Most lists like this could have been written about any city on earth. Communicate openly. Build trust. Manage stress. Nobody has ever read one of those and done anything differently on Wednesday. So here are 10 that are specific enough to act on, and specific to here, because Miami puts a particular kind of pressure on a marriage and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
If you want to know what happens when general advice is not enough and you want somebody in the room with you, that is on couple coaching in Miami. Everything below is free and you can start tonight.
One, two and three: the hours
1. Give the commute back to yourselves. If one of you spends 50 minutes on the Palmetto twice a day, that is nearly 9 hours a week you have already lost, and the person walking through the door at 7:15 is not the person who left. Build a 10 minute decompression rule that both of you honor. No decisions, no logistics, no complaints in the first 10 minutes anybody is home. It sounds small. It removes about a third of the fights I hear about.
2. Put one thing on the calendar that is not the kids and not a party. Miami is generous with events and hostile to unscheduled time. Couples here rarely lack things to do together, they lack time alone together with nothing scheduled inside it. One recurring block, protected like a work meeting, is worth more than a big trip in October.
3. Stop having the important conversation in the car with the children in the back. I know why it happens. It is the only place you are both sitting still. It is also the worst room in the house, because nobody can leave, nobody can be honest with an audience, and you both end up performing a version of the argument for an audience under 8.
Four and five: the family down the road
4. Decide together where the family line sits, before the next thing happens. In a lot of Miami households, the extended family is not distant relatives you see at Christmas, they are 12 minutes away and they have opinions about your children, your money and your marriage. That is a genuine gift and a genuine pressure. The couples who do well are not the ones with fewer relatives. They are the ones who agreed, in advance and in private, what gets decided by the two of them and what gets discussed with everybody else.
5. Never let your parent be your ally against your spouse. The moment you go to your mother with a complaint about your husband, you have added a permanent member to your marriage who only ever hears the bad half. She will not forget it after the two of you make up, because she never got the resolution, only the grievance. This is the single most common self inflicted wound I see in multigenerational Miami families.
Lines worth agreeing on in advance
-
We decide about the kids first, then we tell people.
-
Nobody hears about our fight before the other one hears the apology.
-
Money that comes from your family gets discussed by both of us.
-
Sunday lunch is not automatic. We choose it each month.
-
If your mother says it about me, you say something. That is not disloyalty to her.
Six and seven: culture and language
6. Check the assumption before you argue about the behavior. Two people raised in different houses, and frequently in different countries, come in carrying entirely different defaults about how loud a disagreement is allowed to be, whether you say the difficult thing directly or by implication, how much a family is entitled to know, and what generosity with money means. My own wife is Argentine, so I have opinions about this that were earned rather than read. Most of these fights are not about the incident. They are about a rule neither of you knew was a rule.
7. Fight in the language you both dream in, or slow down until you can. Plenty of couples here are arguing in one person's second language, which means one of you has full access to nuance and the other is translating under stress. That asymmetry is not a small thing. It makes one partner sound blunter than they are and the other sound evasive when they are actually just buying time. Name it out loud once and you will fight better for years.
The fight you are having
The rule underneath it
You told your sister about the miscarriage before you told me you had told her.
Two different defaults about what family is entitled to know.
You always get so loud.
One house where raised voices meant danger, one where they meant nothing at all.
You never just say what you want.
One person raised to ask directly, one raised to consider it rude.
Eight and nine: money and weather
8. Have the money conversation in June, not in the middle of it. Miami is expensive in ways that arrive as surprises: insurance, the assessment, the second car, the school, the trip to see family that is not optional. Couples who talk about money only when something has gone wrong will always experience money as an accusation. Put an hour on the calendar every quarter, with actual numbers in front of you, and it becomes a project rather than a fight.
9. Treat hurricane season as a joint project, not as one person's job. Every year somebody in the house does the shutters, the water, the generator, the plan for the dogs, the call to the parents about whether they are staying. In most houses I know, it is the same person every year and the other one thinks it happens by itself. That is a small resentment with a very reliable annual renewal. Split it in writing in May and you have removed one of the few genuinely predictable arguments in your calendar.
Miami does not give couples time, it gives them activity. Those are not the same thing and only one of them keeps a marriage alive.
Matthew W. Hoelscher, PCC
Ten: the one almost nobody does
10. Ask your partner what they have stopped expecting from you. Not what they want, not what is wrong, not what you could do better. What they have quietly stopped expecting. It is a difficult question to hear and an even harder one to answer honestly, and it goes straight past every rehearsed complaint to the thing that actually got given up on. Ask it once, then be quiet for a long time. In my office it is frequently the moment the real session starts.
If you want the mechanics of having that kind of conversation without it becoming a fight, how to improve communication in marriage goes through it properly. And if what you are dealing with is that every conversation has already become a fight, start with how to stop constant arguing instead.
If you do only one thing this week
-
Pick the single item on this list that made you uncomfortable
-
Do it once, badly, without announcing that you read an article
-
Say nothing for the rest of the evening about how it went
-
Do it again 3 days later. Once is an event, twice is a change
When a list is not enough
I want to be honest about the limits of a page like this. Ten good ideas will move a marriage that still has goodwill in it. They will not touch a marriage where somebody has already made a verdict about the other person, or where something happened that neither of you has been able to say out loud.
If that is your house, a list is not the intervention. A room with somebody in it who does not flinch is the intervention. And if what is going on involves abuse, an active addiction or an untreated mental health condition, that belongs with a licensed professional, and I will tell you so on the first call rather than after you have paid me.
Where a list stops working
-
When it has become a verdict
Complaints are survivable in unlimited quantity. Conclusions about who your partner is as a person are not. Those need to be surfaced and tested, not managed with better habits.
-
When something is unsaid
If there is a fact in your marriage that one of you is holding, no amount of scheduled date nights will do anything except make the holding more elaborate.
-
When it is not marital at all
Abuse of any kind, an active addiction, or an untreated mental health condition belongs with a licensed professional. Safety and treatment are not coaching conversations.
Talk it through
Try the list. If a month goes by and nothing moved, that is information rather than failure, and it usually means the problem is one layer down from where the advice lands. Book the free 25 minute call and I will tell you which layer you are actually on. It is for first timers, it costs nothing, and if I am not the right person I will say so.
Questions couples ask
Does living in Miami really change how a marriage works?
It changes the pressures, not the fundamentals. Three things show up in my office constantly and are specific to here: extended family living close enough to be a daily presence, two people frequently raised in different countries with different unspoken rules, and a pace of life that consumes exactly the hours a marriage needs. None of those break a marriage on their own. All of them go unexamined in most houses.
Which one of these 10 should we start with?
The one that made you uncomfortable while reading. That reaction is data. If none of them did, start with number 10, the question about what your partner has stopped expecting from you, because it is the only item on the list that cannot be done half heartedly and it reliably surfaces whatever the real material is.
We have tried lists like this before and nothing changed. Why?
Usually because the advice was landing above the actual problem. Habits and scheduling fix a marriage that is starved of time. They do nothing for a marriage where one person has already concluded something about the other, or where there is a fact nobody has said out loud. If a month of honest effort produces nothing, the issue is a layer down.
Do we both have to be on board for any of this to work?
No, and that is the useful part. Every item on this list is one sided. You can decompress for 10 minutes, stop routing complaints to your mother, split the hurricane list, or ask the question in number 10 without your partner agreeing to a single thing in advance. Loops have two sides and only one of them has to move first.