How Do You Know You Have A Healthy Marriage?

I see posts on CafeMom or articles in magazines or on-line all the time talking about how important it is to keep up an active sex life in your marriage and it just makes me laugh. Sure it's important to keep that spark going, but you don't have to measure success by how many times a day/week you have sex.

In my opinion, one of the biggest things that my hubby and I  have going in our marriage is not the sex (though that is definitely important- LOL). It's the fact that we can spend time together for hours on end talking about things other than our family and not run out of things to talk about that we both care about. We share some of the same hobbies and like a lot of the same music and have the same basic beliefs when it comes to religion/faith and politics. It's very important to make sure that you married couples out there are spending some time together just being a couple and talking about these things that you have in common as well as your family. I don't think that my husband and I could have lasted the nearly 20 yrs as a couple that we have under our belts if we didn't keep those communication lines open and find time to just enjoy being the friends that we were even before we got romantically involved.

So, how do you know if you have a healthy marriage? I guess to some extent that depends on what a "healthy marriage" means to you. For me, it means that your spouse is someone that you want to spend time with doing things both with your kids AND on your own; someone you still enjoy sex with, but who understands if you just don't feel like it tonight so that you don't feel like you have to do it; and most importantly, it means that when something upsetting or really awesome happens, you can't wait to tell them about it and when you do tell them, they actually CARE and RECIPROCATE! In my opinion, if you are forcing yourself to have sex with your partner some arbitrary number of times a week out of a feeling of obligation or from some misguided notion that somehow doing so will fix your marriage, but you never do anything else together without the kids and you have nothing else in common, it's time for some serious couples counseling and soul-searching.