4 Extraordinary Marriage Quotes and What They Can Teach You About Strengthening Your Relationship Right Now

As an experienced couples’ counselor and organizational relationships expert, I've developed a serious passion for sharing what the best relationship and marital therapy research can teach you about saving or building a stronger, healthier and more resilient relationship.

But is there any genuine and practical wisdom in those popular short relationship and marriage quotes that we often see on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest? Can these quotes really teach us anything useful about relationship self-improvement? 

As it turns out, can they ever! 

Some of these quotes are seriously packed with relationship transformation wisdom that you can start to apply right now to improve or even save your relationship!

I've been on the lookout recently, for high impact short marriage quotes to tweet out to my almost 15,000 loyal twitter followers on my @P2PEngagment account. 

The Challenge here is that many of the most popular relationship and marriage quotes out there can actually provide some pretty bad advice. Yet I've still manged to find and tweet quite a few of what I consider to be emotionally healthy quotes for couples who want simple and effective strategies to help save a marriage on the verge of collapse or to maintain already strong and vibrant relationships. 

4 of these quotes dramatically out-shined the dozens of others I’ve shared. These quotes provide so much valuable insight in so few words that I just had to write about them here and share what I've learned from them. 

These 4 extraordinary relationship quotes have strongly resonated with many of my twitter followers as measured in their high rates of being re-tweeted, “Favorited” and repeatedly Twitter top-listed among the dating, relationship and marriage keywords I target while on Twitter. 

They've also enjoyed many positive twitter comments and responses. I strongly recommend that you share them with your partner, family, friends, followers, fans and readers too.

Here are the 4 extraordinary marriage quotes in question, along with a brief overview of how surprisingly on point they are with what today’s leading relationship experts are telling us about building healthy vibrant marriages and families. 

As you'll see they're  as powerful as they are short and to the point:

1.   “A good marriage is a contest of generosity.” - Diane Sawyer

This is by far the most popular of all the marriage quotes I've posted on twitter so far. And it’s not surprising.

Diane Sawyer may not be a marriage therapist but she sure managed to capture some of the most important modern relationship advice in just 8 words.

You see, "generosity" implies giving something of serious value and in your relationship, value is determined by you and your partner's shared values, which in turn help define your most important relationship needs.  

Do you know what your partner's top 2 or 3 most important relationship needs are right now? And remember, it’s not what you think their needs are but what those needs are in  reality. 

What your partner needs most from you and what you think they need can often be 2 very different things and it's up to both of you to zap that relationship knowledge gap every day. It's one of the many reasons why effective couple communication is so critical.

Next, “a contest” implies that more than 1 partner is being generous. And it’s not really a contest as much as it’s a positive, behaviorally contagious and snowballing virtuous cycle.

You see, the more you give your partner in terms of meeting their  most important relationship needs, the easier and more spontaneous it is for them to be generous with you. 

And it’s not just those big deep relationship needs like those found in spiritual, emotional or sexual intimacy that count here.

It’s also those small acts of loving kindness that are cumulatively just as powerful and important as the giving and receiving of true spiritual, emotional and sexual connection.

The best recent marital science shows that it’s the little things, like surprising your partner with a fresh cup of coffee, doing their preferred activity (say, on your weekly date night) over yours or (especially for the men) doing a little extra of that already evenly divided house work that really boost a relationship's resiliency and health. 

These little things add up. They're the small solid bricks that build a strong, lasting and vibrant relationship and that help sustain the deeper forms of intimacy.

 Yet in some relationships, the greatest generosity can be in the pure and unconditional receiving of the gifts of love and sacrifice.

There is nothing stronger and more beautiful than the love of a wife for a military husband who comes home with a serious physical and/or emotional injury, unable to give for now; strengthened and healing in his or her partner's pure love.

There is nothing stronger and more beautiful than the love of a husband for a wife who, diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, doesn’t know if she'll be around long enough to reciprocate her husband’s generosity of love and unconditional caring.

