After eight years together, I was feeling hopeless, like our home and our dog and our angelic 3-year-old were the only things connecting us anymore. For a year now, the energy I had left after caring for our child I put into remaking myself: with weekly therapy and daily yoga, with new hobbies (mosaicking, poker) and new friends, believing if I tried to be my best self, the marriage would also fall into place. All these changes were great — I felt proud of myself, and confident I was rocking it as a parent. But none of it seemed to help my marriage.

We tried fighting in the car during nap time (battery-powered baby monitor on my lap, so we’d hear our daughter, but she wouldn’t hear us). I tried reading books on marriage, discovering our 5 Love Languages weren’t as compatible as they were when we met. (His were the same as they’d always been, with physical touch up top, but mine had shifted.)

We read part of another book: Why Talking is Not Enough, and he said, “Yeah, us talking never solves anything.”

So we talked less and less, spoke to each other only when we needed to — “Little Boo was saying she’d like to go to the pool sometime this week; maybe you could take her?” — and we grew further and further apart.

Even though we weren’t talking, I thought about our marriage all the time: Why are we drifting away from each other? Is the drift inevitable? Are we fundamentally different people than when we met? Is monogamy unrealistic? Will my daughter look back and wish we’d just divorced when she was young? Is my husband going to give up on me because he’s a child of divorce? How can I change him? I know I’m not supposed to want to change him. Why won’t he change himself?

I read endless, self-affirming articles about women doing all the self-care and self-betterment (through therapy, yoga, journaling, talking to friends about feelings), while men look to their partners for all their emotional needs. This resonated, as I was doing all of those things, and my husband wasn’t doing any of them.

I asked him if he’d try therapy, and he said, “Why? What would I even talk about? You’re the only problem in my life.”

He took those words back later, but they kept appearing, piling up, on the loveless side of an imaginary scale; I feared if the loveless side grew heavy enough, then I just couldn’t anymore with him.

Can words ever really be taken back? In the short term, did we need this silence just to minimize the untakebackable words?

As a bisexual, I wondered why I’d even chosen a man at all. But of course, I hadn’t chosen a man; I’d chosen one specific person, a person who had inspired me with his creativity and his silliness and his kindness, someone I loved to go on long car trips with, because we never ran out of things to talk about.

But now we didn’t talk.

I pictured myself growing and maturing, connecting with the world around me, and him stagnant, left behind, crouched over his computer screen in the basement, usually creating impressive fantasy art, but in a dark space I didn’t want to visit.

So one day I asked him to commit to a month of daily yoga with me.

My year of intentional self-betterment had started with Revolution — 31 Days of Yoga on the free YouTube yoga channel Yoga with Adriene. I instantly loved Adriene Mishler’s style — inspiring and personal, focused on radical self-love, with touches of silly singing, her dog Benji, and the occasional dirty joke. I shouldn’t be surprised something so helpful and relatable has over 4 million subscribers on YouTube, and yet it’s hard to fit in my head, because I feel like Adriene’s my best friend.

With a young kid, I assumed I didn’t have time for daily yoga. But after a year of practicing alone, along with her free videos (and millions of people around the world I’ve never met), I believed Adriene when she said the time we take for yoga is adding, not taking away.

I accomplished poses I’d never dreamed of, like Crow, and everyone was commenting on my changing body. (Always aware of my impressionable daughter, I’ve tried to redirect these weight loss comments by telling another truth: “I’m stronger than I’ve ever been!”) I’d never been an athlete, so my body being my friend was quite a novelty. I also grew half an inch, just from improved posture, and best of all, I had effective strategies when anxiety struck.

Of course I wanted to share this with my husband. When Adriene announced TRUE — 30-Day Yoga Journey, another month of free daily yoga videos, I invited him along.

To my surprise, he said yes.

The first time was a struggle.

I’d cued up Yoga with Adriene on the laptop, but somehow we got in a fight before we even pressed play. My husband stormed downstairs and retreated to his basement computer, and I locked myself in the bathroom to cry it out unseen. Our daughter worked on a puzzle on the kitchen floor that I’d given her to keep her busy during yoga.

