When it comes to being married, you can get overwhelmed with a lion’s share of obligations, bills and bad timing. It can be hard to imagine in the first years of your marriage that there may come a time when children, work, family and financial obligations are pulling you in opposite directions. The thing about it, is that it’s insidious. It starts a little bit at the time, you don’t go from doing everything together to doing everything apart overnight. It just starts to happen.
Take a Moment
It’s important to stop every so often and take stock of what is going on in your lives individually and together. It’s not just important, it’s vital to the health and security of your marriage to do this so that that two of you don’t get pulled so far apart that you’ll need to construct a suspension bridge to get back to each other.
For example, when you have kids – they have activities. Do you find yourself going out every day to shepherd them from activity to activity while your husband is at work or home or elsewhere? Do you find that your weekends are subdivided into house work, yard work and grabbing a quick nap on the sofa? Do you find that you go to bed at different times because even after the kids are tucked in for the night, your interests and activities have become so diverse that it’s hard to find a common ground?
Rediscovering Each Other
It’s okay. Because it happens to all of us, what isn’t okay is to let the situation persist until you’ve forgotten how to enjoy each other. A few months ago, I made a suggestion that my husband and I used when we found that life was putting us at cross-purposes, sending him off to travel regularly while I was running around with our daughter and doing a ton of stuff and it always seemed that one of us was falling down tired and when we had an empty few hours – we were wondering what to do with ourselves.
So we had to take the time to rediscover each other and we did this with our date jar. We took a jar and stuck it on the kitchen counter. We filled it with little slips of paper describing something we’d like to do whether it was sharing dinner over the kitchen counter after the midget went to bed or watching a movie, going out to karaoke or bowling – whatever our fancy was. Whenever we had a few hours, we’d reach into the jar and pick out an activity.
We don’t necessarily need the jar anymore – but it was a lot of fun and we still stuff it with fun ideas and some of them are more oriented to the family than just to us – but even when life is pulling us apart, we’ve found our way to keep it together.
Have you ever tried something like the jar idea?
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