Most Couples Don’t Plan on Drifting. That’s the Problem.

I have spent a lot of time around marriages.

Some of them are flourishing. Some of them are struggling quietly. Some of them are ending. And in nearly twenty years of pastoral conversations, financial planning meetings, and Saturday morning coffees with couples I have come to love, I have never met a single couple who said, "We planned on growing apart."

I have met hundreds who would say, "We just didn't plan at all."

That is the sentence I want you to sit with this week, especially if your marriage is in a stretch that feels less alive than it used to.

Drift is not a moral failure. It is what happens when intention stops.

Marriages do not stay close because two people love each other enough. They stay close because two people make a thousand small, intentional choices in a row, then make those choices again the next month, and the next year, and the next decade. The choices aren't dramatic. They almost never look spiritual from the outside. They look like a Tuesday night dinner without phones. They look like a Saturday morning walk with no agenda. They look like saying out loud, on a quiet weekday, what you are hoping for and what you are afraid of.

Most couples lose the close marriage they had not because they fell out of love. They lost it because life sped up and their intention slowed down. And the marriage drifted in the direction every unattended thing drifts. Apart.

There is a particular version of this drift that I see in ministry families, in Christian business families, in faithful church-going families that I want to name plainly. It is the drift that hides behind being busy doing good things.

You are not having affairs. You are not arguing. You are running a calendar that has no margin for each other, and you have been doing it long enough that you don't remember it being any other way. You sit at the dinner table and talk about logistics. You go to bed at different times. You make decisions about money, about the kids, about the future in fragments instead of together. You don't fight, because fighting takes time you don't have. You just exist in parallel.

That is drift, dressed up as fine. And it is the most common shape of marriage erosion in faithful Christians I have known.

I wrote Legacy Together in part because Rachel and I have had to fight this in our own marriage more than once. We are not in crisis. We have not been in crisis. But the calendar of a pastor and a financial advisor and a writer and a director will fill itself in without anyone's permission. And there have been seasons when I have looked up and realized we were doing fine on the outside and slowly drifting on the inside.

The remedy is not more romance. It is more rhythm.

Rhythm is the deliberate, unspectacular practice of returning to each other on a schedule that the world does not approve of. It is the weekly dinner. It is the monthly conversation about what is actually happening underneath the schedule. It is the quarterly look forward, with prayer, with honesty, with hope. It is the annual retreat, even if your retreat is two nights in a cabin with notebooks and bad coffee.

Rhythm is what intention looks like once it has been practiced long enough to become a way of life.

If your marriage has been drifting, the answer is not a new program. It is one small return. One Tuesday night. One Saturday morning. One sit-down conversation where you ask the question most couples are afraid to ask out loud.

What kind of marriage are we becoming?

Not what kind of marriage do you want. Not what kind of marriage do you hope for. What kind of marriage are you actually becoming, given how you are spending the only currency that matters — your time and your attention.

If the honest answer scares you, that is a gift. Most couples don't get to ask the question early enough for the answer to matter. You still have time.

So this week, pick one return. One small piece of intention you can put back into your marriage that you have not been making time for. Then put it on the calendar. Then keep it.

That is how a marriage stops drifting. One unspectacular return at a time. Repeated until it becomes the way you actually live.

The couples I know who have built marriages worth admiring did not have less in their lives. They had more intention.

The good news, this March, is that intention is something any couple can start tomorrow.