The sitting room in Kofi and Abena Mensah's two-bedroom apartment smelled like fried plantain and baby powder - a combination that somehow made perfect sense for a Saturday afternoon. Their three-year-old daughter, Nana Ama, was building a tower of plastic cups on the tiled floor, concentrating so hard her little tongue peeked out from the corner of her mouth.
Kofi sat at one end of the worn-in sofa, flipping through his phone, and Abena sat at the other end, folding laundry in that efficient, rhythmic way she had, the kind where each shirt gets one sharp snap before it's folded.
They were not talking. They were not fighting either. They were just... there, together, in the ordinary hum of a Saturday. And that, as it turned out, was everything.
A few months earlier, this same Saturday would have felt like a wound. Kofi would have been at his brother Kweku's place, Abena would have been on a voice call with her mother, and Nana Ama would have been shuffled between the two of them like a small package nobody had time to hold still.
They were just a busy couple who had confused busyness with building something. They had mistaken noise for love and exhaustion for effort. It took a very quiet evening, cold rice, and a power outage to teach them otherwise.
That night, ECG, as they call it in Ghana, took the light without warning. No fans, no TV, no phones charging, no distraction. Just Kofi, Abena, a candle, and a pot of rice that had gone cold before they could eat it.
They sat across from each other at the small dining table and, for the first time in months, they actually looked at each other, and not past each other, not at their screens through each other, but genuinely at each other.
Abena laughed first, about nothing in particular, maybe the absurdity of the moment, maybe relief, and Kofi laughed too, and Nana Ama, who was watching from her mat on the floor, clapped her hands like it was a performance. It was the most connected they had felt all year. And all it cost them was one dead candle and a plate of cold jollof.
That evening became their turning point, and it was built entirely on simplicity. Not simplicity as a buzzword, not simplicity as a lifestyle brand, but simplicity as a genuine, daily, intentional choice to stop overcomplicating the thing they both wanted to protect.
Here are the 27 ways you can make simplicity the quiet engine of a deeply enjoyable marriage.
1. Eat at least one meal together every day, without screens.
It sounds almost too small to matter, but it is one of the most powerful anchors a couple can build. For Kofi and Abena, it started as breakfast, but the rule was firm: phones down, Nana Ama in her chair, everyone present. That 15-minute window each morning became the thread that held the whole day together. When you share a meal without distraction, you are essentially saying, "You are worth my full attention right now." That is not a small thing in a marriage. That is actually the whole thing.
2. Have one conversation every week that is not about money, children, or logistics.\
Kofi and Abena called theirs "the real talk," which sounds more dramatic than it was. It was usually just ten minutes before bed, talking about something they had read, something funny that happened, something one of them was quietly thinking about. The point was not depth for depth's sake; it was connection for connection's sake. Couples who only talk about bills and school fees and what needs fixing in the house slowly start to feel like business partners, and the warmth leaks out without anyone noticing. Protect the warmth intentionally.
3. Learn to sit in comfortable silence together.
The evening of the power outage taught them this one. Not every moment needs to be filled. Not every silence is awkward. There is a kind of ease that only comes when two people are so secure in each other that they do not need noise to prove they are okay. Build toward that ease. Let the silence sometimes just be silence.
4. Say "thank you" for the ordinary things, out loud, every single day.
Abena thanked Kofi one morning for fixing the leaking tap; a tap he had fixed four times because it kept refusing to cooperate with him. Kofi looked up from his tea and said, "You noticed." That is the thing about gratitude for ordinary things: it tells your partner that you see them. Not just the grand gestures, but the Tuesday-morning efforts, the quiet fixes, the small endurances. "Thank you for cooking tonight." "Thank you for handling that." "Thank you for being patient with Nana Ama when she was difficult." Say it. It costs nothing and builds everything.
5. Stop keeping score.
This one is hard, and it is important to say so honestly. There will be seasons when one of you is carrying more the domestic work, more of the financial pressure, more of the emotional load. Keeping a mental tally of who did what and who owes what slowly turns a marriage into a courtroom. Kofi realised he had been keeping score when he caught himself feeling bitter about a Saturday when Abena rested, and he cooked. The truth was, Abena had carried the previous two weekends almost entirely alone. Score-keeping makes you blind to what your partner is actually doing. Let it go, actively and often.
