091|3 Checks Every Marriage Needs — Daily, Weekly, and Monthly

00:00:00 Why Your Plan to Show Up Keeps Failing

Every week I ask the men in my coaching community, Better Husband Academy, to do one thing: Make a commitment to himself and his marriage. Pick one thing and actually do it. Take one step toward the version of the marriage he's trying to build.

And after a long time of doing this, here's a pattern I started to notice, and it shows up over and over again. A man will tell me his commitment is to show up when things get hard in his marriage, to be ready when his wife wants to have a hard conversation, to be prepared when things get emotional so he can stay present.

Essentially, what he's telling me is that his commitment is to show up to a hard moment when it happens. When there's a real problem in front of him, when there's a fight to clean up, or she's upset, or things get tense at home, that's when he'll bring his best.

And maybe you've said a version of this to yourself. Things are fine right now, so your plan is to stay ready for when things are not fine, for when there's actually something in front of you to deal with. And I get it. That sounds like a good plan on paper. It sounds like a man who's ready to show up the second his marriage needs him. But here's the problem hiding in that answer.

By the time there's a fire, the thing that's supposed to save you already has to be working. You don't get it working in the middle of the emergency. There's no time. You get it working long before the emergency ever shows up, on the ordinary days when nothing is wrong at all.

And think about that for a second. The moment you actually need something to save you is the exact worst moment to find out whether it works or not, and yet that's how most of us run our marriages.

We make a plan to do better, to take action, to respond differently when the moment shows up in front of us. We never check to see if we have the capacity to do that before the moment actually shows up.

We never practice in the smaller moments so that we're ready for the big moments. We never train for the thing that isn't in front of us yet. We just expect that we'll be able to handle it when it comes. And when it finally comes, we're stunned. We're shocked. We're completely confused about why we defaulted to the same old patterns when we told ourselves it wouldn't happen again this time.

Some version of this happened to me for most of my marriage. A moment where I felt like I failed would turn into a promise, a commitment to do better, and then the next moment would show up and I'd repeat the same thing all over again, and I wouldn't understand why it kept happening.

Now, for years, I was a firefighter, and that job taught me something about readiness that has completely changed the way I look at my own marriage and the way I coach every man I work with.

So in this episode, I want to give you three checks for your marriage. A daily one, a weekly one, and a monthly one.

And I'm gonna show you how to think of them the way that I thought about the equipment that my life depended on as a firefighter.

By the end of this episode, you're going to know exactly what those three checks are, how to run each one, and why doing them when everything's calm is the entire point, not when it's already on fire. Before.

And I'm also gonna give you a printout, one page that you can put up somewhere, and you'll actually see it, on the fridge, in your truck, on the bathroom mirror, so these checks stay in front of you, and you actually run them.

And yes, even though I could probably give you way more, I'm only giving you three on purpose. Not 10, not some list so long you just nod along and never do them. Three checks you can actually carry for the rest of your marriage. So stick around. You don't wanna miss this one.

00:03:24 What the Firehouse Taught Me About Being Ready

Welcome to Better Husband, the podcast that helps you answer the question: how can I be a better husband? I'm Angelo Santiago, a men's marriage and relationship coach, and every week I bring you practical insights to help you strengthen your marriage and become the best husband you can be.

Now, as I've mentioned earlier, and I've shared on this podcast before, I spent over a decade in the fire service, and there was a lot about that job that I loved, a lot that was hard, and honestly, a lot that was just plain annoying. But when I look back at what that work taught me, this is the piece I keep coming back to.

Every single time I got to work, before anything else, there were checks I had to run. And the very first one every morning was my SCBA. That's my self-contained breathing apparatus. That's the thing that lets me breathe inside a building full of smoke. First thing every shift, I checked it.

Is my air level good? Is the mask working? Is anything defective in it? And I didn't run that check because I was in the mood, I ran it because my life depended on it. If that thing failed while I was inside a fire, I wasn't walking back out. Then the rest of my gear, my turnout coat, my helmet, my boots, my gloves, all my tools.

