Even the best relationships require work. We have to communicate, support, encourage, negotiate, compromise and occasionally apologize to keep a relationship positive. Like an infant, long-term relationships require care and feeding. There is no auto-pilot for a relationship. Unfortunately, we often forget this.

Think of your relationship as a ship sailing across the Atlantic. When you left the dock, you were excited. You looked forward to the journey. You imagined many days of smooth sailing. You set your course and marked it with a long, straight line from one port to the next. The skies were clear and blue. The sea looked calm. The future looked good.

Before long, however, the winds changed direction. The ocean’s currents pushed you North or South. Your ship drifted off course. Every relationship drifts off-course at times. If you were paying attention, you noticed this and made a correction. If you noticed it quickly, the correction was easy.

But what if you weren’t paying attention? By the time you discovered it, your ship may have been well off-course. In that case, it would be much harder, and take much longer, to get back on course.

Sometimes life brings a storm. When you’re doing everything you can just to survive the storm, you can’t focus very well on staying on-course. You figure you’ll just have to work on that after the winds die down.

In the early stages of marital or relationship counseling, I often ask the couple to recall the best time in their relationship. Their “best” times don’t have to agree. For one, it may be when they were dating. For the other, it may be the years when their children were born. I just ask them to identify the time that seemed best for each person.

I then ask them to talk about what it was about that time that made it feel like the best for them. How did they feel? How did the other person make them feel about themselves? What did they do back then that made it the best time? How did they behave differently back then?

The exercise leads them to reminisce about their good times. Often, their moods change a bit. They sometimes connect a little in that moment. It’s such a simple thing, but reminiscing can be a powerful tool to initiate change.

Of course, it doesn’t fix all the problems, but it does remind you that there were better times. When your ship is off-course, it helps to remember the reason you set sail in the first place. It helps to remind yourself that that line drawn across that map still exists. With work, you still have a chance of getting back on course.