One behavior, seven days, and a scorecard that tells you by the weekend whether it did anything.
If you want things to be better between you and your wife, most of the advice you get is enormous. Communicate more. Be more present. Prioritize the marriage. All true, and none of it is something you can start on a Tuesday and check on a Sunday.
An experiment is smaller than that on purpose. You pick one behavior, you run it for seven days, and at the end of the week you have an answer instead of a feeling.
A resolution has no end date, so there's never a night where you sit down and decide whether it's working. There's just an unbroken stretch of being slightly behind on a promise you made yourself.
Seven days fixes that. Nobody has to agree to anything permanent, you don't have to announce it, and if it does nothing for either of you, Sunday comes and you drop it with no ceremony.
It also gets the order right. In The Kindness Challenge, Shaunti Feldhahn explains that what you say and do shapes what you feel, rather than the other way around: you can't always pick your feelings, but you can always pick your behavior. Which is why a trial run makes sense at all. You're not waiting to feel different before you do something different. You do the thing for a week and let the feeling catch up if it's going to.
Feldhahn's program runs thirty days, not seven. I'm asking for less than she does, and a week won't do what a month does.
It's the same logic behind how I built Date Nights Dancing: easy swing dance taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, the two of you working on the same moves from the first video on. No dance experience required.
I run a weekly email for couples, and when I sent the phone experiment out, I tested two subject lines against each other. One promised better sleep and connection. One promised a closer relationship. The sleep version won, and it wasn't close.
I don't think that's people being selfish about their marriage. I think an experiment you'll run on a Wednesday when you're tired has to have something in it for you personally, not only for the two of you in the abstract. All three below are built that way.
Pick one. Running all three at once is how you end up running none of them.
What you do: for seven nights, the phone charges somewhere that isn't your bedroom. Kitchen counter, hallway, entry table, anywhere with a wall outlet and a door between it and you.
The practical part everybody hits: your phone is probably your alarm. Solve that before Monday, or you'll cave on night one. A cheap wind-up alarm clock costs less than a pizza and removes the only real excuse.
Why it works: you're not using willpower at eleven at night to keep from picking up the phone. You've put a hallway and a door between you and it, so picking it up takes a decision instead of a reflex. The last few minutes before you're both asleep and the first few after you're awake stop belonging to a screen by default, and neither of you had to have a conversation about phone rules to make that happen.
If it's the evening hours rather than the bedroom that have gone missing, the piece on reconnecting when screens eat the evening is aimed at that hour specifically.
What you do: somewhere you have five minutes alone together, each of you shows the other one place you like being touched. Not describes. Shows. She takes your hand and puts it where she means, and then you do the same with hers. The back of the neck, the inside of a forearm, the scalp, the spot between the shoulder blades that never gets reached.
I send this out as a five-minute challenge and call it Favorite Touch. The seven-day version is the part I'd add for you: once she's shown you, use it once a day for the rest of the week. Walking past her at the sink counts.
Why it works: touch in a long marriage tends to go one of two ways, functional or a preamble to something else, and either way it stops carrying information. This gives you one fact you didn't have, from her, in her own hand, and then a week of using it while it's still fresh.
If asking feels awkward, say that part too. "This is going to sound strange, but show me one place you like being touched, and I'll show you mine." It's fine if it comes out clumsy :)
What you do: for seven days, when something good happens to either of you, you tell her about it in person that day, and you let it take sixty seconds instead of a thumbs-up on a text. It doesn't have to be big. The thing at work that went your way. The kid's teacher who said something decent. The tomato plant that finally did something.
Where it comes from: I ran this in the email as The Overwhelm Antidote, off research out of the University of Illinois on savoring, which found that savoring appears to buffer stress. Everybody already knows that pausing to appreciate something is nice. The stress part is the news. I'm giving you the direction of that work, not the paper.
Why it works: when a week is hard, the good things still happen, they just get processed alone and forgotten by dinner. Saying it to her face the same day gives the two of you something at dinner that isn't logistics.
Keep the count as you go, because your Sunday-night memory of the week isn't reliable, and that isn't a knock on you. In The Kindness Challenge, Shaunti Feldhahn found that people are worse at estimating their own behavior than they believe: participants who were sure they expressed appreciation to their person more than once a day were doing it two or three times a week. They weren't lying. They'd never counted.
So count. Sunday night, three lines, on your phone or the back of an envelope:
Then keep it, drop it, or swap it. A week that ends in "that did nothing for us" is a successful experiment. It cost you seven days to find that out, and now you don't have to wonder about it again.
Once you've run one, the format's yours. A good one has three properties: it's a single behavior you can picture yourself doing, it needs no negotiation to start, and there's something in it for you personally.
I've got one on deck I haven't sent yet, so you can have it first. Call it the walk audit. For a week, write down how many minutes you spent walking each day, and how you felt about that number. Then, three of those days, ask her to come with you after dinner. The tracking is for you. The company is the experiment. If you want a bigger version of that same accounting, the couple's energy audit runs it across the whole week instead of one habit.
If the week goes well and you want the next thing to be something the two of you do together rather than something you track, the Date Nights Dancing program is where I'd point you, for the same reason these are seven days long: fifteen minutes at a time, in your own living room, no audience.
Whichever one gave you a small internal "yeah, but" is probably the one with something in it. The phone one is the hardest of the three, and it's also the only one you can start tonight without her in the room.
You don't need her buy-in to start any of these, and asking for it turns a week you were going to run anyway into a negotiation. Run it, count it, and if she notices and asks what you're up to, tell her the truth: you read about a thing, you're trying it for a week, and you'll tell her Sunday whether it's worth keeping.
For what it's worth, the fact that you're reading about seven-day experiments instead of waiting for a better year says something real about you. A guy who's coasting doesn't go looking. If the week works, a few sub-minute rituals are the natural next size up, and the ideas hub has the rest of them sorted by the kind of night you've got.
One week. One behavior. An answer by Sunday.
The Thursday reminder over 100,000 couples love: ideas and conversation starters that deepen love, laughter, and intimacy.
