WIFE

If you thought the days of men making sweeping, romantic gestures to woo women were over, there's hope yet. Unfortunately, they don't seem to work.

The two of you should do everything together; work out every disagreement (without actually fighting); spend every night in the same bed; and never, ever be bored. Say what?! These and other so-called “rules” for marriage need some serious debunking. And it’s not just because rules your mother may have passed on are outdated; some may be downright damaging. In fact, “breaking some marriage ‘rules’ may be the best thing you can do for your relationship,” says Barbara Bartlein, RN, MSW, psychotherapist and author of Why Did I Marry You Anyway? Here are 10 rules you can break with confidence.

The other woman in my life, Sophia, is my 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter. Sure, children can arrest marriages: maybe Mom has to put a career on hold, or Dad realizes he just isn't ready to be a dad, or mom and dad bicker constantly over the cumulative array of child-rearing decisions (diet, vaccines, public or private school?—the list is endless). But it shouldn't be this way. In fact, the more time I spend with my daughter, the more attuned I become to what I love about my wife.

Since I’ve been married for 20 years, I’ve been elected to dig up some of the truths about married life. I had some ideas of my own, but I also polled a bunch of my long-married friends. They told me that over the years, their eyes had been opened—and it has not always been pleasant.

Love and marriage on the best of days they go together like a horse and carriage. On other days, lets just say they work together as well as cream cheese and Cheetos. But through it all, many marriages have thrived. In fact, the average American marriage is lasting longer and despite what Tiger Woods would have us believe, divorce rates are falling. In celebration of marriage and all things love, YourTango has a round up of the top 10 stories and advice about and for your marriage.

In our latest video crush, a man wakes up in the wrong bed, next to a beautiful woman, after what appears to be one wild night. The kicker? He's married.

No matter how far along the marriage highway you've gone, there are some simple, fundamental rules of the road. Putting them into practice isn't always easy, but it's critical. If you do play by the rules, you'll make your marriage stronger, and the good stuff—fun, sex, trust, affection—will be better than ever.

When you're the stay-at-home mother of an infant, you spend almost no time alone, and thinking goes out the window, unless you count anxious fretting over when to start solid foods and how to persuade the baby to go down for a nap. It's unclear to me now why I imagined this wouldn't be a difficult adjustment.

There we were, checked into one of the most stunning hotels in Vancouver, and my husband had just one thing on his mind—and it had absolutely nothing to do with me. No amount of negligee (or lack thereof) was going to distract him. Guidebook in hand, I headed out to explore the city, while he sat in front of a laptop for the next six hours doing his fantasy baseball draft.

If someone had told me when I was 25 years old that one day my husband and I would be parents to three sets of twins, I would have laughed out loud. At the time—it was 1988—my husband Bruce and I had been married about three years. We were very much in love, building our relationship upon mutual trust, love, respect, humor and faith in God. We also had a very active, healthy and happy sex life, but we hadn't yet decided it was time to start our family.

Have you ever known a married couple that just didn't seem as though they should fit together—yet they are both happy in the marriage, and you can't figure out why?

What's an emotional affair and how do you know if you're having one? The line between harmless flirtation with a member of the opposite sex and actual infidelity is blurry, especially for women, who are typically more open with their emotions. The number one sign that a relationship is starting to cross the line? You're telling another person things you're not telling your partner. Have you been cheating?

We’ve been married for 13 years and during this time we’ve learned that just about everything we’ve expected from love and marriage is the opposite of our actual lives. We’ve discovered there’s no such thing as happily-ever-after so we’ve opted for the more realistic “ever after.” We may not be blissed out every minute of the day, but in our “ever after,” we're raising a kid together we madly adore, we’re cracking each other up, and as far as we can tell there isn’t anyone else we’d rather spend our lives with. It’s in this spirit of lowered expectations that we’d like to share a few of things we’ve gleaned from our relationship.

Why is it that when we're upset, stressed, or scared we instinctively reach for our partner's hand? Or conversely, why is it that we always seem to reach for our partner's hand to comfort them when they're upset? Well a recent study by University of Virginia psychologist, Dr. James Coan, showed that the answer doesn't lie between our fingers, but in our brains. The study involved subjecting 16 happily-married women to stressful situations while monitoring their brain activity. The results showed less activity in the stress-related areas of the women's brains even while holding a stranger's hand, and a whole lot less when they held their hubby's hand.

Sometimes you need to read about other people's relationships before coming face to face with your own. We've culled a few favorites that help us deal.