One of the 7 Building Blocks in my parenting model is “a strong marriage.” It goes without saying that protecting and strengthening our marriage is important for the well-being of our children. No matter how much parents love their children, bitterness, hostility, or coldness between mom and dad will affect the kids. Not only is our child’s basic sense of safety threatened when our marital relationship is unstable, but our marriage models for our children how to treat others (and how they should expect to be treated by others) in close, intimate relationships. So, any discussion of what children need to thrive emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually must include an examination of what it takes to create and sustain strong (happy, secure, affectionate) marriages.

How do we build and protect our marriage? Here are 3 basic principles that have helped me in my nearly 21 years of marriage:

1. Tap into the Sacramental Power of Marriage

First, we can choose to live in a way that honors the sacramental dignity of marriage. You see, for Catholics marriage is not just a civil contract, it is a sacrament — it is a sacred sign and witness of the redemptive love of Christ. Our love for one another should serve as a sign of Christ’s love for the Church and, through our acts of love and sacrifice for one another, we build up the entire Body of Christ.

In addition, through the graces of the sacrament (which we receive on our wedding day if we were married in the Church), we are able to attain holiness through our marriage. Our marriage is our path to sainthood. When we love, honor, and support our spouse, and he does the same for us, we are helping one another become more Christ-like and holy.

This kind of holiness isn’t easy. I’ve discovered that Philip and I really have to work toward mutual, self-giving love. Marriage requires a kind of love that philosophers call “philia.” In philia, we live with mutual care and openness, sharing one another’s burdens, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, and allowing ourselves to be changed by the other person. Without philia, our marriage will become very lopsided, with one spouse doing all the work or only one of us changing in response to the insights of the other person. Without philia, the spouses can become like an employer and employee, or, worse, 2 lonely cows grazing in a field, chomping on their own hay without paying attention to each other.

2. Prioritize Your Relationship

Next, if we want to build a strong marriage, we must choose to prioritize our marriage before any other human relationship — including our relationship with our parents, our golf buddies, and even our children. Of course, we as parents must recognize the needs of those who are most vulnerable in our families — babies, small children, the sick. We have to try to balance the needs of the many people in our family, and the needs of the weakest and most vulnerable must be attended to first in order to protect their dignity. We just have to remind ourselves not to let our marriage go stale while we’re busy being a super-parent.

It doesn’t take a great deal of time or grand gestures to prioritize your marriage; it really just requires an attitude of appreciation and small gestures of love — a kiss every time we come together after time apart, a note left on the mirror, a favorite dessert when it isn’t expected.

3. Give 100%

Finally, we seek to love our spouse fully, completely, selflessly. A Christian marriage isn’t a 50/50 proposition: we commit our hearts and our lives one hundred percent, twenty-four hours a day. I think when spouses get caught up in splitting everything 50/50, they are treating their marriage like a business deal rather than a sign of Christ’s love for his Church.

Didn’t I just say under #1 that we need both spouses to offer love, sacrifice, and vulnerability in order to practice “philia”? Am I contradicting myself by saying marriage isn’t a 50/50 proposition? No. Here, I am talking about our attitude and expectations. I am talking about avoiding the trap of constantly comparing your sacrifices to your spouses; for example, telling your spouse that since you did the dishes, he should get up with the baby, or because you washed the car, your spouse should go put gas in it. When we live like this, we are turned in on ourselves, not turned toward our spouse. These conversations will happen inevitably, but I wonder whether we can more often ask ourselves what our spouse needs from us today rather than what our spouse forgot to do for us.

Christ loves his Church with abandon, without counting the cost or comparing sacrifices. This is a very strange concept for the modern mind. Western culture’s view of love places the almighty ME at the center of marriage: Do you make ME look good? Are you fulfilling all of MY dreams? What have you done for ME lately? For Christian spouses, we take Christ as our model of love, and through his example we discover that we must empty ourselves to find our true selves.

So, let’s ask ourselves questions daily that place Christ at the center of our marriage: What can I do to make my spouse’s life a little easier today? How can I allow Christ to love my spouse through me? How can I help my spouse to become the man/woman God wants him/her to be? This is a difficult ideal to live up to, but through grace and our willingness to practice, we can grow toward it.

In these three ways — through honoring the sacredness of our marriage, prioritizing our relationship with our spouse, and loving our spouse with a radical other-centered kind of love — we build and protect our marriage, the Body of Christ, and our child’s heart!