2.   “To get divorced because love has died, is like selling your car because it's run out of gas.” - Diane Sollee

When I first read this quote I was literally stunned by its subtle brilliance!

This quote fully captures what the top relationship scientists and marriage and relationship therapy researchers have proven again and again over the last 20-30 years.

The truth is, love doesn't die. It just shrinks so small that you can't see it anymore. When you don't nurture love, It gets layered over with external life stress and overpowered by the fear, hurt and anger of not having our deepest relationship needs met for too long.  

It turns out that just about any relationship can be saved and utterly positively transformed. The most emotionally distressed couples can regrow and fall back into their once vibrant state of being in a profound state of love again.

For example, we know that one of the most destructive forces in relationship and marriage is a pattern of frequent verbal criticisms and emotional shutdowns. 

Partners in these dysfunctional relationships paralyze each other out of healthy communication and meeting each others needs because those very needs have become so deeply frustrated. There is so much pain as a result.

  learn to hear and meet the underlying need and the criticisms, anger, hurt, arguing and shutting down vanish into thin air. Emotional shut downs and “just walk always” become impossible in fully re-expanded true love.

One of the biggest obstacles to saving a dying relationship, even one devastated by say an emotional affair, due to chronically unmet needs, is the couple's own faulty belief that their relationship is beyond repair. 

 Saving or radically improving a distressed relationship just takes learning and applying some very basic communication and emotional repair skills. It also takes practice and couples need to know that there can and will often be mistakes in the learning process.

Positively transforming a relationship also means that both partners fully and mutually commit to the relationship itself, and that they each allow for the incredible power of love to do what it was designed to do; - heal and grow infinitely.

3.   “The most important marriage skill is listening to your partner in a way that they can't possibly doubt that you love them.”  -Diane Sollee

 In this marriage quote Diane Solle eloquently captures what we have all heard so many times about growing a strong and resilient marriage: It’s all about the communication!

But Diane nudges our understanding of communication 2 steps further. She does this through emphasizing the critical role of effective, active listening. But it’s not just active listening she's talking about, it’s emotionally active listening.

What’s important here is learning to really hear our partner’s fundamental need to feel loved, emotionally protected and to come before any other person in our life.

The question is begged in this extraordinary relationship quote: 

Is there anything more powerful, healing and love expanding in the area of relationship communication than for our partner to know that we are really hearing their deepest feelings and listening and responding ultimately, to their very emotional essence?

Not only does listening instil the kind of deep connective wiring through which we re-energize one and other's relationship love-batteries through listening and heightened emotional responsiveness but that energy is then directly channelled into healing and repairing past and current emotional hurts both big and small.

 Learning to listening with love provides a kind of laser targeted emotional repair process for your relationship.  And a laser welded broken heart, like a properly welded metal structure, is stronger than it was before it was ever broken!  

4.   “Be presidents of each other's fan clubs.” - Tony Heath

I love this quote by Tony Heath. It captures the real day to day stuff of healthy love and marriage.

For example, we know that in the healthiest happiest and longest lasting relationships couples have 5 positive exchanges for every negative exchange (disagreement or argument). We know that they tend to see each other and life with an at times, “unrealistic positive outlook or bias.” It's all in how they choose to see life and one and other.

The love, life and relationship glass for these couples is always at least half full if not continuously overflowing.

Emotionally healthy couples are all about frequently expressed gratitude for the many blessings they share including, simply being there for and with one another in the moment. 

Emotionally healthy couples are almost always in positive scan, looking for the slightest excuse to catch each other being good, to appreciate what many less emotionally healthy couples take for granted in this beautiful life every day. 

 What are your partner's top 3 most important relationship needs right now? What are your top 3 most important relationship needs? 

On a simple scale of 1 to 10 how effective are you both at meeting each others needs? 

If that number is low? What's getting in the way? 

What do you love most about your partner? What are the top 3 most loving and supportive things your partner says or does for you on a day to day basis?

Why not get into positive scan and share with your partner right now? It's contagious!