BlueCreek

Ok, since you asked for details, this will be a bit long, but here's what I did:

I sat down and created two lists. My first list was to look at myself and see all of my shortcomings and things I was doing wrong or ways I was withdrawing from the marriage. I said to myself, "If I were to die tomorrow, I want my wife to be able to say I tried as hard as I could to be a perfect husband to her and father to our children. What can I do to be that man starting today." I then wrote down every single thing I could think of broken down by categories. Here's a VERY brief example (my list actually took up two single spaced pages -eek!)

Listening To You More
• Whenever you talk to me, I will stop whatever I am doing and truly listen and focus so I don’t just forget what you’ve said all the time, this especially goes for when I am on the computer or watching tv.
• When you are upset at me, I will stop just getting defensive and tune you out and instead I will truly listen to what you are saying and if necessary even add it to this list of things I need to work on.

Taking Care of Our Household
• I will come up with a cleaning schedule (bathrooms, kitchen, family room, etc) to help keep the house in better shape for you so that there is less you feel you need to worry about.
• I will hang up a small white board in the kitchen for us to start jotting down stuff that needs to be take care of and I will start doing them in timely manner instead of putting them off for months and months.

Next I ranked each item on the list from 1-5 in terms of what I thought was most important to my wife, and then I graded each item A-F in terms of how I expected she would mark how well I currently met those goals.

I then created my second list and wrote down all the things that I felt were missing on her end that kept me from being as happy as I really wanted and needed to be, only I noted how I would rank or grade them on a separate piece of paper.

I let her know I was doing this and that in about a week I would want to go over it. I told her she didn't need to do anything yet or think on it like I had. Then when the time came (I left the actual evening up to her so that she could chose a time she was relaxed and not worn out or stressed) we sat down in a nice quiet room with some desert and the music on low in the background and went over my list. I went over it each item at a time with her, discussed them, and re-grading and prioritizing them based on her input. She also added a few things to the list that I had missed, stuff that never even occurred to me that really bothered her.

By getting my stuff out of the way first, I think it was a little bit less threatening and a "you have to do this for me" feeling for her when we started on the list I'd written up for what I needed from her. I also told her if anything on the list made her feel uncomfortable, that we would skip it and only come back to it when she was ready some another time. So we went over every item and discussed it and I had her rank and grade before showing her how I would.

When it was all done, I told her that I was going to start working on everything right away, but that I did not expect the same from her. I just asked that she slowly work first on what she felt would be easiest for her, not necessarily what I saw as the most critical. Then I asked her what would be a fair amount of time before we sat down to go over how we were each doing, and we decided on a week at the beginning until we got the hang of things and then farther apart later on.

Like I said the first month didn't go so great. Every time we went back over out lists she would say she didn't get a chance to work on this or that too much because one of the kid's kept her up a couple nights late and she was really tired, or she was in a bad mood after having an argument with her mom, or whatever. The two mantra's I kept on telling myself over and over were: A) I will not pressure her and take this slow, and B) I will not be negative. NOT easy, but absolutely critical in my opinion.

But after about a month when we got together to talk about it as planned, two things happened. First, I told her it was really important that while her excuses were certainly valid for why it had been hard for her to make many changes, the fact of the matter was that I didn't feel like our marriage came first and until that changed, we should just hold off on our lists. And second, I think she was really kind of embarrassed. There were all these things on my list I was working on and she was giving me credit for, but not much on her list was changing.

I think this list was really important for us for three reasons. A) It gave us an open non-judgmental forum to communicate our needs from each other and either of us could ask to add something to the list whenever we felt was necessary. It's can also just be easier to be honest and say everything you mean to on paper. B) It let us come up with specific resolutions together as a couple to improve or fix things. C) It allowed us to objectively quantify improvements and see how it directly translated into a happier marriage. If something my wife did moved her up from a C to a B, I was able to tell her exactly how great she was and give tons of positive reinforcement. There was no chance she might make a change for me and have me not be aware of it or show her my appreciation.

Now it sounds like your situation may be more complicated than that. My wife never had a "things will never get better" attitude because she didn't think things were that bad to begin with (it was a shock to her that I did.) But for my situation, I think this method of communicating not only our issues but brainstorming ideas together to address them properly was the single most important thing we did. We still have our lists, only there are a lot more A's and B's and we only bring them out every two or three months.