New Bestseller: Marriage of Greatness

The Ultimate Handbook to a Winning Marriage  is now available on Amazon.

Enjoy this section from Chapter One of Marriage of Greatness:

Chapter 1:  Romance Hygiene

I can already hear your reaction:  Romance hygiene?! What are you talking about?

I’m talking about the daily habits—the small, consistent actions—you take to romance your spouse and keep your marriage alive with passion, adventure, excitement, and joy! Let me guess… it’s been a while.

Men, how often do you brush your teeth? Ladies, how often do you wash your face? That’s basic hygiene, right? (Teenagers excluded, of course.) So how did your romance hygiene become so neglected? Simple—you let it drift. Little by little. No guilt trip here. No should shame. Just a much-needed wake-up call.

It’s time to get back on course. It’s time to stop drifting and start being intentional.

You won’t restore everything with one grand gesture, but you can rebuild it one small win at a time—stacking victories every single day. What you’ll need is a new mindset to replace the old, passive, drifting one. You need something that keeps “romance hygiene” top of mind.

And that’s where it begins.

It all starts with the Prehab mindset.

Prehab Is Better Than Rehab

Tom Brady once taught me a powerful concept:  prehab is better than rehab when it comes to caring for our physical bodies—especially at the brutally demanding level of the NFL. This philosophy is one of the key reasons he was able to play an astonishing 23 seasons and retire while still performing at the very top of his game.

Think about that for a moment.

How many NFL players can you name who lasted 23 years?
Now take it one step further—how many actually walked away significantly better than when they started?

Tom accomplished this because of the prehab vs. rehab mindset. He explained it in a refreshingly simple way.

The typical rehab cycle looks like this:

You train.
You play.
You get injured.
You rehab.
Then you repeat.

The challenge is that the rehab process is painful, exhausting, and incredibly time-consuming. All that time spent painstakingly rehabbing takes you away from training, which means you’re losing valuable ground instead of steadily improving.

But what if you flipped the script?

What if you took a portion of the time and energy you normally spend on the back end rehabbing, and invested it on the front end instead? By doing that, you could often avoid a painful injury and the entire rehab process altogether. Suddenly, you have more time to train, more time to improve, and more time to get better faster.

What a simple, yet powerful concept.

This prehab mindset applies beautifully to marriage as well—too bad Tom never quite figured out that part.

Here’s what the typical cycle of many marriages looks like:

You work.
You run the kids to activities.
You work some more.
You go to church.
You juggle even more kids’ activities.
You cancel date nights.
You work again.
You start to feel under appreciated.
You fight—usually about the same old issues.
You rehab (also known as “making up”).

But every time this cycle repeats, the arguments take longer to resolve, the wounds feel deeper, and the real root issues are rarely addressed.

Then the exhausting cycle begins all over again.

Ugh.

The good news? There’s a far better way.

What if you took all the emotional energy it takes to fight and all the time it takes to repair your relationship, and simply invested it on the front end instead?

When you do that, you skip much of the pain entirely—and your marriage becomes filled with passion, adventure, excitement, and joy.

No more pointless fights.
No more silent treatment.
No more avoidance.
No more unnecessary pain.

Most men buy their wife flowers after a big fight (rehab) or on Valentine’s Day.

Why not buy her flowers today?

Just because.

That’s the prehab mindset.

Better yet, you could pick a few flowers from a neighbor’s bush on your way home and write a short, heartfelt “I love you” note. No extra trip to the store required—and it’s completely free.

Most married women also have a drawer filled with beautiful lingerie that tends to get worn less and less as the years go by. Instead of waiting for him to “deserve it” or “earn it back” after a fight (rehab), what if you decided to put it on today, simply because you love him?

Welcome to the prehab mentality.

But what if you just don’t feel like it?

Great question!

The simple truth is…