How To Spice Your Marriage With Weekly Meetings
Marriage meetings off-load concerns and ideas that are crouching on your mental bandwidth, and bring closure to loose ends. They ensure you’re on the same page about everything that’s going on internally and externally, and contribute to a home and family life that’s more orderly and harmonious. And they don’t just reconnect you as a couple during that half hour; in smoothing out snarls, encouraging appreciation, and laying plans for fun, they create the conditions for greater connection the rest of the time as well. How To Spice Your Marriage With Weekly Meetings How To Spice Your Marriage With Weekly Meetings
Consider marriage meetings as a weekly fueling stop — periodic maintenance for your relationship. You can only get so far off track in 7 days! Checking in each week thus ensures your relationship is always headed in the right direction. How To Spice Your Marriage With Weekly Meetings How To Spice Your Marriage With Weekly Meetings
The device might seem contrived, but if I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that nothing happens haphazardly. If you want a satisfying, fun-filled, long-lasting marriage, you’ve got to be intentional about it. And marriage meetings are a key way of doing that.
How to Execute a Marriage Meeting
The following are some of the guidelines Berger suggests for implementing and carrying out a marriage meeting: How To Spice Your Marriage With Weekly Meetings How To Spice Your Marriage With Weekly Meetings
- Meet weekly. Doing the meeting at the same time each week can help make it a habit, but schedules change, and it’s fine to adjust the time as circumstances dictate.
- Meet as just the two of you. This is a private meeting. No kids. If you’re already doing a weekly family meeting, that’s great; one does not supplant the other, but rather complements it. Meeting as husband and wife will ensure you’re on the same page when holding council with your kids.
- Minimize distractions/interruptions. The best place to do a meeting is a comfortable, quiet spot in your home. Schedule a time when the kids are napping on the weekend, or after they go to bed during the week. Turn off the TV and your phones if you can. If you need your phone for scheduling, exercise self-control in not looking at distracting apps, or let an app exercise the control for you.
- Sit together. Berger advises against sitting across a table from each other, as that can feel confrontational, and recommends sitting side-by-side instead. Kate and I, though, haven’t had a problem with face-of-face marriage meetings (then again we practice every day with our business meetings!). However you position yourselves, Berger suggests sitting “close enough to feel like partners handling a project together.”
- Jot down notes during the week. It’s useful to jot down notes in the days leading up to meeting on things you’d like to talk about. But you don’t need to have a set agenda at the meeting, unless you’re the uber-organized type. It can be free-flowing.
- Bring your organizational devices/notebooks/apps to the meeting. You’re going to be scheduling stuff and will want to write down dates and to-dos. So bring your paper or digital planner, or use other apps to keep track of these. Kate and I use todoist for both our business and personal to-dos, as well as Google calendar.
- Keep the meeting to about 30 minutes. A half hour is long enough to cover the 4 stages of the meeting, but short enough to keep it focused and productive. The meeting might be a little longer when you first start out and are getting the hang of it, or when you have more than usual to discuss. But err on the side of shorter over longer, so it doesn’t feel like a drag.
- Cultivate a positive atmosphere. Each spouse is responsible for coming to the meeting in a good mood and with an upbeat, patient, positive attitude. Each spouse should try to use a supportive tone throughout the meeting and abstain from any griping or criticism. (Constructively working on issues is okay — but not snark or empty complaining.) “A good goal for each meeting,” Berger says, “is that it should inspire you to want to meet again a week later.”
- Allow both partners to feel ownership in the meeting. The more verbal partner should allow the less verbal partner to speak first at times, and should actively solicit feedback, instead of dominating the meeting.
While some of these guidelines, like keeping a positive attitude, are essential for the success of your marriage meetings, others can be tweaked and experimented with. See what works for you as a couple.
Source:www.artofmanliness.com