6. Create one shared routine that belongs only to the two of you.
Kofi and Abena's was Sunday evening tea after Nana Ama had been put to bed. Just two cups, the quietness of the house, maybe a biscuit if there was one, and twenty minutes of conversation or comfortable nothing. It was unremarkable to anyone watching. To them, it was sacred. Shared rituals are the invisible architecture of a marriage. They are the things you look forward to without even realising you are looking forward to them, and the things you miss most when life disrupts them.
7. Do not wait for the "right time" to enjoy each other.
This is perhaps the most common trap of married life: the idea that connection is a reward you earn after all the hard things are done. After the debt is cleared. After the children are bigger. After things settle. Kofi and Abena caught themselves saying "when things settle" so often it became a private joke between them because things never fully settle, and waiting for them to do so means watching your best years pass while you hold your breath. Enjoy now. Enjoy the imperfect version of your life together, right now.
8. Apologise quickly and without excessive drama.
Abena had a habit of needing to process for a long time before she could apologise. Kofi had a different habit: he would apologise too quickly, then feel resentful about it. Neither served them well. What worked was this: apologise when you know you were wrong, mean it when you say it, and do not drag the aftermath out longer than the offence warranted. A simple "I was wrong about that, and I am sorry" clears the air faster than anything else.
9. Respect each other's need for alone time without making it a problem.
Kofi needs thirty minutes of quiet after work before he can be fully present with anyone, including the people he loves most. Abena used to take this personally until she understood it was not about her, but it was about him being able to refill enough to give her his best self. Understanding this changed everything. Give each other breathing room, not as a rejection, but as an investment in the quality of time you will spend together.
10. Find joy in the budget version of things.
The Saturday afternoon with cold rice and a candle was, by any measure, a terrible evening. It became one of their best memories. This is what simplicity teaches you: the memory is made of the feeling, not the price tag. A walk around the neighbourhood after dinner. A movie night at home with popcorn made on the stove. A long drive to nowhere in particular with the windows down and music playing. These things are available to almost every couple, in almost every season of life, and they build intimacy just as well as anything expensive.
11. Protect your home from the noise of outside opinions.
Extended family. Colleagues. Social media. Neighbours. Everyone has an idea about how your marriage should look, how much you should have by now, where you should be living, how many children you should have, and what your spouse should be doing. Kofi and Abena made a quiet decision early on: what happened between them stayed between them, and what people outside said about their marriage would be heard but not given a seat at the table. Your marriage is not a public institution. Guard it accordingly.
12. Celebrate small wins together, genuinely.
When Kofi got a modest bonus at work, Abena made his favourite meal, and they spent the evening talking about what it meant and what they wanted to do with it together. No fanfare, no expensive outing, just acknowledgement and warmth. Small wins deserve celebration because they are the ones that happen most often. If you only celebrate the enormous victories, you will spend most of your marriage waiting to feel good.
13. Choose kindness over being right.
This is a discipline, not a personality trait. In the middle of a disagreement, when you know you are correct and your spouse is stubbornly missing the point, kindness is a choice, and an incredibly hard one. But couples who consistently choose kindness over winning create a home where both people feel safe enough to be honest, to be wrong, and to grow. Kofi learned this slowly. Abena is still learning it too. That is the truth of it; it is ongoing work, not a one-time arrival.
14. Talk about your dreams, even the small and silly ones.
Abena once told Kofi she wanted to learn to make tigernut drink from scratch. He looked at her like she had said something profound, and then asked her what flavour she would start with. That is it. That is the whole point. The dreams do not have to be big. They just have to be shared. Couples who know what the other person is quietly hoping for feel closer than couples who know only each other's stresses and obligations.
15. Do a simple act of service for your partner every week, without being asked.
Kofi ironed Abena's work clothes one Sunday evening when she was struggling with a headache. She did not ask. He just did it. She remembered it for weeks. Acts of service speak to something deep in a partner. They say: "I see your life. I want to make it easier." You do not need grand gestures. You need consistent, small ones.
16. Laugh at yourselves and at life, often.
A marriage that has no laughter in it is a marriage running on fumes. Kofi and Abena are not a couple who laugh all the time but they have developed the habit of finding the absurdity in their struggles. The car that refuses to start on the most important mornings. The recipe that fails spectacularly. The plan that falls apart in the first five minutes. Laughter does not fix these things, but it makes them survivable, and it keeps you on the same team while you deal with them.