Every day, I'd lay it all out and go through it piece by piece, because when that tone drops in the middle of the night, you have seconds to get dressed and get on the fire engine or the truck, and you don't wanna be the guy fumbling for a glove in the dark. And those are a small fraction of all the checks I had to do every day.

I was also checking radios, making sure they were on the right channels and actually transmitting. When I was the engine operator, it was my fuel, my water tanks. When I drove the truck, was the ladder operational? Have I checked the 20 plus compartments to make sure everything is in the right place?

Don't even get me started on all the checks I had to do when I promoted to fire captain. The list was long, and I ran it every single day. Then on top of all that, there was the weekly stuff.

Saturdays, we'd pull every piece of medical equipment off the engine and check the expiration dates, count everything, make sure we had exactly what we were supposed to have, every IV kit, every med, every box of gloves, all of it laid out and accounted for. Sundays, we ran the power equipment. Every chainsaw got started.

Every generator got run. Everything that could turn on got turned on. Because the tool you never start is the tool that won't start when the car is upside down and somebody's trapped inside.

And that's before you even get to the monthly trainings and the drills where we'd run the whole thing like it was real, over and over until our hands just knew what to do. It was endless. Now, here's the part that connects to your marriage. When I was brand new, a rookie, man, I was fired up to do all of it.

The older guys would tell me not to worry about something, and I'd say, "No, I've got this," and I loved it. Every time I started a chainsaw, I was learning something. If something was broken, I got to figure it out. The crew relied on me, and I had the energy and the excitement to be that guy. But 10 years in, those Sunday checks got old.

When there's a football game on, when it's the playoffs, when it's the World Series and you're out in the yard trying to start a generator or trying to figure out why that idiot from B shift didn't fill up the SCBA tanks... Sorry, B shift, but if you've ever been in the fire service, you know it's always B shift messing things up.

And I didn't wanna do them, and I wasn't the only one. The whole crew felt it. But here's what I want you to really notice. We didn't run those checks and then sit around the firehouse waiting for someone to have the worst day of their life. We ran them so we'd be ready, and then we went and lived. We cooked together, we worked out, we laughed, we watched the game.

And when the call came, and eventually it always came, we were ready to set down whatever we were doing and go handle the thing that needed us. That's what it actually looks like to be ready for the hard moment when it shows up. Once you're ready for it, you gain the freedom to enjoy the ordinary day because you already know you're covered.

You're not sitting in tension waiting for the moment to show up because you know you're prepared for when it does.

00:07:17 The Ladder From Reactive to Prepared

So let's bring this home. I want you to start looking at your marriage the same way I looked at that firehouse full of equipment I depended on. There are checks you can run daily, weekly, and monthly.

But before I hand them to you, I need you to understand what a check actually is, because this is easy to hear the wrong way. A check is not a check-in. A check-in is a conversation, the two of you sitting down to talk how you're both doing, and that's a good thing.

But it's not what I'm giving you today. A check is something you do. It's a rep. You run it whether you feel like it or not, whether or not anything is wrong, but because something important is riding on it. And that phrase, "whether or not anything is wrong," is exactly where most men get stuck, because most of us are fixers.

We are wired to respond to problems. When something breaks, we jump on it. When nothing's broken, we do nothing. So when I ask a man to do something for his marriage on a calm, ordinary day, part of him thinks, "Why? Nothing's wrong. I'll deal with it when there's actually something to deal with." That's the reactive man, and I don't want you to be the reactive man.

I want you to be prepared. Now I want you to picture a ladder. At the bottom is reactive, just waiting for things to go bad. In the middle is preventative, trying to stop bad things before they start.

But at the top of the ladder is prepared, ready. And here's what I need you to hear about being ready. It's not bracing for disaster. It's not sitting around expecting your marriage to blow up. It's the opposite.

You run your checks so that you can relax, so you can actually enjoy your marriage without that low hum of worry in the back of your mind because you already know the important things are handled.

