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Taking Your Marriage on Vacation
Photo by Wilson Sánchez Nine years into marriage, we were planning to leave town to visit family after Mark worked a half day. Mel packed up the kids and the car, and Mark just needed to throw in his suitcase. Mark was delayed several hours at work. By the time we met up, we were both irritated and highly stressed and just
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Married Singles
How do you find the right balance of couple time versus individual time? Sports, times with friends/co-workers, Facebook/Pinterest, hunting…. There are a lot of fun activities that can keep us busy – and distracted. None of these activities are bad or wrong in themselves. But… do they draw us slowly away from our spouse?
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Money Matters
When we were newly married, Paul asked me if I would mind if he took care of paying all our bills. I literally said, “Oh thank God!” I felt relieved I wasn’t responsible for making sure our rent, utilities, and car payments were paid. I also felt secure knowing that part of our monthly income would be put aside as savings for retirement and buying a house.
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We Come First
Marriage is hard, I don’t care who you are. That’s why we write this blog, and that’s probably why you’re reading it. The fail rate on marriages is way too high. How did things get so screwed up? How do we build a better “us”, rather than letting our marriage take the slow slide into a hole we can’t climb out of? We propose this: we have to put “us” (our marriage relationship) first.
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Date Nights
In July we wrote a post on Romance, simple and spontaneous. We described it as a feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love and remoteness from every day life and promised a post on dating. One of our favorite quotes from Mignon McLaughlin, author and journalist is: “A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.” This is why “Date Nights” are so important. They take us back to why we fell in love all over again. Everyday “Romance” makes us crave those “Date Nights.” We have found both to be important in our 38 plus years of marriage.
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Making Up is Hard to Do
Every married couple has conflicts- sometimes over the littlest things. Most conflicts are a result of our unmet expectations– I expected this, but instead that happened. We begin to feel hurt or disappointed. We begin to think we’re disrespected or that we’re unloved.
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TGIF!
Tom and I can say “TGIF!” with very different ideas of what that might look like especially as Friday unfolds into Saturday and Sunday. I need the weekend to get caught up on stuff and slip in a good workout to make up for slack time during the week. If I approach the weekend with the attitude “I am the only one that gets anything done around here” and paint Tom as “Mr Slouch” it is pretty unlikely he will enjoy pitching in to help.
