Does it feel like “What are you doing for the holidays?” is a loaded question this year? You’re not alone. Whether you’re doing the usual or changing up your plans, there’s bound to be some stress and strain making its way into your psyche – and maybe your relationship. Here are four “C’s” to help avoid unnecessary stress and strain between you and your partner.
It’s that time of year. The time of year where most people fall into one of two camps: the “I’ve already finished my holiday shopping” camp, or the “What are you talking about, I’ve got a whole month” camp.
All joking aside, the holidays can be stressful, and this year is definitely no exception. Maybe your partner is hard to buy for, or maybe they’re not. Maybe you love the task of finding the perfect gift for them or maybe it’s a struggle. Perhaps money is tight this year, or you just want to do things differently. Wherever you’re at, here are four “gift” ideas that will strengthen your relationship (and don’t have to cost a lot of money).
If you Google “quotes about complacency”, you will see many different iterations of the same idea — complacency is the enemy. Companies get complacent, and they begin to lose customers to their competitors. Employees get complacent, and they are shocked when they are passed over for promotions or are let go altogether.
Complacency slowly corrodes the motivation, desire, and potential for progress, improvement, change, growth, and ultimately success. Apply that to relationships, and… yikes.
The scary thing about complacency in relationships is that, by nature, it silently takes root and eats away at intimacy. You don’t notice it lurking because hey, things are “fine.” You’re both just busy with work, and the kids, and your separate hobbies, and any number of other things. Why rock the boat? Then one day you find yourselves standing on opposite sides of a Grand Canyon-sized chasm, wondering, “How did we get here?”
But that doesn’t have to be your fate. You can combat relationship complacency. How, you ask?
Everyone knows we should all be striving to create healthy habits in our daily lives, and we also know the struggle that can sometimes be. It’s hard! Habits are little behaviors, routines, or rituals we do on a regular basis – sometimes they just kind of happen over time, and other times we’ve worked to make it happen. In addition to the healthy habits we have, we also likely have some unhealthy ones that we try to break. That is also hard!
We most often think of habits when it comes to things like lifestyle: nutrition and exercise, or maybe even more relevant these days, work life, specifically productivity as so many of us have transitioned to working from home. However, there’s another part of life that can benefit from healthy habits – your relationships! And specifically, your marriage.
We all know that one couple that seems to do everything together. You know the one. They share every leisure activity, and rarely, if ever, does one partner make plans that don’t involve the other. Maybe you see this in your best friend’s relationship, maybe in a relative’s relationship, or maybe in your own!
Maintaining a sense of emotional closeness with your partner is important; it is one of the major pillars of a healthy intimate relationship. That being said, you can have too much of a good thing.
Here are some tips for achieving a healthy balance of “I” and “We”:
When you finally get the chance to reunite and reconnect with your partner at the end of the day, what do you say?
“How was your day?”
There’s definitely nothing wrong with this question! It shows you’re interested in each other’s daily lives and can be a great way to start a more in-depth conversation. But when you both start asking the question mindlessly and responding with one-word answers, it might be time to say hey, we can do better!
It feels good to be right about something, doesn’t it? Imagine you’re talking to a friend about a movie you saw recently, it has that one guy from that one show – what’s his name? You think it’s one person, but your friend is very sure it’s someone else. So you look it up… and ha! You were right! You feel a brief good-natured sense of satisfaction and share a laugh together.
If only issues in relationships were this easy to sort out. You could simply look up the answer and declare who is “right.” Your arguments would be solved.
Hold up. It isn’t that simple – and it shouldn’t be. Here are two things to focus on when you get caught up in winning the argument.
I was talking to a friend last week, sharing stories about our weekend. She and her husband had celebrated their first anniversary as a married couple, in true quarantine style, with homemade pasta and a bottle of chilled wine that had been left on their front porch by a dear friend. She made a comment that struck me as interesting – “Our first year of marriage was certainly not what I imagined.”
In that first year, they both had major changes with their careers, bought a home together, and most unplanned of all: weathered 3 months (and counting) of a global pandemic. While many of those events were welcome and brought joy to their relationship, she delved deeper in her reflection that it was more the amount of change, challenge, and cooperation between the two of them that she didn’t anticipate. She, like many newlyweds, thought that the first year would be a breeze, a blissful journey together living life. I can relate. I myself just celebrated nine months married to my husband – also qualifying us as newlyweds navigating a different first chapter of marriage than we envisioned.
How do you spend your emotional energy?
The world is heavy. We feel it. It’s hard to escape. And the weight of it all might be seeping into your relationship. It’s not a question of how to build a fortress to prevent the events of your community or society from penetrating your relationship; it’s a question of what amount of energy you devote to feeling those feelings, and at what cost.
What do you celebrate in your relationship?
Do you go all out for every birthday and anniversary or are you in a season of life where you barely have time to yell, “Happy Anniversary!” across the room as you head off in separate directions?
Do you celebrate the big milestones? What about the small victories? Do you still commemorate your dating anniversary? What about the anniversary of when you first met?
The thing is, we choose whether we want to make celebrations a priority, whether we celebrate both the big and small occasions, and whether we do that through grand or mundane gestures. By doing so, we create our own relationship celebration “culture.”
So why is this important?
© Prepare/Enrich
