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Keep The Spark

How to Spice Up Your Marriage: 15 Ways to Get the Spark Back (Starting Tonight)

by Hunter Masters · 16 min read

A smiling wife with a diamond ring pulls her husband toward her by his grey silk necktie against a smoky grey backdrop, the kind of spark this guide to spicing up your marriage brings back.

Spicing up your marriage comes down to logistics, not lingerie or a fancy dinner. The spark faded through chemistry and routine, and it comes back the same way it left: by deciding, scheduling, and starting small things on purpose. Fifteen ways below, each one named, each one runnable at home, most of them tonight.

Why the spark fades (and why it's nobody's fault)

Early on, your body was doing half the work for you. John and Julie Gottman call it the love cocktail in Eight Dates: dopamine, norepinephrine, and phenylethylamine, the mix that had you staying up all night talking. Then the body builds tolerance to it, the same way it does to caffeine. Gary Chapman puts the average run of that first obsession at about two years, citing psychologist Dorothy Tennov.

The fade is a chemistry bill coming due, and the Gottmans' point is that it reverses. The same brain still pays out for novelty. You just have to supply the novelty yourselves now.

The bigger risk isn't fighting. In one large divorce survey, 80 percent of divorced men and women named growing apart or feeling unloved as the real cause, while only about 40 percent of divorces get attributed to frequent explosive fighting. Matthew Kelly says it flatly in The Seven Levels of Intimacy: "Hatred is an extreme that destroys only a handful of relationships, but indifference destroys millions."

Nobody puts their marriage on the back burner on purpose. You get a promotion, a baby, a mortgage, a sick parent, and the routines fill in around all of it.

When I asked readers what gets in the way, one wrote:

"After 37 years as a couple, it's easy to get stuck in a rut."

A rut is a routine. Routines are the one part of a marriage you can rewrite this week.

Stop waiting for moments. Build them

Chip and Dan Heath wrote a whole book on why some experiences stick and most evaporate. Two findings from The Power of Moments apply straight to a marriage. When people judge an experience, they mostly ignore how long it lasted and remember two things: the best moment and the ending. And most of us sit around waiting for those best moments to show up on their own.

"We walk a flatland that could have been a mountain range."

Novelty is what makes a peak. Anything that breaks the expected pattern gets recorded more deeply and even feels longer while it's happening, which is why fourteen Friday nights of dinner and a show compress into one blurry memory, and the one night you did something ridiculous is still a story you tell. The Heaths are specific about the mechanism: "Breaking the script isn’t just surprise, it’s strategic surprise." You keep the date. You break one expectation on purpose.

There's a time math problem underneath all of this. In one study of young professional couples monitored around the clock, talking time between partners averaged about 35 minutes a week, most of it logistics. Nobody in that study decided to give their marriage 35 minutes. It's what was left after everything else took its cut.

Matthew Kelly's whole framework rests on one line: "Love is a verb, not a noun."

The daily spark, before the date night

Before you plan anything, know where the leverage sits. John Gottman's The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work reports a six-year study of newlyweds: the couples still married had turned toward each other's small bids for attention about 86 percent of the time in the lab. The couples who divorced: 33 percent. Not fights. Not affairs. Bids, meaning the grumble about the dishwasher, the "come look at this," the hand on the counter.

In his data, the quality of a couple's friendship accounts for roughly 70 percent of how satisfied both spouses are with sex, romance, and passion. Shaunti Feldhahn's research points the same direction from a different angle: couples who spend some time together talking or sharing an activity at least once a week are five times more likely to say they're very happy.

These first three cost almost nothing and run every day.

1. The Six-Second Kiss

Who it's forCouples whose kisses have all shrunk into a two-second peck on the way out the door.

What you needSix seconds.

Next time one of you is leaving or arriving, stop moving and kiss for a full six seconds. Count it in your head the first few times. It's longer than it sounds.
Do the same at the other end of the day.
For the first week, let it be only a kiss. No agenda attached to it.

Gottman built this into his Magic Six Hours, the weekly time budget that separated the couples who kept improving after his workshop from the ones who slid back.

2. The 20-Minute Stress Talk

Who it's forThe couple whose only shared conversation is logistics, pickups, bills, and what's for dinner.

What you need20 minutes and one rule.

Take turns venting about anything stressing you out, as long as it comes from outside the marriage. Work, your brother, the neighbor's tree.
The listener's only job is to be on their side. No fixing, no advice unless it's asked for.
The rule: the marriage itself is off the table for these 20 minutes. If something between you two comes up, it goes to number 13.

Gottman calls this the stress-reducing conversation, and it's a daily block inside those same six hours.

3. The Double Compliment

Who it's forAnyone who thinks good things about their spouse and assumes they already know.

What you needYour spouse, plus one other human.

Find one specific thing to praise today. Specific, not "you're a good dad." Closer to "you handled that call with your mom better than I would have."
Say it to them.
Say it about them to somebody else. A coworker, your sister, the kid in the back seat. Bonus if it gets back to them.

Shaunti Feldhahn's 30-Day Kindness Challenge is built on three habits: say nothing negative, praise daily to them and about them, and do one small kind thing. Across the 700 people in her study, 89 percent saw the relationship improve, and that number covers people who ran all three parts, not people who read about them.

Date nights that don't feel like reruns

When I asked readers what they were hoping for, one wrote:

"Well, we need something to get some fun in our lives!"

Many couples don't have a date problem, they have a definition problem. Dinner and a movie is a script the two of you can run in your sleep, and scripts don't make memories.

In Eight Dates, the Gottmans and the Abramses explain why shared, slightly nervy experiences do so much work: the body's fear response and its arousal response run through a lot of the same wiring, so a racing heart on a ropes course or a dance floor can get filed as attraction to the person standing next to you. A dinner table has never made anybody's heart race. That's the case for picking something you're both a little bad at.

4. Meet as Strangers

Who it's forCouples who've been together long enough that flirting feels like something you used to do.

What you needOne bar or restaurant, and two arrivals.

Get there separately. Whoever arrives first sits alone.
The other one walks in and introduces themselves to a stranger. Fake name optional, terrible accent highly optional.
Stay in character through one drink or one appetizer. You're allowed to lie about your job.
Take the same car home.

Straight out of the play chapter in Eight Dates.

5. The Circle-and-Star List

Who it's forThe couple who keeps saying "we should do something" and can't ever name the something.

What you needA long list of activity ideas, two pens, twenty minutes.

Separately, go down a list of things couples can do together and circle every one that appeals to you. The Gottmans' list in Eight Dates runs about 60 items, from kayaking to pottery to pretending to be spies.
Star your top three.
Compare. Anything you both circled is your play zone. Start there.
If nothing overlaps, each of you takes one item from the other's list, then asks why that one mattered to them.

The Gottmans state there's no correlation between couples having common interests and being happy together. What matters is that you both play, and that you find where the two styles touch.

6. Gold and Silver Dates

Who it's forCouples who mean to date more and keep ending the month at zero.

What you needA shared calendar and ten minutes.

Define the two kinds. A Gold date is planned, out of the house, no kids. A Silver date is planned, at home, no kids, after the house goes quiet.
Aim for one Gold and one or two Silvers a month. Not a date every week.
Put both on the calendar right now, with names on them, so neither one is "sometime this month."
If you need Silver date material, my page of at-home date night ideas was built for exactly that.

This is my own system. It exists because most people only count a night out as a real date. Once a planned night at home counts, most couples find they're closer to the target than they thought.

Questions that bring the curiosity back

We ask people we barely know all kinds of questions. The person we know best stops getting them. Not out of boredom. It's that you already know the answers, or you're sure you do, and after enough years the questions start to feel redundant.

They aren't. Arthur Aron's closeness study is the cleanest proof anyone has run. Strangers were paired up and given a set of escalating personal questions, taking turns, each of them answering whatever they asked. After 45 minutes, 30 percent of those pairs rated their closeness to a person they'd just met higher than the 3.82 average people give their own closest relationship.

Forty-five minutes. With a stranger. You have a head start on every pair in that room, and a much deeper well to draw from. What's missing is the structure.

7. The 36 Questions Date

Who it's forCouples who talk all day long and haven't had a real conversation in months.

What you needA printed copy of Arthur Aron's 36 questions, two chairs, both phones in another room.

Start in the middle, not at question one. The early rungs were built for strangers, and you're not strangers.
Whoever asks a question answers it too. Every time.
Run it like a conversation instead of an interview. Follow the tangents. Finishing the list isn't the goal.
If you only do one, do number 11: four minutes each, your life story in as much detail as you can fit. Set a timer, because four minutes is longer than it sounds.

8. Love Map 20 Questions

Who it's forThe couple who'd rather this feel like a game than a therapy session.

What you needPaper, a pen, and a willingness to lose.

Each of you writes 20 questions about your own life your spouse ought to be able to answer. Favorite color, biggest worry at work right now, who they'd call first with big news, what you wore the night you met.
Take turns asking. Score it however you want, one to five points an answer.
Laugh at the misses instead of scoring points off them. The wrong answers are the useful part, because that's where the map went out of date.

Gottman calls these love maps, the running file you keep on your partner's inner world. He treats it as the floor the rest of the marriage stands on, and it goes stale without maintenance.

9. Two Hours, No Agenda

Who it's forCouples whose time together is always attached to a task.

What you needTwo hours and nothing planned.

Block two hours with no destination, no reservation, no list. A drive, a walk, the porch.
Leave the phones behind, or at least zipped in a bag.
Resist the urge to fill it with a plan. The lack of an agenda is the whole point.

Matthew Kelly calls this carefree timelessness and treats it as the one technique that moves a relationship past small talk. The length is the mechanism, because short windows stay stuck at the level of clichés and facts. He scales it three ways: two hours, a day, or a weekend.

Affection that isn't a request

Spice, in most marketing, means performing. Shaunti Feldhahn's research turned up a better definition. A wife was asked what made her husband kind, and this was the example she reached for: other men would want the sexy little something in the evening, while "there I sit in my giant robe, with my hair up in a towel," and he just smiles at her.

That's the version that survives a hard week. Being delighted by each other as-is.

