With Father’s Day on the approach, it occurs to me that one of the things we do on Father’s and Mother’s day is to celebrate our spouse. We ask and answer what our spouse means to us – what their role is in our life and what being married means to us as well.
The following exercise can be fun for you and your spouse to do together – and it may take more than one sitting to get through it all. The exercise should spawn discussions and those discussions can help improve the foundation of your marriage, especially for couples looking to reconnect with each other. The questions come from John Gottman and his research at the Gottman Institute and described in his book: The Relationship Cure.
If you find the following exercise useful, you might pick up a copy for yourself to try it out.
- How do you feel about your role as a husband or wife?
- What does this role mean to you in your life?
- How does your experience relate to that of your parents?
- How would you like to change your role, if you desire any changes, in your marriage?
- How do you balance your role as spouse and parent and other roles such as employee, friend, adult child and more?
- How do you feel about your home? How do you define it? Is it the place you live or the family you have built? Some combination of the two? What changes would you like to make?
- How close are you to your extended families? What roles do they play in your lives?
- How do finances affect your marriage? How important is the role of money in your lives? What changes would you like to make there?
- How is your sex life? What role does it play in your marriage? How would you like to change it, if any?
- What life dreams have you fulfilled? What life dreams do you want to fulfill?
- What do you want to accomplish in the next 5 to 10 years personally and in your marriage?
Enjoy the exercise – it can really open the channels of discussion. You can learn a lot about how your ideas, thoughts and dreams may have changed since the first day of your marriage. After all, our priorities do shift over time and it’s important to acknowledge that.
What does marriage mean to you?