A Checkup For Your Marriage

Drift. That’s a fun word when you’re applying it to camp! Drift on a wakeboard behind a boat on the lake. Drift down a hill on a drift trike. Drift on a giant swan float in the pool.

When it comes to relationships, however, we absolutely do not want to drift.

It’s pretty easy for all of us to drift in our relationships, if we’re not careful. Whether it’s our relationship with the Lord, our kids, or our spouse, there’s potential for us to just keep coasting. We want to encourage you to invest time and consideration into your marriage so that your relationship is moving forward in a healthy, beneficial way.

Craig “Dutch” Langemeier and his wife Carrie, or “Duchess,” created a short, one-page marriage checkup questionnaire that they’ve been sharing with friends and campers for years. This checkup is an opportunity for couples to reconnect and talk through some topics that may otherwise be difficult to bring up within the rhythms of normal, everyday life.

We encourage married couples to go through this check up on a yearly basis. Depending on the current state of your marriage, you might find some of these questions to be a bit too deep. Others will find them life-giving. Craig and Carrie make it a point to get away overnight once a quarter throughout the course of a year to keep their marriage focus strong. In one of those getaways, they’ll complete the checkup and go through all the questions together.

“Can we do this during our normal date night?” 

Yes, a moderately healthy married couple could complete this questionnaire in one date night. However, Craig and Carrie recommend getting away to a hotel (or anywhere you can stay the night away from your house), to complete the checkup and take a break from the usual interruptions of your everyday life, particularly if this is the first time you’ve gone through the questionnaire.

Fill the questionnaire out individually, carefully considering each topic. (If you fill it out together, the peacekeeper in the relationship may change their responses to appease the other person.) When you’re both done, come together and discuss your answers as a couple. You will be amazed at how the Lord uses the process of going through these questions to strengthen and renew your relationship! 

Download the Marriage Checkup

We hope this marriage checkup is life-giving for you and your spouse! Remember to go through it every year, get away if you can, and of course—be honest! Feel free to share it with anyone you feel would benefit from giving their marriage a regular checkup.

Looking for a book to further read about strengthening your marriage? Craig recommends Sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas.