Marriage affects your health, wealth, sexual satisfaction, and your kids. All couples have some issues they will never resolve. You can develop a dialogue with your particular set of issues - as you would with a chronic bad back or trick knee. You do not like them, you wish they were not there, but you keep talking about them and learn how to live with and accommodate them.

Love is a feeling that recedes and flows depending on how you treat each other. If you learn new ways to interact with your partners, the feelings can come flowing back, often stronger than before. 

Sex recedes and flows too, comes and goes. Creating good marital sex is not about putting the sizzle back into your sex life. Early marital sex is sex between strangers - you do not know your partner or yourself at that point. Passionate sex is based on knowing your partner and letting them know you.

Marital contentment often drops with the birth of a baby, and with each successive birth – that is normal. Marital pleasure is at its lowest when there are kids in the house between 11 and 16. That is normal. Satisfaction goes back up with the empty nest - the final stage of marriage, the last third, is the real honeymoon period.

For marital happiness, repair attempts are highly predictive. They can be clumsy or funny, even derisive - but this willingness to make up after an argument or fight is central to every happy marriage.

Learn ways to discuss and update your wishes, hopes and dreams. Discuss about your desires and beliefs on a regular basis. Welcome, hold and integrate change. The marriage vow is a promise to stay married, not to stay the same.

You can build the kind of marriage that suits you and which can help you negotiate and renegotiate your own value and meaning.