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• Make hot cocoa and look at picture albums.
• Bundle up and take a short walk.
• Go window shopping at a local mall or town.
• Buy a plant.
• Bake cookies together (clean up together, too).
• Read Song of Solomon out loud.
• Have an indoor picnic—and don't forget the marshmallows.
• Spend the night at a motel or inn.
• Play a favorite board game.
• Make love by candlelight.

Excerpted from Lists to Live By for Every Married Couple, ©2001, compiled by Alice Gray, Steve Stephens, John VanDiest. Used by permission of Multnomah Publishers Inc.

"We've been having this same conversation for the past two years," my wife, Jana, said, having listened to my frustrations about my father who had turned down our request for a loan. "Every time you talk about your family, your face gets red and you pound the table. I don't know what to say any more. I think you need to see a counselor."

I felt hurt, even betrayed. But my wife's truth-telling launched me on a journey that invited the presence of Christ into a back corner of my soul. She had exercised an unpleasant kindness; she had served me by telling the truth. And it cost her something. She had to endure my angry response and then my sullenness. But Jana's insistence that I had a problem with my anger was a beautiful expression of her love to me, no matter how difficult it was for me to accept.

There isn't a pain-free way to tell the truth, but the alternative is a marriage built around a series of covert compromises. Truth may initially douse the fires of passion, but over time it creates new possibilities for genuine intimacy—the intimacy that comes with being fully known by another. The gust of God's grace now blowing through our marriage is experienced in a little more transparency, a little more honesty, and, consequently, a little more intimacy.

By Dave L. Goetz, from The Couples' Devotional Bible (Zondervan).

Want to get on her good side? Whisper sweet nothings into her left ear, suggests researcher Teow-Chong Sim of Sam Houston State University. His study found that emotional words get through to people better when spoken through the left ear, not the right. The findings are consistent with the brain's right hemisphere's ability to perceive emotions. Also, the study showed that emotional words were remembered better when spoken into the left ear. When study participants were asked to recall words, there was a 64 percent recall rate when emotional words were heard in the left ear, compared with 58 percent in the right. So, go left and you won't soon forget the rest!

In more ways than one. Studies at Ohio State University College of Medicine show that poorly handled marital conflicts "have negative effects on the cardiovascular (heart), endocrine (hormones), and immune systems functioning" in both men and women. But the latest research shows that women take a greater hit than men when it comes to bodily stress reactions due to marital stress and arguments. The bottom line: be sure to take good care of your mate—and spend more time making up.

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