If married life isn’t what you initially thought it would be, it’s time to learn how to save your marriage and bring love and intimacy back into your relationship. If I could do it, you can do it.

If you want to save your marriage, stop exhausting yourself trying to change your spouse. Instead, focus on your happiness first.

Here are two skills that can save a troubled marriage:

1. Know what you will and will not tolerate

That’s correct. Putting yourself first is the key to getting your spouse to prioritize you. A study in the Journal of Social Psychology explain that if you don’t feel good about yourself and don’t have high self-esteem, you won’t have a “high degree of difficulty.”

This is when your partner perceives you honor and respect yourself and you know what you will and will not tolerate. Of course, it’s impossible to do that when you spend so much time and energy pleasing them and giving them what you think they want.

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2. Treat yourself

Photos five via Shutterstock

If you only take one thing from this article, let it be this: the only thing that will never work to help them make you happy is to focus on their happiness!

Here’s what’s surprising: what makes a good spouse happy is doing be happy, as a study suggests the interdependent dynamics of marital interactions in the Journal of Happiness Studies. One of the easiest ways to do this in marriage is to “date yourself.” This means that you do what you like for yourself.

If you want your spouse to take you out to dinner, tell them you’re going to a spa lunch. If you wish they would buy you more gifts, treat yourself to something you want. It doesn’t have to be expensive, and it just needs to be make you happy. This might mean taking an hour each day to do yoga.

Once they see that you don’t put aside your wishes for them, they will remember the wonderful person they fell in love with and what made them unique. A change in atmosphere like this can reignite your spouse’s passion and help save your marriage.

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IIt’s worth repeating: good spouses like to make their partners happy. Period. They like to give gifts, they like to take you out, they like to be faithful to you, and they like the way it feels when you feel good about yourself when you’re with them. Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling, PhD explores martial perceptions of positivity to help show people what it feels like when you let them know you feel good.

When I married my husband over 20 years ago, I thought the heartbreaking days of romantic angst were over. I thought I would never worry about my the man moves away from me or withdraws.

And yet, the unthinkable happened: our initial marital bliss gave way to disconnection to the point that I felt like I was living with a stranger. I tried everything to save my marriage, including repeatedly telling my husband about it.

I was exhausted trying to change him until I made an important, life-changing discovery: the only way to change him and save my marriage was to change myself. I realized I had lost track of myself and my happiness, which led my husband to do the same.

Once I started making small changes in myself and putting the focus back on the most important person – me – I was able to save my marriage and create a union that was stronger and more connected than ever before, as suggested by study of unexpected adjustments in marriage.

If you think they will do their best to make you happy without demands and just letting them know when they make you happy, you’ll be well on your way to more love than you ever imagined.

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Rori Raye is a relationship coach who has helped thousands of women transform their love lives.