Alex and Jordan hit year seven. The spark was gone. The conversations were purely logistical. Alex finally said it out loud during a tense dinner: "I'm just not happy anymore. I feel like I'm doing all the work and getting nothing back."
Jordan, exhausted and defensive, snapped back: "Then maybe we should just get out. If you're so miserable, why are we doing this?"
Modern culture trains us to treat marriage like an internet provider: if the service drops, you find a new vendor. But you cannot build deep, lasting intimacy with someone if you know they are evaluating your daily performance to decide if you are still worth keeping.
Before you learn a single communication technique or intimacy hack, you must decide what kind of relationship you are actually in. Are you managing a fragile consumer contract, or are you building a resilient covenant?
The covenant doesn't mean you tolerate abuse. It means you stop threatening the existence of the house every time there's a leak in the roof. You stop asking "Should I leave?" and you start asking "How do we fix this?"