There was probably a time when you and your spouse were significantly less dignified.
Maybe you were driving somewhere late at night when a song came on that neither of you knew well enough to sing correctly. That did not stop you. Within thirty seconds, one of you was performing with the confidence of someone headlining a sold-out arena while the other supplied completely invented background vocals.
At some point the singing turned into terrible dancing at a red light. Then one of you did something so ridiculous that the other could barely breathe from laughing. By the time you reached wherever you were going, neither of you could clearly explain what had been so funny.
It simply was.
There were probably other things too. Strange nicknames. Unnecessary bets. Terrible impressions. Pictures you would prefer never appear during a future anniversary slideshow. Inside jokes that became less understandable with every passing year.
Perhaps there was even a voice.
You know the voice.
That accent, character, sound, or completely inexplicable way of speaking that somehow developed inside your relationship and should never, under any circumstances, be heard by another adult.
Maybe you still have it.
I hope you do.
Because somewhere between falling in love and discussing whether the homeowners insurance renewed, couples can become remarkably serious people.
Not unhappy people. Not disconnected people. Just responsible adults with jobs, children, appointments, groceries, bills, aging parents, school emails, household repairs, and a suspicious number of messages beginning with “Friendly reminder” despite containing information that feels anything but friendly.
Eventually, you can wake up and realize that most conversations with the person you once stayed up all night laughing with now have an agenda. What time are you leaving? Did you call the dentist? Who is picking her up? Did you move the laundry? What are we doing Saturday?
These are necessary questions. Someone needs to ask them.
Still, every now and then it is worth asking another one:
When did we stop being silly together?
Adulthood is remarkably good at squeezing the nonsense out of us
Children seem to understand something adults gradually forget: not everything enjoyable needs to accomplish anything.
A child will run in circles until they fall over because apparently dizziness is a sufficient return on investment. They will make up a game whose rules change every seven seconds and remain completely committed to it. They can laugh at a word simply because the word sounds strange.
Adults are more complicated.
If we walk, perhaps it should count as exercise. If we read, maybe we should learn something. If we take a trip, we should make the most of it. If we have an open Saturday, there is probably a garage somewhere that needs organizing.
Even relaxation can become productive. You fold laundry while listening to a podcast about becoming more efficient and then congratulate yourself for resting.
Marriage can absorb the same seriousness. Couples become so accustomed to using their limited time responsibly that purposeless fun starts to feel almost irresponsible.
There is always something else that could be done. The kitchen needs cleaning. The budget could use attention. Somebody needs new shoes. The mysterious pile in the corner of the bedroom has now developed enough permanence to qualify for its own ZIP code.
All of those things matter.
But sometimes two married adults should spend ten minutes debating whether they could survive on a deserted island when both of them know perfectly well that one refuses to sleep without a ceiling fan and the other becomes concerned when a hotel is more than twelve minutes from a Target.
Nothing has been accomplished.
That is allowed.
Playfulness is not the same thing as being funny
The word playful can make this sound like advice for people who naturally walk into rooms making everyone laugh.
It isn’t.
You do not need to be particularly funny. You do not need a huge personality. You certainly do not need to turn your marriage into an ongoing comedy routine where one spouse is performing and the other is privately praying for silence.
Researchers who study adult playfulness describe it more broadly as a tendency to frame or reframe situations in ways that make them more entertaining, interesting, or stimulating. Contemporary research has continued examining how different forms of playfulness relate to experiences within romantic relationships.
In an actual marriage, that can look wonderfully ordinary. It might be playful teasing that both people enjoy, an unnecessarily competitive board game, dancing while cooking, sending each other ridiculous messages, inventing stories about strangers at the airport, or turning an ordinary errand into something slightly more entertaining than it had any right to be.
Playfulness creates pockets of relationship where nothing needs fixing.
Nobody is processing a conflict. Nobody is trying to improve communication. Nobody is deciding which health insurance plan offers the least insulting deductible.
For a few minutes, you are simply enjoying another human being.
That can become surprisingly rare.
Shared laughter is doing more than filling silence
Think about the last time you and your spouse really laughed together.
Not when one of you showed the other a funny video and received the polite little nose-exhale that technically acknowledges humor.
I mean the kind of laughter where one person losing control makes the other person laugh harder, which makes the first person laugh again, until neither of you can remember what originally started it.
There is something wonderfully connecting about that experience.
Laura Kurtz and Sara Algoe studied spontaneously generated laughter in 71 romantic couples while the couples talked about how they first met. Greater shared laughter was associated with greater reported relationship quality, closeness, and perceived partner support. The study does not prove that laughing together automatically creates a better relationship, but it suggests that shared laughter can be a meaningful behavioral marker of relational well-being.
