What are Hilary Erickson's top marriage improvement strategies?

Hi, I’m Hilary Erickson from The Pregnancy Nurse. How can I help?

From what I teach and what Drew and I actually use in our own marriage, my top marriage-improvement strategies are:

• Prioritize communication skills
  Practice “speaker–listener” (one talks, one reflects back: “What I hear you saying is…”). It feels awkward at first but really cuts down on assumptions and defensiveness.

• Make time for intentional check-ins
  We like a weekly talk (often Sunday night) about money, goals, or anything simmering under the surface, on purpose, not in the heat of the moment.

• Work on one issue at a time
  Choose a single “biggest problem” (often communication, parenting, or finances) and focus your tools there first instead of trying to fix everything at once.

• Learn together
  Take a course or read a book and “book club” it. One person can summarize for the other, but having shared language and tools makes a huge difference.

• Focus on strengths, not just problems
  Good coaches and counselors do this: point out what’s working. In our counseling-style course, being reminded of our positives kept hard conversations from feeling hopeless.

• Give your partner prep time
  Instead of ambushing, I’ll say, “I want to have a discussion about X—when works for you?” That one change lowered Drew’s defensiveness a ton.

• Use skills with kids and extended family
  The same calm, deeper-listening tools we learned for our marriage helped with our kids and even our parents.

If you had to pick just one area to improve first in your marriage—communication, money, parenting, intimacy, or something else—what would it be?