P Is for Playful: How to Build Joy Into Your Marriage | EPIC Marriage (Part 2 of 4)
Nick and Alex Leyva are in the middle of their four-part EPIC Marriage miniseries. Part 1, E is for Eternal, looked at what it means to begin with the end in mind. This is Part 2: P is for Playful. Nick and Alex host the Epic Marriage Podcast, where they explore what decades of research and modern revelation teach about covenant relationships. Nick studied family science at BYU, while Alex brings the lived experience of a wife and mother raising five children. Together, they are trying to build marriages that are not just functional but eternally significant.
Joy Is Not Wall Art
Scripture teaches that we are made for joy, not for permanent exhaustion. That line in 2 Nephi about joy is not home decor text. It is doctrine about what human life is supposed to look like. If joy belongs in God’s purpose for us, then it belongs inside our marriages on purpose, not as a rare surprise when the kids are finally asleep and nothing urgent is on fire.
Many couples treat joy like sprinkles that get added when everything else is done. Nick and Alex invite us to see joy as oxygen. Without shared delight, negativity hardens, affection fades, and marriage slips into an efficient partnership that feels more like a recurring meeting than a living friendship. In that sense, joy is not extra. It is part of the design of a covenant relationship.
Play Is in the Blueprint
The Family Proclamation teaches that happiness in family life is most likely when a home is built on the teachings of Jesus Christ. Along with faith, repentance, forgiveness, love, compassion, and work, it names wholesome recreational activities as part of what holds families together. That is not a throwaway phrase. It means recreation and play sit inside the structure of a successful home, not outside it.
Play is one of the ways a couple lives after the manner of happiness. Games, walks, shared hobbies, and simple goofiness all send a message. They say I like being with you. Joy becomes a spiritual practice that keeps hearts soft and relationships flexible. Without that, a marriage can be correct on paper and still feel empty in practice.
The Emotional Bank Account
Every marriage runs on reserves of connection. Over time, you are either making deposits or living in emotional debt. Deposits look like warmth, laughter, admiration, curiosity, kindness, touch, shared enjoyment, and good intimacy. Debt looks like contempt, sharp sarcasm, constant criticism, stonewalling, and the slow slide into acting like roommates who only share logistics and a last name.
Psychologist John Gottman’s research is often summarized with a five to one ratio [https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-magic-relationship-ratio-according-science/]. In stable marriages, even during conflict, couples have many more positive interactions than negative ones. The goal is not to eliminate all tension. The goal is to make sure frustration does not define the relationship. When a couple only connects to solve problems, that ratio collapses. They become adept at discussing grievances and surprisingly weak at staying in love.
Small Joy Stacks Big
Playfulness is one of the simplest ways to build that emotional reserve. It often shows up in tiny ways. A grin across the room. A soft tease that lands as affection, not mockery. An inside joke that only the two of you understand. A gentle squeeze as you walk by in the kitchen. A quick look during a busy holiday gathering that says you still matter to me in this crowd.
Those moments rarely feel grand, but they create a quiet sense of being chosen and seen. Each light, positive touch says I like you, not only I am committed to you. Over time, those small signals form a buffer that helps a marriage absorb stress without cracking under it.
Fun Over Grievances
Harvard professor and happiness researcher Arthur Brooks has been strikingly direct in his advice to couples. In his view, many relationships spend too much time circling grievances and not enough time having fun together. That does not mean problems are unimportant. It means that when resentment becomes the culture of a marriage, the nervous system starts to experience a spouse as a threat instead of a refuge.
Nick notes that this can even be a blind spot in some forms of counseling. Sessions can revolve around my hurt and my pain until the entire focus turns to what is wrong. Necessary honesty about wounds matters, but couples also need to become joy builders. When there is a base of laughter, shared projects, and lightness, hard conversations do not feel like proof that the marriage is broken. They become challenges addressed by two people on the same team.
Bids for Connection
The Gottman Institute uses the phrase bids for connection to describe small reaches for attention, affection, or engagement. A bid can be a simple look at that, an invitation to sit down together, a quick meme, a sigh about a long day, a hand brushing an arm, or a quiet question that says do you want to hear something.
Gottman’s long-term studies with couples found a striking pattern. Pairs who stayed married responded to these bids with warmth far more often than couples who later divorced. The numbers often cited are about 86 percent for couples who stayed together and about 33 percent for those who did not. In real life, that difference looks ordinary. A spouse comments on the sunset, and the other pauses to look up instead of staying lost in a screen. Someone mentions a memory, and the other leans in instead of brushing it off. Bids are the circulatory system of a relationship. Ignored often enough, they cut off emotional oxygen.
