So interesting. Click on the mom tab and you see quite a few posts about the children. Sooo many healthcare posts. This is my first one about marriage.
It makes me a little sad.
A little sad because I promised myself this would be more of a priority.
A little sad because I LOVE dressing up for my husband and getting to reconnect, and it’s been since July, our 10th anniversary, since we really got to sit down and look each other in the eyes and just…kick it.
But the migraines, and the kids, and the dog, and then work, and suddenly, here our relationship is again, on the back burner. How does that happen?
Well, finally, it’s date night! And it’s amazing how a simple dinner can do a couple so much good. I got to talk to him, look at him, look at the Houston skyline with him, and remember why we’re doing this craziness together.
It’s so easy to get bogged down in the craziness of life. To become business partners, co-parents, roommates, and forget to nurture that loving friendship that brought you together in the first place. But it’s so important to do. Because it makes communicating through the craziness so much easier…remembering who your friend is, remembering you were friends before it all and through it all.
These were my sentiments, my thoughts, and I wanted to encourage all my fellow married couples, especially the parent married couples, to make the romance a priority. And the doctor in me kicked in. Is there any evidence for this? Turns out there is. I’ll be honest, it’s late, and it has taken me a week to be able to sit down and do this post, so I didn’t dig into the quality of the data, but it looks like there may be some supporting evidence to this date night thing. Communication was one of the factors, but also keeping the novelty, eros, and commitment in the relationship, and having a place to de-stress were all reasons to commit to a weekly date night in this study.
Turns out that making prioritizing your relationship can be really good for the health of your relationship. Go figure .
And parents, let’s talk. Prioritizing our relationships mean our children live in households with healthier, happier, more well-adjusted marriages. Maybe we spent 2 hours less with them. If that means we were able to parent better as a team, to model what a healthy marriage looks like for them in the future, to love them better as a unit–wasn’t it worth it?
I’ll admit, weekly seems a bit ambitious to this parent, but I do hope to make monthly more of a commitment. I love our us time. And it’s the us that built this thang, and will keep it afloat.
Cheers to us!