For human beings, our greatest emotional need is relationship. Since your spouse will likely be the person you spend the most time with, almost nothing will be more powerful in making you happy or miserable than the quality of your marriage. I’ve been married for nearly nine years, and this is what I’ve learned about having a good marriage that makes your life infinitely better, rather than an awful marriage that ends in bitterness and resentment or divorce.

You can’t fix people. People can change, but you can’t change them. You have to learn the signs of obvious psychological and emotional damage and not marry those people. You will want to, in one or two cases: don’t do it.

Since marriage is about living life together, you need to have a basic degree of compatibility with your spouse. If you’re a Democrat, and they’re a Republican, you’re adding friction. If you’re separated by a generational age gap, that will make connection on certain things difficult. If you subscribe to different religions… you get the idea. This also goes for race, geography, and socio-economic class. Any one or even two of these rules for congruency can be broken if there is connection in other areas; a couple that is of different races and geographic origins, but who share the same religion, politics, economic class, and went to the same school, probably have a better shot than most. What’s important is being generally aligned to start with.

And most importantly, you should deeply love the core of who this person is.

Marry that type of person.

But no matter how aligned you start, you won’t be totally in agreement on everything. That’s why you have to learn how to fight — to fight well, and to fight fairly. If a couple fights too much, that usually indicates either deeper emotional problems or money problems. But if a couple never disagrees or argues, that might just mean that one is dominating the other. Perhaps some people prefer it that way. But smarter people tend to get either bored or claustrophobic in that kind of relationship. I wouldn’t lean into that if you want to grow as a person.

Fighting well is about balancing assertiveness with genuine listening. Most fights that go badly come down to some failure to correctly interpret a criticism: “I wish you would take the garbage out every week without having to be asked” becomes “you never appreciate the work I do!” It takes conscious effort and practice to be able to hear what your partner is saying — and more importantly, trying to say — accurately.

Conversely, most fights that don’t happen, but should, come from insufficient assertiveness. You think you’re avoiding conflict, but you’re really just building up resentment. If that builds up too long, it will rot your marriage from the inside like black mold. Past a certain point, there’s no recovery.

To fight well, you should be assertive regarding things you care about and believe, and you should also listen carefully. Pay attention. Learn to separate how you feel about what they’re saying from what they are actually saying, so that your emotions aren’t re-interpreting everything in real-time. And above all, try to maintain some playfulness and humor, even in an argument.

Playfulness and humor go a long way in making you someone your spouse wants to spend time with, rather than someone they’re always trying to get away from.

If the two of you fight well, you’ll end up understanding each other better, and can come to mutually beneficial solutions to disagreements, or at least compromise. You know you’ve got a good relationship when every once in a while, someone changes their mind (usually a few weeks to a few months after a disagreement).

The three things that most powerfully contribute to the overall quality of your marriage are (1) physical attraction, (2) money, and (3) your day-to-day habits.

Physical attraction should be obvious. Keep yourself in shape, and take pride in your appearance.

Money is not so much a source of attraction as stability. You don’t need to make seven figures. But you do need to make enough that you aren’t living paycheck to paycheck. Below a certain threshold, relative to your cost of living, money issues become emotional issues that can exacerbate everyone’s feelings and spin everything out of control. If you’re in financial dire straits, most of the complaints you will likely hear about dishes, cleaning, not getting touched enough, or whatever else, are probably mostly displaced feelings about money.

Day-to-day habits are part of how we build physical attraction and financial stability. But they’re also how you build everything else. You can use day-to-day habits to make your house prettier, to spend more time together, to have more sex, to become more interesting. If you become a student of systems and a conscious builder of your own habits, you can make your marriage into something better, in a way that compounds over time.

Those are the basics. Beyond that, your marriage is something you have to build yourself. There isn’t a “right way” to do it. There isn’t a single model that will hold and be best for everyone. There are consistent patterns in the wrong way to do things (this is why we have jokes about “telling her to calm down”). In case it needs to be said, don’t cheat on your spouse. Don’t even put yourself in a situation where cheating is possible.

But the best marriages embody and express the uniqueness of the individuals who build them. Your marriage is what you put into it. Don’t slack off, and make something you can be proud of.

Good luck.