The Three Second Rule
Nick and Alex offer a simple challenge for one week. When your spouse reaches out in any way, respond within three seconds with something warm. That can be eye contact, a touch, a sentence, a smile, or a simple question. The goal is not to craft perfect speeches. The goal is to be present.
Nick shares that one phrase has helped him show up in moments when he does not know what to say. When Alex begins to share something and he is unsure how to respond, he says tell me more about that. That short line signals curiosity instead of withdrawal. Again and again, it invites Alex to open up. It gives each of them a way to stay in the conversation without needing polished answers.
Joy Creates Energy
Parents often say they are not playful because they are too tired. Nick and Alex know that feeling well with five children and busy lives. It is easy to assume that rest must come before joy. Yet research on positive emotion suggests that joy can generate the energy we think we need in advance.
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden and build theory explains that positive emotions widen our mental field and help us build inner resources over time. Moments of joy spark the urge to play and, in the context of safe relationships, lead to cycles of warmth and connection. Joy is not just a reward, at the end of the day, it is a tool that helps couples think more creatively, stay more patient, solve problems with less defensiveness, and develop resilience under stress. When joy disappears, marriage shrinks into survival mode. If a couple wants a marriage with real strength, the place to begin is not control or constant correctness. It is shared joy.
I Just Like You
Alex remembers their season of dating in Hawaii. Life felt like a string of simple adventures. They spent time together, talked for hours, then fell into comfortable silence. In those quiet moments, one would ask what are you thinking, and the other would answer nothing; I just like you. It was not a complicated declaration. It was a way of naming delight in each other’s presence.
Over time, many couples stop saying that out loud. I love you becomes familiar, but underneath it, unspoken messages can creep in. Jokes about having to love a spouse but not liking them in the moment can hide real hurt. Reintroducing small statements of liking matters. You love many people in your life in different ways. A marriage thrives when there is a felt sense that this person is not only loved in a covenant sense but also liked as a companion.
Keep Dating on Purpose
Marriage grows out of dating. In most stories, there was at least a season when being together felt fun and hopeful. If dating is miserable or absent, it is very hard for a marriage to flourish. The counsel to always be dating is really an invitation to keep the playful core of the relationship alive.
That does not mean constant grand gestures. Many couples are raising children, working, and fighting exhaustion by eight in the evening. In that reality, creativity matters. Simple board games, short walks, shared projects, or learning a new skill together can bring a sense of novelty without demanding large budgets or elaborate plans. Research by psychologist Arthur Aron and colleagues found that shared participation in new and engaging activities is linked with higher relationship quality in part because it reduces boredom. A more general summary of this idea is available through the Gottman Institute. Fresh experiences remind each spouse that the other is a full person, not a set of duties.
The Seven Day Playful Bid Challenge
To make this concrete, Nick and Alex offer a seven-day challenge. For one week, make a single playful bid each day and keep track of it. A playful bid is not a grand romantic gesture. It is one intentional moment of warmth or humor aimed at your spouse. Think of a flirty text, a short dance while dinner cooks, turning on music while you clean the kitchen, a spontaneous hug, a light tap on the shoulder, or a callback to an old inside joke.
The rule is simple. One bid per day. No debate over scale. If you have time to scroll and share funny posts with friends, you have time to reach out to the person you married. Those tiny efforts can slowly change the emotional climate of a home. They restore the sense that you like each other, not only that you are obligated to keep going.
Joy as Infrastructure
Scripture describes a glad heart as something that heals. Husbands are invited to rejoice with the wife of their youth. The Family Proclamation again names wholesome recreational activities among the supports of successful families. The Book of Mormon reminds us that we exist for joy. Simultaneously, modern revelation warns against empty, mocking laughter. The balance is not humorless seriousness. It is a life that combines reverence with a glad heart and a cheerful countenance.
That kind of joy is not the dessert of a good marriage. It is part of the framing. It is what holds the boards together when storms hit. Instead of treating joy as something that might show up if everything else goes well, Nick and Alex invite couples to build it into the daily structure of their relationship.
This is Part 2 of the EPIC Marriage miniseries. The next conversation will explore I is for Intentional and what it means to be deliberate about who you are becoming together. For more resources created for temple sealed couples, visit YourEpicMarriage.com and keep building a marriage where joy is not an afterthought but a core feature of your covenant life.
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