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I had a strange realization the other day at a friend’s wedding: The groom had just called his bride a “glorious human” in a speech in front of the crowd, which was quite possibly the best compliment ever. And suddenly it hit me: I couldn’t remember the last time I’d given my husband, Chris, a compliment—especially not one as amazing as what I’d just heard.

Sure, I thank him all of the time. I mean, I’m all about heaping on the praise when he takes my car to the shop for maintenance or makes dinner on a whim. But a flat-out, “glorious human”-level compliment? Err…

Since that amazing compliment came from an uber-newlywed, I took a poll of my buddies who have been married longer than two hours to see what the compliment situation was like in their households. The verdict: not great, with the exception of my friend Laura, who makes it a point to try to compliment her husband every other day. “But the flip side is pretty much zero,” she says.
 

Clearly, there’s a serious compliment deficit going on around here, and it’s not good.

With that in mind, I reached out to clinical psychologist Andy Hahn, Psy.D, to see how big a deal compliments are in a marriage. He says they really do matter in a relationship—especially to people who tend to process things with their heart instead of their head or gut. And Chris is definitely a heart kind of guy. Not only that, Hahn says it’s important to aim for a 5:1 ratio when talking to your S.O. As in, for every one negative thing you say to your partner, you should say five great things about them.
 

Well…damn. I’m probably more like 5:1, flipped around. So basically, I’m totally bombing at this whole “giving your spouse props” thing.

Instead of wallowing in my shortcomings, I decided to rise to the challenge. I secretly created Chris Appreciation Week, with the goal of giving him at least one compliment a day. Easy-peasy, right? So you’d think.

I’m no stranger to doling out compliments: I give them to my girlfriends all the time, usually along the lines of “Your [insert body part or outfit] looks awesome!” Since that comes easily to me, I started out by telling Chris how great he looked. The next day I was in a rush, so I reached for the appearance compliment again. But Chris didn’t seem to really notice…or care. What the what? I have years of success with the appearance compliment. Why wasn’t it doing it for him?

It turns out, I was going about this all wrong: Hahn says compliments about who you are and what you do for someone are stronger than ones about appearance. For someone like Chris, compliments on his hair or outfit just don’t stick as much as ones about who he is as a person.
 

So I started thanking him more than usual for all of the things that he does…until I realized that’s not the same as a compliment. This was f*$ing hard! Finally, on day four, I gave him props for his parenting skills. I started to give more thoughtful compliments like that, and I noticed that he really seemed to appreciate them.

Once the week was over, I ‘fessed up to Chris about my little experiment—I was curious to see if all of the effort was worth it and whether he’d noticed anything different. “You told me one day that I’m a great dad, and that meant a lot to me,” he said.  Okay, one out of seven ain’t bad.

Thinking back, giving compliments to Chris didn’t just make him feel good; It made me feel good, too. He’s a great guy, and he deserves to have a wife who tells him that on the regular.

Not only that, it’s coming full-circle. When I told Chris about my experiment, he realized he could stand to step up his complimenting game, too. There have been lots of nice comments flying around our place lately, and as cheesy as it sounds, it really does make a difference.

Secret to Brangelina-level bliss? Quite possibly.

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Korin Miller is a writer, SEO nerd, wife, and mom to a little one-year-old dude named Miles. Korin has worked for The Washington Post, New York Daily News, and Cosmopolitan, where she learned more than anyone ever should about sex. She has an unhealthy addiction to gifs.

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