I checked my SCBA at 6:00 in the morning before the day started when absolutely nothing was happening. Now, was there a quick check right before I walked into a burning building too? Yeah, of course, but that quick check only meant anything because I'd already done the real one hours earlier when it was calm.

The check that saved my life was never the one at the door. It was the one I ran long before that. Your marriage works the same way. So here are your three checks, and yes, just three, and I'm holding it to three on purpose because I would rather you actually run these three for the rest of your life than just nod along to this episode listening to a list of 10 of them and run none.

00:09:39 Check Your Own Air Before You Check Hers

Number one, the daily check. And this one is on you, not on her.

Remember, the first thing I checked every single morning was my own air. Before I worried about anybody else, before I could get anybody else out of a building, I made sure I could breathe. Your daily check is the same idea. It isn't about your wife yet. It's about you showing up as the man you actually want to be that day.

So here's the rep. Every morning, you take a few minutes and ground yourself before the day gets going. That might be something you say to yourself and a scan of your body for tension before you even get out of bed. It might be a few deep breaths as you get dressed before you rush out the door. It might be stepping outside and moving your body before the first cup of coffee.

Whatever settles you down. And while you're there, you set one intention. You ask yourself one honest question, "What does today need from me as a husband?" Some days the real answer is, "She needs my patience." Some days it's, "She needs my attention," phone down, actually present. Some days it's just, "She needs me warm instead of checked out and somewhere else."

That's it. Ground yourself and set the intention. It takes two minutes. Now, here's why it comes first. You cannot give your wife something you don't have. Before you even say good morning to her, you're already carrying all the stress you're expecting for the day ahead. You're running hot, you're half gone, still stewing on something from the day before.

That's what she gets. That's the air she's breathing first thing in the morning. But if you take even two minutes to check your own air first, to come back to center before you engage, she gets a steadier man. Doesn't have to be a perfect one, just a steadier one, and she feels the difference right away, even if neither of you ever says a word about it.

I have plenty of mornings where I skip this. I roll out of bed still thinking about something from work, and inside of 10 minutes, I've been short with my wife over nothing, some little thing about breakfast or our son, and I watch her go cold and pull back. Nothing blew up, but the temperature in the whole house dropped, and I'm the one who dropped it. Two minutes of grounding myself, preparing myself, would have changed the entire morning.

The reactive man starts his day on autopilot and hopes it goes okay. The prepared man takes his two minutes and decide who he's going to be before the day ever starts.

00:12:00 Find the One Thing You Let Slide

Number two: The weekly check. So the daily check is your air, getting yourself right. The weekly check is where you start running the equipment so nothing seizes up on you. Back at the firehouse on Sundays, we started every chainsaw and ran every generator, even the ones that were working perfectly fine because the machine that just sits there untouched is the exact one that fails the day you finally need it.

Your marriage has parts like that too, and here's the rep. Once a week, you look back over the last several days, and you find the one thing you let slide, the moment you were short with her and never circled back, the time she reached for you and you were tired and you turned away, the little thing you brushed right past, and then you go repair it.

You name it, you own your part in it, and you reconnect. That's the whole rep. And you run it even on a good week, especially in a good week. You don't wait until there's some big rupture to go repair something because here's what actually ends marriages. It's rarely one giant blowup. It's the slow pile of small hurts that nobody ever went back and cleaned up.

Each one on its own is nothing. A sigh, a snap, a cold shoulder, a forgotten promise, but they stack. Year after year until two people are strangers under the same roof who can't even tell you how they got there. And the research on marriages that last say the very same thing from the other direction.

What separates the couples who make it isn't that they never fight or never hurt each other. Everybody does that. It's that they repair. Repair is the whole skill, and here's the key I need you to get. Repair is not a mood you wait around to be in. It's a discipline you run on a schedule. That's why it's a weekly check.

You don't sit around waiting until you feel like apologizing. You look once a week, you find the thing, and you clean it up before it has a chance to harden. Most weeks this is small, a two-minute conversation. "Hey, I was short with you last week, and that was unfair to you. I imagine you probably felt hurt or dismissed and definitely not loved.

