Is your marriage everything you ever hoped it could be? Or has it been pushed down your list of priorities since having children? Let’s face it, parenthood is a full-time job, and it dramatically changes your marriage relationship. But marriage is the foundation upon which your entire family is structured. If your marriage is strong, your whole family will be strong; your life will be more peaceful, you’ll be a better parent, and you’ll, quite simply, have more fun in your life.
Some of the key elements which are important to nourish your marriage:
- Communicate clearly and often.
- Tell your spouse that you’re thankful for having them in your life.
- Make time for you two as a couple.
- Plan for some personal time.
- Understand that it’s OK to disagree.
- Build trust.
- Learn to forgive.
Unfortunately to maintain and ensure your marriage is healthy is not just a matter of running through a checklist and if you throw children into the mix it could become a real challenge.
Time is one of the things that seem to disappear into thin air especially when your children are small. The working parents dealing with what life has thrown at them and the pressures of surviving mentally and financially in the real world it could become messier. Communication could be the first thing out of the door.
Having a great partner will obviously make things easier, but lets face it you would not have gotten married if you did not think you partner was “great”.
I suggest we flip the script; BEING a GREAT PARTNER is very important. I remember a little life lesson I read years ago about relationships in a book called How to live with life; the writer said the best relationship advice comes off a mayonnaise jar label; keep chill but don’t freeze.
Struggling and being tired is how we freeze our partners out of our lives. Unfortunately we “wake up” down the line and find that we have been doing things alone all this time and might feel cheated. When this happen the important thing is not to just continue on this road alone, but to double down and be that great partner. Find ways to include your partner, bring them back into your life. Find ways to be better, try to be perfect.
Being married isn’t always easy especially when you’ve been for a long time. This year is our 22nd year of marriage and I find myself being annoyed at my hubby. There are reasons but mainly I feel that he does not make me feel seen and heard all the time. We have our own dynamic as a family and on that front we seem to be doing okay. I have to do some introspection, because I think that I have not been seeing and hearing him. I was in survival mode for so long, feeling that I need to deal with certain things alone, I never gave him a chance to be part of the solution.
As a couple it does feel like we have been loosing touch, I am going to focus on feeling thankful for my partner. I have to move my focus from what he is not doing to what he IS DOING and how that makes my life better.
I have told my daughter that the way to have a long marriage is to choose your partner everyday. I think I have lost sight of this and have just been choosing not to leave my marriage everyday. This is not the same thing and as I am writing this article and doing the research I can see where things went wrong. I need a paradigm shift as I have veered off course.
Make time to do things as a couple will require more work. As we have been following our own paths the last couple of years fighting for survival as a family the fight for being a couple took the backseat. There has been some challenging mental health issues we had to deal with, and this has really taken its toll on both of us. We have both been focusing on “staying alive” more than doing things together or for each other. We need to move the focus back to us being a couple.
Soon we will be empty nesters and it will be too easy to just drift apart further. If this is not what we want we need to put in the work and make sure our relationship is healthier than ever.
Make time for yourself. I have never been good at this. I have years of burnout and tiredness to attest to the fact that selfcare is not a priority. I have been struggling with my health and it although I have tried several specialists we are not anywhere near finding a solution to my medical issues. I have been very tired and had bouts of daytime sleeping, some days anything was too much.
I’m not that tired at the moment and now I’m trying to make up for lost time. I do have a Friday night date with friends for some wine and a weekly debrief. This has been a godsent and keeps me relatively sane. I however need to find other ways to make time for myself.
In our relationship we have always to been OK to disagree. We are not precious about our beliefs and have managed to raise a highly opinionated teen in the mix. We have spirited discussions on things like religion, politics, human rights and gender identity. We however can’t agree on some of the major details of who did what and why. As this is not an intellectual hypothesis we are dealing with, but rather an emotional one I feel the need for a mediator, without one we might get stuck and not resolve what needs to be discussed.
With hubby’s high-functioning ASD, emotions get tricky thus I think that it would be better to have a 3rd party to help keep us on point and the discussion within emotional reason. Hubby is not elated by this, but also understand that this is important. So in this section I would add, It’s OK to get help.
Trust I think is an important building block to a healthy marriage, without it. If I can not trust that my husband has my best interest at heart, it would not e possible for me to try and be the best partner possible. I would not be able to think about what he’s doing right because I would expect him to be looking out for number 1; himself.
I do not know how you work on renewed trust once it is broken. I do know I trust my partner absolutely as he does me. We are able to function independently and allow each other space to venture outside our house and recharge our batteries. I am a total extrovert and need to be amongst people to recharge. Hubby is the exact opposite he needs solitude. When you have younger children in the home it is tricky to fit this into the grander scheme of things. However, it is important that you are able to trust your partner to have your back.
Forgive in most cases you need to forgive yourself. You are human, you will not always be perfect. Live will not always be perfect, but it can come close. I find myself being more upset because the expectations I had in my head or the way I though things would work or be did not pan out. I find my annoyance at things not being the way I wanted it. However, I never make these wants and needs known; sometimes I don’t even know I had expectations. I can’t be upset about how things did not turn out if I do not share my expectations with my husband.
My husband does not knowingly do things that requires forgiveness. It is important to evaluate this when you look at how you can better communicate and live your lives together. Is your hubby malicious? Does he mean to hurt you? Does he let you down on purpose? If he is not, then forgive him, but more importantly forgive yourself and move on.
Being married and working as a couple, a family a unit is sometimes going to be challenging. We all carry our relationship baggage with us, whether it be from generational hurt, sibling rivalry, past relationships, being a child, being a parent. If we want to make our marriages healthy we need to be able to look beyond all this; to the person you married. To the promises we made on our wedding day, to the optimism you had for a future together. If you can find those two people then you can work on a successful marriage, you can move forward again with renewed optimism and love, even 22-years down the line.