I hated fighting in front of her, and I hated how she seemed unfazed by this fight, desensitized. If only to model something better for her, I took some deep breaths, went downstairs and said, “I know we got off to a bad start, but I really want to do this with you. I’m afraid if we don’t do it today, it will be hard to do it at all. Can we give it another try?”

To my surprise, it worked. He came back up and we did Day 1 — Motive, a 25-minute video that invited us to “give the thinking mind a break, and… accept the invitation here to simply feel your way through this ride.”

Adriene said all the words I needed, all the words my husband couldn’t hear when they came from me:

“Notice how it feels funky and weird. So there are gonna be moments along this journey that feel funky and weird, and I just want to thank you with all my heart and soul for saying yes to the exploration, and you’re my hero,” she said, at the end of a simple but sweaty 25 minutes. “Trust that it’s all there, it’s all inside, and what this journey is going to do, or invite you to do, is to uncover what’s already there.”

“Inhale lots of love in and exhale lots of love out.”

We said, “Namaste,” (or I did, and he rolled his eyes), he thanked me for inviting him back up, and then he went back to the basement.

The next day, we did it again. And again. Even when we traveled to visit my parents out-of-state, we moved furniture out of the way and did our YouTube yoga there.

Finally, we were doing something together that felt good. We cheered each other on as we got stronger, and also laughed at each other’s farts. Occasionally, without a word, we’d reach out to grasp each other’s hands. And I’d listen to his breath, lining up with mine. Yoga with Adriene’s mantra is “Find What Feels Good,” and we were finding it together.

We invited our daughter to join (which meant climbing up on our cat/cows or tunneling under our downward dogs), and I reveled in knowing she was seeing her parents making this commitment to ourselves, to each other.

Sometimes we’d do our daily yoga while she napped, and after shavasana, the final relaxation pose, both of us full of endorphins, I wanted to jump right on top of him. To put my head on his chest and hear his heart pumping. To kiss him. So I did. And we connected again, in a way that had seemed impossible before.

“I see why you do this,” he said.

Despite (what I thought were) completely obvious positive effects on my mind and body, he had to try it himself to understand.

Halfway through our month, we did Day 16 — Self Love. In the middle of a challenging practice, Adriene invited us to, “Close your eyes and think of one thing you love about yourself.”

My mind went instead to my husband, to how his one thing was probably his butt, how I loved his butt too. I was overjoyed to think positively about him but also freaked out that my mind had trouble focusing positively on myself. My illusion — I’d fixed myself already; he needed to change and I didn’t anymore — was unraveling.

“And when you feel like you have something, anything, anything at all, any little thing…”

I had nothing. I started to sob.

“Tears are coming down your eyes…”

How did she know?

I turned my weepy face to my husband.

“Aww, honey, I love you,” he said, and then I thought of my one thing:

I remembered playing the day before with my daughter with a balloon, laughing till my tummy hurt. I loved how I had never stopped playing.

“I love you too,” I said.

“Inhale lots of love in and exhale lots of love out,” Adriene reminded us.

“Close your eyes and think of one thing you love about yourself.”

On Day 29 I asked him, “When the 30 days is over, will you keep practicing with me?”

He didn’t want to promise anything, said the whole point of a 30-day commitment was knowing it didn’t need to last forever. I thought the whole point was to form a habit, to hold on to something good. But I held my tongue. And on Day 31, when his commitment was over, I asked him to join me, and he did.

I still do Adriene’s yoga videos almost daily, and he does them with me 3–4 times a week. I go down to the deep, dark basement, where he’s working on his computer, and I do Namaste hands at my heart and give a little bow. He smiles and follows me upstairs, where we breathe and move and laugh together.

Namaste is usually translated as, “The Divine in me recognizes the Divine in you.” Rather than repeating the endless cycle of fighting, I let the best in myself recognize the best in my husband, and it’s saved our marriage.