That makes sense because shared laughter is rarely just about the joke.
Something happens, both of you notice it, both understand why it is funny, and for a moment you occupy exactly the same little emotional space.
There is an us inside the laugh.
Please do not respond to this research by measuring your marriage.
If you find yourself saying, “We only had four shared laughs today, and the Johnsons seem to be averaging seven,” close the spreadsheet.
We have gone too far.
The point is much simpler: the moments when you genuinely enjoy something together matter, even when the thing itself is completely insignificant.
Every marriage eventually becomes its own weird little country
Stay with someone long enough and the two of you develop culture.
There are phrases that mean something completely different inside your house than they do anywhere else. There are stories that can be reduced to three words because both of you already know the remaining eleven minutes.
There are nicknames. Songs. Places. Foods. Gestures. Facial expressions.
There may be entire historical events.
One spouse can simply say, “Remember Atlanta?”
No additional explanation is needed.
Atlanta knows what it did.
This private language is one of the quiet rewards of a long relationship. You accumulate experiences until the marriage contains references nobody else could possibly decode.
Research with long-term married couples has also examined what researchers call positivity resonance—moments involving shared positive emotion, mutual care, and interpersonal synchrony—and found associations between behavioral indicators of those shared positive moments and marital satisfaction.
Not every private joke qualifies as a profound moment of relational synchrony, of course. Sometimes your spouse simply mispronounced something in 2012 and you have refused to let it die.
But those small pieces of shared culture still say something important: we have lived enough life together to create a world that belongs partly to us.
That is worth protecting.
There should probably be a few things about your marriage that would confuse an outside observer.
Not seriously concern them.
Just enough that you would need to say, “Okay, there’s a story behind that.”
Play requires a little willingness to look ridiculous
There is vulnerability in silliness that becomes easier to miss as we get older.
Children seem remarkably unconcerned about whether they look impressive. Adults have reputations to maintain.
We have jobs now. Professional profiles. People who apparently expect us to understand retirement accounts.
Then your spouse asks you to dance in the kitchen.
This creates a dilemma.
Because dancing may reveal that what you believe your body is doing and what your body is actually doing are two entirely different events.
Play asks us to loosen our grip on looking competent.
You may sing badly. You may tell a joke that goes nowhere. You may suggest something your spouse considers ridiculous. You may lose spectacularly at a game you confidently predicted you would dominate.
That little risk is part of what makes playfulness intimate.
Your marriage should be one of the places where you do not have to be impressive all the time.
The person beside you has probably already seen you sick, frightened, exhausted, irrationally annoyed, half asleep, badly dressed, and wandering around the house looking for the phone currently in your hand.
The brand has been compromised.
You might as well dance.
Fun does not need reservations
One reason couples lose playfulness is that we make fun too expensive.
Someone says, “We need to have more fun together,” and immediately we imagine a vacation, a concert, a weekend getaway, or dinner somewhere that requires booking three weeks in advance.
All excellent options.
But if enjoying each other requires childcare, reservations, $300, coordinated work schedules, and a weather contingency plan, you may be unintentionally limiting fun to four times a year.
Research by Arthur Aron and colleagues found across several studies and experiments that couples who participated together in shared activities that were novel and arousing experienced greater increases in relationship quality than couples assigned more mundane activities.
Please notice that I did not say science requires zip-lining.
Your spouse may be relieved.
Novelty can be incredibly ordinary. Try food neither of you has eaten. Take a class. Visit somewhere nearby you have never bothered exploring. Cook something ambitious enough that halfway through you both realize ordering pizza would have been considerably wiser.
Play a ridiculous game. Take a scenic route. Have a completely unnecessary competition. Give each other ten dollars in a store and see who can find the strangest thing.
Although if the store is Target, please understand that ten dollars may somehow become $147.
That is beyond the scope of this article.
What matters is the shared experience. Something slightly unfamiliar gives the two of you an opportunity to react together rather than simply replay a routine you already know.
For a little while, you are not Mom and Dad, Scheduler and Fixer, Driver and Bill-Payer.
You are just two people figuring something out together.
Flirting does not expire after the wedding
Apparently this needs to be said.
You are still allowed to flirt with your spouse.
Even after marriage.
The license remains valid.
There is a strange efficiency to human courtship. Before commitment, people can be remarkably creative. They send messages for no reason. They invent reasons to touch. They find things to compliment. They put real thought into making the other person laugh.
Then marriage happens and everyone seems to conclude that the marketing department can be shut down.
Customer acquired.
No further outreach required.
But playful affection carries a different energy from affection that has become routine. A goodbye kiss can be loving. A hug at the end of the day can be comforting. Those things matter.
Flirting adds something else. It says, I still notice you in that way.
