You don’t need to go overboard, but a 10% difference in this area can really pique your spouse’s interest–particularly if you can inject a little more romance and a couple more sexual skills.
When you do this, your spouse will either become more interested in you or more fearful that you are going through a midlife crisis and about to have an affair. Either way, it can shake up your spouse enough to get him or her to be more of a participant in your relationship again.
When your spouse asks you what is going on, just say that you want to feel more alive and to enjoy life more. Don’t give any long explanations about changing the marriage or anything like that. Too much explaining is a needy behavior.
Expect your spouse to resist any big changes, so be gradual. Corn can only grow so fast, even if you do all the right things. The ideal rate at which to change is slow enough that your spouse enjoys the changes, but doesn’t ask you what’s going on. Never point out your changes to your spouse. Your approval comes from your better feelings about yourself and your improved marriage.
Step 6: Change the way you think about your spouse
Many of the men and women I work with have contributed to the downfall of their marriages by forgetting to treat their spouse like a man or woman. The best way to treat your spouse is the same way you would treat any single person you were attracted to if you were single.
Marriage is best seen as a place to share your happiness rather than as a place to find your happiness. The more you believe your spouse is responsible for your happiness, the more dissatisfied and passive you will become. It is not your spouse’s job to make you happy.
Think of your spouse as a gift from God. Be thankful and never complain about him or her, directly or behind his or her back. Pray for your spouse’s well-being and ask God what you can do to help your spouse feel more loved.
Behaving this way does not prevent you from using good boundaries in your marriage any more than it would prevent a parent from using good boundaries with a child. It’s all part of loving, not blaming or complaining.
The way you treat your spouse should create in him or her the desire to be with you for a lifetime. One of the main reasons I would not want a woman other than my wife is I know that I could never find anyone better. That is the way to make your husband or wife feel, not with discussions, but with your behavior.
Step 7: Anticipate problems and be ready for them
There is no one less satisfied with their marriage than the person who expected it to be perfect. There is also no spouse less enjoyable than one who tries to make it perfect. Only God is perfect, and the rest of us don’t even come close. No matter who you choose in this world to marry, you will never have a perfect date, perfect home, perfect kids, perfect garden, and so forth.
The big secret to happiness isn’t found in perfection–it’s found in being thankful for what you have.
As God put it:
Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus (1 Thessalonians 5:18).
While you can’t have perfect, you can have a good date, a good home, good kids, a good garden, and so forth. It’s not necessary to kill all the weeds to grow a good garden. Mainly you just need to give more attention to the things you want to grow. And so it is with relationships.
Too many people focus on pulling the weeds in their relationship when they should be focused on growing the good aspects of it.
It may be time for you to learn—nothing is perfect in this life. You are not going to have a perfect date, a perfect garden, perfect kids, and so on. What you can do is to have a good date, a nice garden, lovable kids, and so on—despite the inevitable problems.
This is what you need to do:
- Expect the weeds in your garden, your kids, your spouse, and so on.
- Tell yourself it’s okay–you don’t need perfect.
- Learn the skills for making things good.
- Help your spouse to have realistic expectations.
Most of the time, we are upset it is because our expectations don’t match reality. The easiest fix for that is to change our expectations and our focus.
I expect my wife is going to be moody part of the time. I’ve never known a woman who didn’t get that way. She expects that I am going to forget things she says, our wedding anniversary, and other things. Expecting things like this help us to be calm and loving and keep things in perspective.
When she does become moody, I go do something else. I don’t try to talk her into feeling better. My wife doesn’t try to fix my memory, either.
Help your spouse to recognize that your failings are not going to change. If he or she points them out to you, admit them. Why argue about not being perfect? Be secure enough to admit your faults. Point out your own faults—not your spouse’s. If you have to point out a fault, reaffirm your love at the same time: “Even though you are a moody woman, I still love you.” “Even though you can’t remember our anniversary, I wouldn’t trade you for a different man who could.”
What does this look like in real life?
I’ve done this work both with couples who signed up for my Couples Coaching Package and with individuals who got my Re-Connections Coaching Package. Most of the time, with individuals, so I will give you an example of reviving your marriage solo. It is much easier to do that than to try to get a reluctant spouse to do it with you.
Rena told me that her husband was cold, rarely spoke to her, and slept in a separate room. She had repeatedly tried talking with him about their problems, but he seemed to have no interest in fixing anything. The good news was that they still had some meaningful interaction, like shopping together and doing things as a family.