Feldhahn's surveys also found 82 percent of women are deeply pleased when their man takes her hand. Not a grand gesture. A hand.

Fellas: that one's worth reading twice. Eighty-two percent, for reaching over in the parking lot.

The Gottman Clinic hangs its whole philosophy on one slogan, quoted in The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: "Every Positive Thing You Do in Your Relationship Is Foreplay".

When I asked readers what had slipped, one wife wrote:

"Haven't thought about giving my husband a massage in a long time. Our lives get so busy we forget the importance of taking time to relax and touch without just jumping into intercourse."

10. The 3x20 Hug Week

Who it's forCouples who mostly touch by accident, passing each other in the hall.

What you needSeven days and about a minute a day.

Three hugs a day, 20 seconds each. Twenty seconds is the part that matters and the part everybody shortcuts.
Hang them on fixed pegs so nobody has to remember: first thing, whenever one of you gets home, and before bed.
Let the other person be the one who lets go first.

This ran in my newsletter as a seven-day challenge. It's the cheapest thing on this page.

11. The Tank Check

Who it's forThe spouse who wants to help and can't tell what would count.

What you needOne question, three evenings a week, for a month.

Ask: "On a scale of zero to ten, how full is your love tank tonight?"
Whatever number comes back, ask the follow-up: "What's one thing I could do to move it up?"
Do that thing. Not a version of it you like better. That thing.

Gary Chapman's tank check, from The 5 Love Languages. The score isn't the point. The answers tend to be smaller and more specific than either of you would guess.

12. Touch the Transitions

Who it's forCouples whose affection has turned into a bedtime-only category.

What you needNothing.

Pick the four seams of your day: leaving, getting home, sitting down to eat, and going to bed.
Attach one piece of contact to each seam. A kiss in the car before you back out. A hand on the back walking past. Nothing that needs a production.
Keep it free of any follow-up ask for two weeks, so it reads as affection rather than a signal.

Chapman calls these the dialects inside physical touch. Transitions are the easiest place to reinstall it, because the day already decides the timing for you.

Make it stick: what goes on the calendar happens

The gap between reading all this and running it is narrower than it looks. Peter Gollwitzer's work on implementation intentions, cited by the Heaths, found that committing to a specific time and place, "when I get home Friday, I'm booking the sitter," more than doubled follow-through on things people already meant to do. Same intention, same person. The only added ingredient was a when and a where.

Scheduling is what turns a decision into a night.

13. The Weekly Hour

Who it's forCouples who let small resentments run until they're big enough to fight about.

What you needOne hour a week, the same slot every week, and this agenda.

What went right this week between the two of you.
Five appreciations each, specific, out loud.
One issue, gently. Only one, and lead with the feeling and the request instead of the accusation.
Finish on the question that makes the whole hour work: "What can I do this week to make you feel loved?"

This is the state-of-the-union hour inside Gottman's Magic Six Hours.

14. The Monthaversary

Who it's forCouples who celebrate one anniversary a year and coast the other eleven months.

What you needA recurring calendar event.

Take your wedding date and mark that same day every month.
Do something small on it. A card, the good bottle, your wedding song, a walk with no phones.
Keep the bar low enough that you'll still do it in a busy month, because the busy months are what it's for.

This one came from a reader named John: "We have been married for over 40 years, and it has helped keep our relationship fun."

15. The When-and-Where Pledge

Who it's forEverybody who got this far and hasn't picked one yet.

What you needA shared calendar, both of you, two minutes.

Pick one idea off this page. One. Whichever one made you think of your spouse.
Say the sentence out loud with the when and the where inside it: "Thursday after the kids are down, in the living room, we're doing the 36 questions."
Put it in the shared calendar with the name of the idea as the title.
Tell your spouse which one you picked and why that one.

Gollwitzer's finding again. A good intention loses to a time and a place nearly every time.

If you're the one who noticed the drift first, you don't have to arrive with a plan. You can hand over the choice instead, with something like: "I miss us. Not in a bad way. Can we pick one thing off this and do it Thursday?" And if you're usually the one who says yes to whatever your spouse puts together, they'd probably love to hear you choose for once: "Give me the list. I want to pick this week's."

None of these fifteen ask you to become a different person. No new personality, no grand romantic reinvention, no budget. Pick one. Name the night. Run it, then run it again next week.

The spark got crowded out by a schedule, and a schedule is a thing the two of you can change.

Every one of the fifteen shares the same weak point. Somebody has to pick it, put it on the calendar, and start it on a night when you're both tired. That's where spark plans die, not from a shortage of love and not from a shortage of ideas.

That's the reason Date Nights Dancing exists. It's easy swing dance moves taught at home, fifteen minutes at a time, the two of you learning the same steps together from the first video on. No studio and no experience needed. Two left feet is the normal starting point around here.

Move the coffee table, press play, and give it fifteen minutes. It counts as a Silver date by number 6's definition, it breaks the script the way the Heaths describe, and it puts your hands on each other without either of you having to ask. Then put it on the calendar the way number 15 says, with a night and a room attached.

A few months from now, a song comes on at somebody's wedding and your spouse catches your eye. You both already know the count. You walk out there together.

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