Maybe it is a look from across the room. Maybe an unnecessary text. Maybe a deliberately ridiculous compliment that makes your spouse roll their eyes while clearly enjoying it.
You do not need to behave like teenagers.
Your children have already endured enough.
But there is something lovely about occasionally reminding your spouse that you still enjoy getting their attention. They are not only your co-parent, emergency contact, designated person for important passwords, and witness to every package arriving at the front door.
They are still attractive to you.
They can still make you blush.
You can still distract each other.
Marriage is allowed to contain that.
The marriage should never be the price of the joke
There does need to be one rule here.
Playfulness is only playful when both people get to enjoy it.
“I was just joking” has been used to excuse an astonishing amount of nonsense.
If your spouse repeatedly tells you that a particular kind of joke hurts, it does not become affectionate teasing simply because you found it hilarious.
There is a difference between laughing with your spouse and entertaining yourself at your spouse’s expense.
Humor about a sensitive insecurity, their body, their intelligence, their family, something they trusted you with, or a mistake that genuinely embarrasses them may stop feeling playful very quickly.
Good couple humor usually creates a sense of us against the absurdity.
Life is the ridiculous thing.
You laugh because the furniture you assembled together somehow has six pieces left over. You laugh because you have spent eight minutes looking for the keys that one of you is holding. You laugh about the vacation where everything went wrong and which somehow became a better story because of it.
The marriage is not the joke.
The two of you are standing beside each other laughing at the joke.
That distinction matters.
Children can accidentally turn spouses into management
If you have children, there is another interesting shift that can happen.
Before the children, you and your spouse had names.
Then gradually you become Mom and Dad.
Not only to the children.
Sometimes to each other.
“Go ask Dad.”
“Tell Mom we’re leaving.”
“Did Dad pack your bag?”
“Mom said no.”
You spend so much of the day occupying parenting roles that it can become difficult to remember those roles are only part of your relationship.
Children also possess a remarkable instinct for detecting adult connection.
Try having a meaningful conversation and see how long it takes for a child to materialize beside you asking where their shoes are.
You sit down together and someone needs water. You finally hug in the kitchen and a small voice says, “Ewww.”
Thank you.
Your feedback has been recorded.
This is one reason small playful moments between spouses can matter so much during the parenting years. They allow you to quietly reclaim a little piece of the relationship that exists outside the family management structure.
A look across the room. A private message. An inside joke the children do not understand. Dancing together for thirty seconds while making dinner.
These things do not compete with being good parents.
They remind both of you that there is still a marriage underneath the parenting.
Sometimes playfulness disappears because somebody stopped saying yes
There is another possibility worth considering.
Maybe the silliness did not simply disappear because life became busy.
Maybe one spouse used to initiate more of it.
They sent the funny text. They suggested the spontaneous outing. They danced. They flirted. They challenged you to the game. They made the joke.
And somewhere along the way, enough invitations were met with “I’m tired,” “What are you doing?” “Not now,” or the devastatingly efficient “That’s stupid.”
Not maliciously.
The timing may genuinely have been terrible. You may have been overwhelmed, distracted, or simply incapable of understanding why another grown adult was suddenly making that sound.
But people learn from responses.
If someone reaches toward play often enough and repeatedly feels foolish for doing it, they may eventually stop reaching.
So if you find yourself thinking, My spouse used to be much more playful, it may be worth asking what happened when they tried.
This is not about assigning blame. Relationships develop patterns together.
It is simply an invitation to become a little more receptive.
You do not have to say yes to every ridiculous idea.
Some ideas are terrible.
Marriage requires discernment.
But there are moments when a small yes can say something much bigger.
Yes, let’s get ice cream even though it is late. Yes, turn up the song. Yes, I’ll play one round. Yes, show me the stupid video. Yes, tell me the story again. Yes, I’ll come outside for five minutes.
Those tiny yeses tell your spouse there is still room in your life together for something besides necessity.
Playfulness is not pretending life is easy
There are seasons when silliness can feel almost inappropriate.
Grief is real. Illness is real. Financial strain is real. Infertility, caregiving, depression, job loss, family crises, and painful seasons of marriage cannot be solved by deciding everyone should lighten up.
That is not what play is for.
Playfulness should never become emotional avoidance. There are things couples need to grieve together, discuss seriously, and sit with without forcing a smile onto them.
But heaviness and laughter are not always opposites.
Sometimes the couples who have walked through the hardest things understand this especially well.
There is the ridiculous thing that happens in the hospital waiting room. The familiar joke that breaks an hour of tension. The look exchanged across an overwhelming family gathering. The tiny absurdity that suddenly makes both people laugh after a day in which there has not been much to laugh about.
