Think back to when you first connected with your spouse. In the beginning of your relationship, you likely spent a lot of time focusing on how you felt about your partner, how your partner felt about you, and how much you enjoyed spending time together.

When you get married, it is a testament to the deep love and trust you share with another person. Marriage can be a wonderful experience, but the day-in and day-out quality of a life spent with someone else can sometimes cloud your vision when it comes to how special your spouse really is to you. As time goes on, jobs, kids, and other big life changes often steal the limelight away from your relationship.

If you and your partner feel like strangers to each other, how can you reconnect?

Be Romantic

It’s common knowledge that the starry-eyed romance so characteristic of a young relationship doesn’t normally last forever, but that doesn’t mean there’s no place for romance in your marriage. As you and your spouse grow and change in life, it’s important to allow the love in your marriage to grow and change as well.

Find ways to be romantic together. Go on a date. Tell each other what you love most about the life you share. Reminisce. Take a vacation. Recommit. By setting aside time to spend with your spouse, you can more easily appreciate the person you married amidst the din of daily life.

Keep Things in Perspective

Many therapists agree that an essential ingredient in a successful marriage is the ability to value and connect with each other, even during conflicts. While it’s easy to become defensive during an argument, the things you might feel like saying when you’re angry can be truly hurtful.

So when you’re angry, try to remember how much your spouse means to you. Staying connected can help prevent you from becoming too absorbed in your own feelings. Make eye contact with your partner. A gentle touch during a disagreement can go a long way in diffusing tension.

Work Together

Marriage counseling can be a great way to talk through how you’re feeling and come up with solutions for real problems at home. The earlier you commit to working together, the more likely you are to see great results.

Therapy can be a great resource and has helped many couples stay together, but therapy alone cannot fix problems in a relationship. Open up to and be patient with your partner. Ask for the same for yourself. The best way to make a marriage strong again isn’t to make a problem go away, but to learn how to get through that problem as a team.

Be Open to Change

There’s a lot of debate about how much a person can really change, but the truth is that you don’t necessarily have to change as a person in order for your marriage to work. Perhaps the roles you and your spouse have adopted at home aren’t working and your life needs to be rearranged in some ways. Sometimes in marriage we fall into patterns that lead to discord. Maybe you don’t need to change, but those patterns do.

Expressing a desire to make changes in your life can also help affirm for your partner that you’re still in love, you just need a few elements of your shared life to be different in some way. Think about how you communicate with your partner, how you spend time together, and who does what at home. If your marriage doesn’t seem to be working, approaching your relationship from a different angle might just help you meet each other in the middle.