I'm sorry. And my commitment is that if I'm stressed out about something, I don't dump it on you. I don't treat you that way, I don't speak to you that way," and that's it. One small rep. Run it every single week. That's you pulling the cord on that generator so it starts on the day you actually need it.

Now, here's the part I really want you to hear because it's the whole point of running it on a schedule.

Remember what I said earlier, that we practice these things every single week so that we can use it when we need it? This is how you practice. Every single week, you run the rep, and the skill gets built, and then you don't have to wait for Sunday to use it.

If something small comes up on a Tuesday, and there's a repair to make, you make it on Tuesday. You pull that skill you've been practicing, and you use it right there in the moment. You still run the weekly check no matter what because that's what guarantees the skill is there at all.

But you're not running reps to collect reps. You're running them so that when your marriage actually needs it on a Tuesday or a Thursday, your hands already know what to do.

00:15:02 Go Deeper on Purpose Once a Month

Now, number three, the monthly check. So daily you check your own air, weekly you run the small repairs, and monthly you do the drill. This is the deeper one, and it's the one that keeps the two of you connected to something bigger than the daily grind. Once a month, you do one deliberate thing to go deeper with your wife, and what that looks like depends on where your marriage actually is right now.

If things are good and steady, it might be a real date, and I don't mean just dinner where you both sit there scrolling on your phones. I mean actual time, just the two of you, where you're paying attention to her, remembering why you love her, not just like her. Ask her a real question about her life, and then actually listen to the answer, and then ask another question to go deeper, and then share about yourself.

Now, if you two have been disconnected or just going through the motions lately, your monthly check might just be a conversation about where you're headed. What do we want this next year to look like? What are we even building together here? Most couples never once step back and talk about the bigger picture.

They just run on the treadmill of logistics and kids and work, and fall into bed exhausted, and then they wonder five years later how they ended up feeling like roommates. That disconnection isn't always obvious. It creeps in one busy week at a time until one day you look up and realize you haven't had a real conversation in months. The monthly step back is how you catch it while it's still fixable.

And if something has been sitting heavy, some hurt or some tension that neither of you has really touched, the monthly check is where you clear it. You sit down and you deal with the thing that's been weighing on the marriage before it grows into the emergency.

Notice that the form changes, but the point never does. Once a month, you go deeper on purpose. And why does this one work like a drill? Because at the firehouse, we ran our drills on the calm days so that our hands already knew what to do when the real emergency finally hit. Same thing here. When you practice going to the deeper, realer places with your wife when things are calm, you build the muscle for it so that when a genuine crisis does come up, and at some point it will, the two of you aren't strangers trying to have a hard conversation for the first time under the worst pressure of your lives.

You've been there before. You already know how to find each other.

00:17:19 You're Not Going to Keep This Up Alone

Now, I wanna be honest with you about something because if I'm not, this whole thing is going to sound easier than it really is. I do my best to run these checks in my own marriage, and I still miss them. Some days I flat out forget, and some days I know exactly what I should do and choose not to do it because I'm tired or I'm annoyed or the game is on.

And every single time I let them slide, I feel it and my marriage feels it. The distance creeps back in. The little things start to pile up. So I'm not standing here as the guy who does this perfectly. I'm the guy who has learned over and over again what it costs me when I don't, and here's what I've figured out about how I keep coming back to them anyway.

It isn't willpower, it's the crew. Back at the firehouse, I didn't run those checks on discipline alone. I ran them because the guy next to me was running his. I'd see him checking his SCBA, and it reminded me to go check mine.

We did the weekly inventory together. We ran the drills as a team, and on the days I didn't feel like it, somebody pushed me, and on the days he didn't feel like it, I pushed him. Nobody kept it up completely on their own. That is not how any of us lasted a whole career, and you are not going to keep this up completely on your own either.

