It’s nearly peak wedding season, which also means peak honeymoon season. 

When it comes to keeping the magic alive for a lifetime, here’s what I know now: forget about pre-marital counseling or talking exhaustively about how to parent, where to live, and how much to save for retirement.

Turns out that song about how the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return was right... sustained romance is a matter of learning a few simple skills. 

But, maybe they didn’t offer Relationships 101 at your school, just like they didn’t have it at mine. 

I didn’t learn Intimacy Skills^TM before the wedding, and just a few years later, I thought I had married the wrong man. I dragged my husband to counseling but ended up feeling more hopeless than ever when he didn’t want to spend time with me or even make love to me.

I thought my only options were to spend the rest of my life in a loveless relationship or to divorce. Then, when happily married women showed me a few of their practices, something magical happened. The man who wooed me returned. 

One of the big secrets they taught me was that women are the keepers of the relationship, and that we have more power to make the relationship happy and intimate (or, alternately, stressful and tense). Just as Spiderman learned, with great power comes great responsibility. I believe we women have a responsibility to learn the skills that contribute to lasting love and to pass them on to each other.

Here are things I wish every bride knew, but most don’t...