Studies show that prayer can promote healing in someone who is ill, even when the patient didn’t know that the prayer was occurring! But can prayer promote healing in a relationship or marriage?  Do relationship prayers for couples really work? In fact, the great news is YES!

Research on the Power of Relationship Prayers for Couples

In a series of five studies, researchers studied partner-focused prayer and found that it is super helpful:

• Partner-focused prayer reduced vengefulness and blaming,
• Prayed-for partners independently recognized this shift in the one who did the praying,
• Specifically praying for a partner after being hurt increased forgiveness in the one who prayed.     This was true even if one of the partners had an affair!

These findings have profound implications about praying for your partner or your relationship.  If you are suffering in your marriage, or feel like your relationship is going downhill and falling apart, prayer can create an amazing turn-around.  It can facilitate a journey back to love. So now I’m going to share a few simple prayers that can infuse your coupledom with the Divine, your Higher Power, or the God of your understanding. Amazingly, these prayers take as little as 30 seconds!  Yet they can change the tone, mood, intimacy and connection in your relationship to the upside.

So far, here’s what we know. Sincere prayer can work at any time:

• To make your love and compassion for each other even stronger.
• To foster a beautiful serene connection.
• And to stop a fight.

Research on the Power of Relationship Prayers for Couples: What If You’re Struggling?

If you are in a troubled place about your relationship, prayer is a vehicle that can quickly move you out of suffering and into solution mode. Because suffering comes from focusing on your own ego. In other words, being concerned about how YOU were hurt by your partner. How sorry YOU feel for yourself. How right YOU are and how YOU might want to take revenge by giving him or her the cold shoulder or attacking. And, especially how sad and alone YOU feel.

Sound familiar?

Notice that in all these statements your attention is firmly fixed on YOU and YOUR PAIN. So if you want to move out of suffering and into connection and joy, prayer can be your most powerful ally.

Relationship Prayers for Couples: Diana’s 30-Second Prayers

You can use a prayer you love or construct a new one of your own. For example, here are two prayers that I created to help bring the miraculous into my life and consciousness.

Prayer One can be said throughout the day at any time.

Higher Power fill me completely with your love and light.

Higher Power flow through me in all my thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Free me from the bondage of thinking only about myself in my marriage.

Higher Power may I be one with you and live in the fullness of living love.

 Prayer Two is great in the morning to help me become aware of my Higher Power’s presence throughout the day.

Dearest Higher Power, Divine Love,

Please be with me and show me signs of your presence.

Keep me safe, serene, and in joyful condition that I may be in your great flow of love and service to my Beloved.

As he longs to be to me.

In fact, saying these prayers lifts any resentments I may have toward my husband, Sam and allows me to be serene, feel good, and act in the loving ways that I LOVE to act in. In turn, loving actions restore my self-respect and self-love in a big-time way. So in the end, in addition to helping my relationship, it is for my benefit.  And I almost always get lots of love back!  What goes around comes around.

Relationship Prayers for Couples: Sam’s Prayer

Another example, is a prayer Sam, created and says every morning:

Thank you for helping my relationship with Diana.

Thank you for helping us live in compassion and love.

I thank you for our many blessings, both material and spiritual.

Thank you for being at my side daily.

 Sam says that starting his day this way puts first things first in his life. It sets the tone for having a joyful, spirit-infused connection with me.

Relationship Prayers for Couples: An Invitation

So I invite you to select or write a prayer for spiritually-based love. If your partner is so inclined, invite him or her to also choose or create a relationship prayer for your couple. In fact, I know some couples that create prayers together and say them together.

Another way to do this is to read spiritually inspiring literature, sacred poems, or listen to guided meditations or music that you find to be spiritually uplifting. You can do this alone or with your partner. Just a brief dip into the Higher Power pool of thoughts, sounds, and feelings will be healing and amplify the love within your couple. By the way, I’ve also suggested that you meditate together as expressed in the Loving Mother Meditation.