Having Fun to Heal Your Relationship

From: Dr. Frank Gunzburg

You might be thinking that having fun isn’t all that important considering the problems you are facing in your relationship. You might even think this contradicts all the work you have been doing up to this point in the book. Throughout the book we have focused quite a bit on healing, commitment, communication, and other issues that are central to rebuilding your marriage. How could having fun be part of this solution?

There is no question that making a strong commitment and doing the work it takes to heal is important. These are important aspects of saving your marriage, and each of the sections you have read up to this point are important steps in rebuilding your relationship.

But if all you do is work on your relationship, if you only talk about your relationship and juggle complaints, it makes your marriage all work and no fun. Concentrating only on this part of your relationship would make it as if you were hospitalized in a psychiatric unit. If all you do is serious and substantive talking, it’s a little like being hospitalized.

Take advantage of your freedom by having fun with your spouse.

In your situation, where you are repairing your marriage, it isn’t healthy for you or for your relationship to focus exclusively on your problems. You need some time to hang out and enjoy each other the way you did when you first started dating.

You need to have time when there is nothing more important on the table than simply being together. This sends your partner an unwritten message that you just want to be in his or her presence. And this is a very important message to send.

What’s more, it sets up a positive behavioral response in you as well. To understand how this works, let’s take a few moments to discuss Pavlov and his dogs.

At the turn of the last century, Ivan Pavlov ran a set of experiments you are very likely familiar with. He tested salivation in dogs using bells and food, and came to some very interesting scientific conclusions.

Pavlov measured the amount of saliva a dog produced based on stimuli the dog was exposed to. To start with he rang a bell and tested how much saliva the dog produced. Dogs, of course, don’t care a great deal about bells, so they only produced normal resting amounts of saliva when first hearing the bell.

Next he put some food in front of the dogs. Dogs do care a great deal about food, and when they saw the food they wanted to eat and salivated a great deal.

Finally, Pavlov rang the bell while the food was present. He did this repeatedly. Then, he rang the bell without the food and the dogs salivated as if the food were there.

The reason this happened is because the dogs had subconsciously developed an association between the food and the bell. Pavlov called this response a conditioned reflex because he believed it went beyond the conscious mind and entered the dog’s mind on the level of reflex.

Of course, you aren’t a dog, and you are not concerned about bells or food in reading this book. You may be wondering what this all has to do with your marriage.

Although humans are much more complex than dogs, some principles of learning still apply. Think about this scenario: You are in a situation where you are feeling good and having fun (the salivation in Pavlov’s experiment) and your spouse is there with you (the bell in Pavlov’s experiment). Assuming there are no interfering factors, and you repeat this a few times, this would raise the probability that being in the presence of your spouse will bring back the internal state of feeling good and having fun.

This helps strengthen your relationship on a subconscious level in a positive way. Because the more you associate your spouse with good feelings, the more you are likely to feel good when you are with him or her.

If, on the other hand, you don’t have fun together and all you do is talk about your problems, the whole process could be reversed. You start associating your spouse more and more with problems and less and less with fun. It’s likely you already know what I’m talking about if you have been focused largely on the negative.

In short, going out on dates and having fun with your spouse is critical if you are going to have the wonderful marriage you want. If you don’t nurture your relationship this way, you put yourself on the road to a “ho-hum” marriage.

When you think about it, this is great news! It means you have every reason to go out and have a good time with your partner. You don’t have to be doing emotional work in your relationship all the time and you shouldn’t be. You want to make time to have great experiences with your spouse. It will do wonders for your relationship.

For some of you that may sound wonderful, but if you have been suffering in a painful relationship, going out and having fun might not even be something you can imagine. It may seem to you that your relationship is just too terrible for you to spend any fun time together.

Even if you can imagine having fun with your partner, dating is fraught with all kinds of difficulties for some people: from lack of time, to simply not knowing what to do.

Dr. Frank Gunzburg is a licensed counselor in Maryland and has been specializing is helping couples restore their marriage for over 30 years.