Rena followed my advice to stop all relationship talk and attempts to get her husband to do things he didn’t want to do. I wanted him to feel that she was no longer pursuing and, in fact, seemed to be doing okay without him. At the same time, I had Rena get involved in an activity outside the home. In addition, she started to dress in a slightly younger style and paid more attention to her appearance.
Another important thing Rena did was to improve her listening and validation skills. Even if her husband was talking about pressure washing the house, she needed to make him feel capable and masculine. She had to get out of the habit of simply thanking her husband, which was more of a wife behavior than a girlfriend behavior.
At first, her husband was suspicious of her changes, but he started to enjoy them despite himself. This resulted in him isolating less. He had started to enjoy his wife again–a major turning point. From there, Rena just needed to continue to use the same skills and behave more like she did when she was single than how she had been for the past twenty years. It was only a matter of time and consistency before they both enjoyed their marriage again.
Rena’s progress is not an exception; it’s typical for people who do this kind of work consistently, without pushing.
If your relationship is slipping over the edge already
You may have, like many people, waited to become close instead of working on becoming close. Or, you thought it was useless since your spouse did not want to make things good with you.
Only now are you starting to see that you could have made it better without your spouse’s help. You could have become more attractive, more independent, more accepting, more loving, and more of a girlfriend or boyfriend than a spouse…
I have good news for you. It is not too late…
If your spouse has already become cold or rejecting
What if your spouse no longer looks at you with loving eyes, even when you are at your best? What if your spouse is reluctant to do things with you that he or she used to enjoy? Is it too late for marriage restoration? No, it’s not. Your spouse has entered that stage between being happy with your relationship and getting out of it. Taking action now can prevent him or her from going on to that third stage.
Focus on attraction rather than pursuit
Your first step in this situation is to identify what you have been doing or not doing that has caused an emotional disconnection in your relationship. Have you made your spouse feel like he or she is not a priority? Have you been critical and argumentative? Did you fail to make your husband feel like a man? Or to make your wife feel like a woman?
If so, these are things you can learn to do better. Before trying to get your spouse to do things with you, it is most helpful to get your spouse to enjoy talking with you again. Don’t try to go from distant to intimate in one step. That won’t work. But it will work if you go step by step.
How attracted your spouse is to you depends on what YOU do. How connected your spouse is to you depends on what YOU do. Re-connection is NOT about getting your spouse to do anything.
Many people need to re-learn how to talk to their spouse about something other than work or the kids. If you are a woman, I have 5 free lessons you can download to help you rejuvenate your conversation with your husband. And, if you are a man, I have a free e-book that will help you to do the same with your wife. Don’t try to do more than that at first.
Focus on one step until you achieve it. Then, move on to the next step. That is the way all successful people have success. Even if your spouse has one foot out the door, you can rebuild your relationship if you focus on doing the right steps, in the right order, and at the right pace.
Everything is easier when you have the right help
Life coaches help with general life decisions and ask questions to help you get clarity. On the other hand, a reconciliation coach is a specialist who identifies for you the right steps, provides training as necessary, and helps you to avoid pitfalls that could derail your progress.
Myfree download will help you to get started as long as you are not at a crisis point in your marriage. If you have reached a crisis point more like Rena’s, you don’t have time to reinvent the wheel. You need to work with a coach who already knows how to make one. Sign up for my Re-Connections Package, and I will be happy to guide you from wherever you are now to a close marriage again.
FAQ
How can I revive my marriage if my spouse isn’t trying?
You don’t need your spouse to participate to start improving your marriage. Many of my clients, like Rena, began restoring connection and attraction on their own. With the right steps and consistency, you can create real change without conflict or pushing your spouse.
Won’t my spouse resist if I start changing things?
Some resistance is normal, especially at the beginning. That’s why I teach gradual, enjoyable changes that naturally invite interest rather than triggering defensiveness. When done correctly, your spouse starts to reconnect without even realizing it’s happening.
What if my marriage feels more like roommates than a couple?
That’s exactly what these steps are designed to change. You’ll learn how to reintroduce attraction, connection, and enjoyment—just like when you were dating. Even small changes, done the right way, can bring back real closeness.
Why work with a coach instead of doing this on my own?
I encourage you to do as much as you can on your own as long as your marriage is not in crisis. Then, if you get stuck or things get worse, you can make better use of coaching. However, if your marriage is in crisis, getting things right in a timely way becomes much more important. That’s when coaching becomes essential.
For further study:
Amato, Lauren Gabriele, “The Relationship between Intimacy and Marital Satisfaction in Christian Couples” (2023). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 4905.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/4905