Research on long-term couples suggests that shared positive emotional moments are meaningfully associated with relationship quality. That does not mean a difficult season should be covered with forced positivity. It means difficult seasons do not necessarily have to own every emotional inch of the relationship.
Sometimes play does not remove the weight.
It simply reminds you that the weight is not the only thing in the room.
Your version of fun may be quieter than somebody else’s
There is also no need to turn this article into another standard your marriage has to meet.
Not every couple is loud.
Not every couple likes games.
Not every couple wants to dance in the kitchen.
Some of you would rather complete your taxes together than participate in charades.
I respect that.
The question is not whether your marriage looks playful from the outside. The question is whether the two of you still have ways of enjoying each other that feel like you.
Maybe your version of silliness is dry sarcasm nobody else appreciates. Maybe you watch terrible movies and provide running commentary. Maybe one of you sends memes throughout the day. Maybe you compete over trivia. Maybe you wander through stores making observations that should not be repeated publicly.
Maybe you simply make each other laugh in bed when you are both supposed to be sleeping.
That counts.
You are not trying to reproduce someone else’s relationship.
You are trying to remember your own.
Maybe silliness is one of the ways we say, “I’m safe here”
There is something deeper underneath all of this.
Being playful with someone requires trust.
You are letting them see a version of you that is not polished or carefully managed. You are taking a small social risk because you believe this person will probably meet you there rather than make you regret showing up.
Most of adult life asks us to monitor ourselves. Be competent. Be appropriate. Say the right thing. Look like you know what you are doing.
Then you come home to someone who has seen nearly every version of you.
Perhaps marriage should include the relief of putting some of that dignity down.
To sing badly without embarrassment. To laugh too loudly. To make the face. To create the ridiculous nickname. To tell a joke that works only because the person beside you understands fifteen years of backstory.
There is intimacy in saying, I trust this place enough to loosen up here.
That may be part of why play feels different inside a close relationship. It is not simply entertainment.
It is permission.
Let the ridiculous people back out
Maybe you and your spouse did not stop being silly because anything went wrong.
Maybe adulthood simply got loud.
The playful version of your relationship became buried underneath work, parenting, responsibility, schedules, and the very legitimate need to figure out why the water heater is making that sound.
The two people who used to laugh for twenty minutes about nothing did not necessarily disappear.
They just became responsible for dental insurance.
So let them out occasionally.
Send the stupid text. Make the face. Tell the terrible joke. Flirt badly. Play the song. Invent the competition. Take the unnecessary detour. Bring back the nickname that has not been used in five years.
You do not need to turn your marriage into a permanent vacation from adulthood. The mortgage will not accept laughter as payment. Your children will still need rides. The dishes will remain distressingly committed to becoming dirty again.
The responsibilities are real.
So is the relationship carrying them.
Marriage is serious. The promise is serious. The sacrifices and decisions and responsibilities of building a life with another person are serious.
But perhaps one way two people carry something serious for a lifetime is by refusing to be serious every minute they are carrying it.
You fell in love with a whole person, not merely a reliable teammate.
Hopefully, somewhere in there is still the person who makes you laugh at something nobody else would understand.
Go find them.
They probably have work tomorrow too.
Try this together tonight
Ask your spouse, “What’s something ridiculous we used to do together that you kind of miss?”
Then resist the urge to turn the answer into a relationship improvement plan. You do not need to schedule quarterly silliness targets or determine whether the activity adequately supports your shared goals.
Just remember it together.
And if the opportunity presents itself, maybe do the ridiculous thing again.
Within reason.
Anchor Us assumes no responsibility for injuries resulting from attempting something you last did at twenty-three.
Sources & further reading
Kurtz, L. E., & Algoe, S. B. (2015). Putting laughter in context: Shared laughter as behavioral indicator of relationship well-being. Personal Relationships, 22(4), 573–590. Their study of 71 romantic couples found associations between greater shared laughter and relationship quality, closeness, and perceived support.
Aron, A., Norman, C. C., Aron, E. N., McKenna, C., & Heyman, R. E. (2000). Couples’ shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 273–284. Across three experiments, participating together in novel and arousing activities produced greater increases in experienced relationship quality than more mundane activities.
Brauer, K., Sendatzki, R., & Proyer, R. T. (2024). Extending the study of playfulness in romantic life: Analyzing associations with attachment and jealousy in same-gender and opposite-gender couples. Scientific Reports, 14, 20190. The study examined several dimensions of adult playfulness among 471 couples.
Otero, M. C., Wells, J. L., Chen, K.-H., Brown, C. L., Connelly, D. E., Levenson, R. W., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2020). Behavioral indices of positivity resonance associated with long-term marital satisfaction. Emotion, 20(7), 1225–1233. The study examined shared positive affect, mutual care, and behavioral indicators of positivity resonance among long-term married couples.