When times are tough and we make sacrificial efforts to improve our marriages, it can be tempting to look for instant results. After all, these kinds of heroic efforts cost us plenty in terms of time, effort and ego …

Read my latest marriage column at Fathers for Good today:

When You’ve Tried Everything

January is a time for making resolutions for our finances, health, diet or other ways to improve ourselves in the next 365 days. But have you ever considered resolving to improve your marriage?

You can read my latest marriage column at Fathers for Good:

I Resolve … to Improve My Marriage

You can read about my first “married” Thanksgiving in my Husband & Wife column at Fathers for Good this week:

Grace at Thanksgiving

A cool project I have been working on is a series of columns on marriage for the Knights of Columbus site Fathers For Good.

You can read the first in the series there today, about the complementarity of the sexes: Where Softness and Firmness Meet

My husband, he is vacuuming.

Vacuuming.

It’s a shop vac of course. And he’s using it in our living room which he has stripped bare of all its contents in anticipation of sanding and refinishing the floors in the next 3 days.

But it’s vacuuming nonetheless. And my husband is doing it. And beggars can’t be choosers now, can we?

After 15 years.

I love you, Dan.

Thank God for you.

As a result of a series of freak circumstances, the kids all slept in this morning. Dan and I found ourselves alone, having breakfast together, before he left for work.

Me: This is nice. We should always get up at 5 am and have a romantic breakfast together.

Pause.

Wild laughter.

You can’t talk to a dissident priest, who thinks the Church has no business in your bedroom (immortal soul, si; bedroom, no). Nor even can you really talk to a faithful priest, who will be so thrilled you know what “NFP” stands for that he’ll assume you’re home free. But if you don’t talk to someone, you’re going to jump in front of a train. The truth is, sometimes NFP stinks.

Definitely worth reading the whole thing.