17. Be honest about your needs before they become resentments.
Abena went through a season where she felt invisible and instead of saying so, she swallowed it until it curdled into something sharper. By the time she found the words, more damage had been done than necessary. This is one of the more unglamorous truths of marriage: unexpressed needs do not disappear. They accumulate. They transform. They come out sideways in arguments about dishes and tone of voice. Say the thing before it becomes something bigger than the thing.
18. Keep the home environment peaceful and ordered.
A chaotic home adds invisible stress to a marriage. This does not mean your house must look like a showroom. But it does mean making a shared effort to keep the environment calm, tidy enough, and restful. The home is supposed to be the place where both of you recover. When it is a source of tension, everyone suffers. Divide responsibilities clearly, handle your portion without being reminded, and resist the urge to turn domestic chores into ongoing points of conflict.
19. Revisit your "why" regularly.
Why did you choose this person? Kofi remembers that Abena was the first person who ever made him feel both challenged and completely at ease in the same conversation. Abena remembers that Kofi showed up for people in ways that were quiet and consistent, and she trusted that. Remembering why you started does not erase current difficulties, but it gives you a frame to hold them in.
20. Understand that seasons of marriage are not permanent.
There will be dry seasons - months where you feel more like co-managers than companions, where the warmth seems to have gone underground. These seasons pass. They are not a verdict on your marriage. Kofi and Abena went through eight months like this when Nana Ama was a newborn, and they were both sleep-deprived and overwhelmed. They came through it. Not because they did anything miraculous, but because they hung on with small, simple, daily decisions to keep choosing each other.
21. Resist the pressure to perform your marriage for others.
Social media, family gatherings, neighbourhood conversations all create a subtle pressure to demonstrate that your marriage looks a certain way. Kofi and Abena are private people by nature, and it has served them well. The energy you spend performing happiness for an audience is energy not spent actually building it. Let your marriage be real, even if that means it is quieter and less visible than others seem to be.
22. Support each other's individual growth without feeling threatened.
When Abena enrolled in a professional development course that took up three evenings a week for four months, Kofi adjusted the home routine to accommodate it without making her feel guilty. Not because he was a saint, but because he understood that a version of Abena who was growing and fulfilled would bring more life into their home than a version of Abena who felt held back. Your partner's growth is not your competition. It is your gain.
23. Handle disagreements in private, resolve them completely, and move on.
Arguments that spill into public spaces leave residue that is hard to clean up. And arguments that are technically "resolved" but are actually just suppressed will return. Kofi and Abena made two rules: deal with it at home, and when it is resolved, it is truly done — not brought back up in the next argument as evidence. These two rules alone have saved them from more damage than they can calculate.
24. Know each other's language of feeling loved, and speak it often.
Abena feels loved when Kofi is fully present with her; when he puts the phone down and gives her his face and his attention. Kofi feels loved when Abena expresses pride in him, when she says "you handled that well" or "I trust your judgement on this." Neither of these is complicated or expensive. They are just specific. Know what specifically makes your partner feel seen and valued, and do that thing, regularly, without waiting to be asked.
25. Build a home culture of gentleness.
This means the way you speak to each other in the kitchen at 7am when everyone is tired and late. The way you handle disagreements in front of Nana Ama. The tone you use when something goes wrong. Gentleness is the discipline of treating the person you love with the same basic courtesy you would offer a stranger, even when you are frustrated. A home where gentleness is the default is a home everyone wants to come back to.
26. Prioritise each other above the busyness, deliberately and consistently.
Busyness is not going anywhere. The work will always have more to give. The extended family will always have more needs. The to-do list will never fully empty. The question is not whether there is time, there is not, not naturally, not automatically. The question is whether you are making the choice to create it. A thirty-minute walk. A shared lunch on a weekday. A phone call in the middle of the day just to say, "I was thinking about you." These are choices, and they signal to your partner that the marriage is not being run on leftovers.
27. Accept that simplicity is not a compromise — it is the destination.
This is perhaps the most important thing to say, and to say directly: simplicity in marriage is not settling. It is not making peace with mediocrity. It is not the couple who has given up on grand things. It is the couple who has discovered that the grand thing was always right in front of them; in the ordinary Tuesday evenings, the cold rice eaten together, the child building towers out of cups on the sitting room floor. Kofi and Abena did not find their marriage by fixing it with something big. They found it by choosing, again and again, the small and the present and the real.
Marriage is not built in the extraordinary moments. It is built in the chosen ordinary ones — day after day, simply, together.
