You have your teeth cleaned regularly and you get checked out by your doctor once a year, but what do you do when it comes to the healthy maintenance of your marriage? The Marriage Checkup, A project at Clark University in Massachusetts, aims to stop major problems before they start by offering feedback on and tinkering with concerns that arise for a couple. Project director Dr. James Cordova explains how it works and how to spot some clear red flags.

Q: What is the Marriage Checkup and how does it work?

A: The Marriage Checkup is intended to be the marital health equivalent of the dental checkup or the annual physical health checkup. It is designed to help couples identify their relationship strengths and to catch areas of concern earlier rather than later. We're testing a model in which couples receive annual marital health checkups and early research results are promising -- they show couples increasing in relationship satisfaction, intimacy, acceptance, and increased active marital health care.

The Marriage Checkup book guides couples through the most important relationship health domains, including communication, problem-solving, co-parenting, intimacy, sex, acceptance, forgiveness, and healthy emotional expression. It provides couples with questions to help them assess their strengths and areas of concern, and we provide information from the research literature to help them understand what we know about these relationship areas, plus menus of options to choose from to help couples effectively address any areas of concern.

Q: What kinds of things do you assess?

A: We assess the quality of a couples intimacy, how they express strong emotions with each other, how effectively they communicate, how accepting they are of each others foibles, the quality of their mindful attention to the relationship, the quality of their forgiveness and repair, the spiritual dimension of the relationship, the quality of their sexual intimacy, the quality of their relationship with money, the quality of their co-parenting, how effectively they problem solve together as teammates, and their underlying attachment styles.

Q: Are there problems that are more common than others?

A: The problems we are seeing most frequently in our ongoing research at Clark University include problems with communication and problem solving, diminishing intimacy and closeness, disruptive interaction patterns and diminished sexual intimacy.

Q: Are there some clear red flags you look for when examining the health of a marriage?

A: We look most closely at the quality of the intimate connection between partners, or how safe and comfortable both partners feel being themselves and being completely authentic and at ease with each other. We also look at the degree to which partners simply enjoy each other's company. We also look closely at how accepting both partners are of each other's imperfections.

Q: Do you think any marital problem can be overcome, or are some things deal breakers?

A: Certainly violence and psychological abuse are deal breakers. Anything that causes more harm than good and that genuinely diminishes you as a person is of significant concern. If efforts to change these things do not work and work quickly, then health should be one's primary concern.

Q: How can undergoing a Marriage Checkup strengthen a marriage?

A: I think it is easy for us to neglect our marriages in the same way that it can be easy for us to neglect our health in general. They are the sorts of things that we simply take for granted when they are strong or at least "strong enough." However, like any living being, marriages do not thrive on neglect; they do not take care of themselves, and they certainly do not repair themselves. We have to look after them, we have to pay them the attention they deserve and we have to repair them ourselves. Annual marriage checkups can be just the thing to help us turn our loving attention to our most important relationships on a regular basis, so we can take good care of them before they start to break down. That way, we can enjoy all the benefits of not just being "healthy enough" but of being genuinely strong and vibrant.