And I don't care how motivated you feel today. Motivation fades. That's the whole story of the fired-up rookie who slowly becomes the 10-year veteran with the game on not wanting to run the checks anymore.

What lasts is not the fired-up feeling. What lasts is being surrounded by other men doing the exact same work, who remind you, who have your back, and who call you out when you're letting it slide.

That is the entire reason the Better Husband Academy exists. It's a room full of men running these same checks on their own marriages together.

If you wanna join us in that room, go to betterhusbandacademy.com, or just click the link at the bottom of the show notes.

00:19:09 Awareness, Action, Accountability

So that's it. That's the idea, and those are the checks. That's what you came here for. Start looking at your marriage as the thing you're responsible for maintaining, and run those three checks on the calm days so you're ready for the hard ones.

But an idea you only listen to doesn't change anything. You've got to take it into your own marriage and actually run it. So here is your awareness question, action steps, and accountability for this week

Let's start with your awareness. So this points straight at your real life. Here's the question. Of the three checks, the daily, the weekly, and the monthly, which one do you think is going to be the hardest for you to actually keep? Not which one sounds best, which one you already know you'd be tempted to let go of first when the week fills up.

Sit with that answer because that's the one that's going to teach you the most about yourself over the next month.

Now, the action steps. Here's what I want you to actually do today. One, go to betterhusbandchecklist.com and download the free one-page PDF. It's got a cheat sheet for each of the three checks and a place to track them, so you're not running this from memory.

Print it out and put it somewhere you'll see every day. That's betterhusbandchecklist.com.

Two, run all three checks for the next month. Do the daily check, do the weekly check, and at some point during the month, do the monthly check. Not one of them, all three. Each one is covering something the other two can't, and that's what makes it a system instead of a single habit you picked off a list.

Three, track what's changing in you and in your marriage. That's what the sheet is for. How are you showing up differently? What's hard about it? Where has it actually helped? And pay attention to what's happening between the two of you. A month of this, and you'll notice things you would have walked right past before.

And don't just listen to this and tell yourself you'll get to it at some point. Don't wait for the emergency. Don't wait for the tones to drop. Open up a tab right now on your phone or on your computer. Go to betterhusbandchecklist.com and download this PDF. Then print it and use it. None of this changes anything unless you actually do it.

And for accountability, let's talk about your crew. Let's talk about who's beside you also running these checks because that's where this lives or dies. Start with one. One man you tell what you're committing to. Not your wife, another man, somebody who will actually ask you whether you ran your checks.

The check you say out loud to another guy is the one you actually run. That's how a crew starts. And if you don't have a single guy in your life doing this work on his own marriage, that's exactly what I built Better Husband Academy for. It's that room that's full of men running these on live calls every single week, keeping each other in it, men who want the same thing you want, doing the same work you're about to do.

Go to betterhusbandacademy.com or click the link at the bottom of the show notes. You don't have to do this alone.

00:22:00 Closing Takeaway

Here's what I want you to take away from this episode. When my fire engine pulled up to that burning building, and my crew and I got out, ready to go in and deal with the emergency in front of us, what kept us safe and let us do what we knew had to be done, it didn't happen at the door before we walked into that building.

It happened hours earlier, early one morning when nothing was wrong and nobody was watching. Nobody hands you a medal for checking your air on a calm day. There's no big deal about it, no story to tell, but that plain, unglamorous work is the whole thing. It's what's actually there for you when it counts.

Your marriage is the same. The steady, ready love you want to have on the hard days gets built on all the ordinary days when nothing is hard at all. The fire is not the time to go find out.

Run your checks now while it's calm, and then go enjoy your marriage knowing you're ready for whatever comes. The prepared man isn't the anxious one. He's the one who finally gets to relax because he already did the work.

Now, before you go, I just wanna say thank you. There are a lot of men out there who are not willing to look honestly at their marriage, but you're here showing up, making a choice to do something different.

Keep going, keep running your checks, and go download that PDF at betterhusbandchecklist.com . You're listening to Better Husband. I'm Angelo Santiago, and I'll see you on the next one.