Staying In Love After Kids
You may love your spouse, but are you staying in love with each other? It is entirely too easy to lose that young love you had before bringing kids into the family.
Photo credit: Elizabeth Fontecchio Design
Happy Valentine's Day!
Today is a day to celebrate many forms of love. What better day to renew your love with your spouse? Some may argue that the family they came from (mother, father, or siblings) come first in life, but I ask who do you come home to at the end of each day? Others may claim that their children are the most important in their lives, but I argue that if your marriage falls apart, where does that leave your children? Your spouse is arguably the most important person in your life.
When you choose to marry someone, you accept that someone as your person, and therefore you are promising to put them before everything and anyone else. When you start adding children to the mix, things get messy. You become like roommates who happen to share offspring and maybe share a kiss as you greet each other. Let me take a moment here to say that some can make this work for their children's sake. That is what it looks like when they put their children before their marriage. If you think that lifestyle is best for you and your husband, dare to take a guess what will happen to your marriage when the children leave the house.
When your entire existence together ties too tightly into raising your children, you forget to be married. The time in a couple's life with the second-highest divorce rates is during the "empty nester" stage, when all the kids are out of the house, and it's just husband and wife again.
You cannot let yourselves forget how to be married! Now comes my big confession of the day: we were terrible at this. I can tell you it is so easy to let life take over. Suddenly marriage becomes just a piece of paper tying you together when it should be so much more. Now that you know I also struggled with this, here are a few tips we can do together to save our marriage.
Date Nights
Schedule date nights: You can decide if you want this to be once a week or once a month, but make sure it is regular. Having a date night planned makes it easier to budget for it. I could spend more money in one trip to Target than any date night we've ever been on, yet still, somehow, I feel we are wasting money going out to eat or to the movies just the two of us. With regular date nights on the calendar, I can expect to spend money and budget accordingly. Scheduling your night also allows you to have a babysitter lined up. If you are fortunate enough to have family around, you can make it a regular deal with them as well. We have every other Friday night split between my parents and his. It's a win-win! They love it because they get a sleepover with their grandson once a month, and we love it because we get a night off and a morning to sleep in twice a month.
Plan your nights: We have wasted an entire date night trying to figure out what we're going to do. The night ended with us doing absolutely nothing. Don't get me wrong; sometimes, doing nothing together can be lovely. Yet when you're looking forward to getting dressed up and going out, it's disappointing to stay home. When I know we have a date night approaching, I try to present ideas to my husband and get a rough idea of what we want to do. I don't like to have our date outlined entirely, but this gives us a place to start, and we can go wherever the night takes us from there!
Keep it between the two of you: At some point, I found we were forming a bad habit of inviting friends with us on our nights out. None of our friends have kids, so when we get a kid-free night, we usually want to relive our nights with friends. There is nothing wrong with scheduling a separate night with friends every once in a while. But for the sake of your marriage, keep your designated date nights between the two of you.
When in doubt, keep it simple: Like I said, sometimes doing nothing can be lovely too. We don't always have the finances to go out to eat every date night, but we have streaming devices and a mutual love of popcorn. At least one night a week, during a weeknight, we come together on one couch. We put on whatever series we chose to watch together and never without each other. We break out the popcorn and snuggle close. It's just the two of us. We can talk about the show, what we think will happen, what characters we can't stand, what we agree on or don't. To an outsider looking in, it doesn't look like anything glamorous. But I swear to you all, this is what keeps us close. Those nights are what keep us feeling like best friends in love rather than coexisting roommates.
Laugh Together
It will start with a simple annoying prank.
He hides my phone from me while we're getting ready for bed, so I splash water on him when we're brushing our teeth.
He then throws my pillows off the bed in retaliation, but I spot his phone within my reach. The gears start turning. If I can get his phone, I can slide it under the bed so far out of his reach and declare victory over this prank battle! I go for it, but he sees right through me, and now we're in a wrestling match over his phone.
Regardless of who wins, we end up laughing at each other. These simple events keep us feeling young together. We have jokes only we would understand, and we have an unspoken language when we prank each other. Pranking might not be exactly what is right for you and your partner, but I'm confident there was something you used to do when you were young and childless that you could bring back. Just because the two of you are parents now does not mean you've aged out of having fun together in a silly, immature way. Stay young! Laugh together! Never lose that side of yourselves.
Communicate! Communicate! Communicate!
Need I say it again? Communication is key to staying close to each other. As I've said, sometimes life with children can take over your lives. You're both exhausted by the end of the night. So much so that your efforts to come together on the couch are forgotten. Maybe your weekends have become so booked up that you've stopped scheduling date nights. Whatever the cause, you might find yourself feeling more and more distant from your partner than you have before. This is something I strongly encourage to discuss with each other. Tell your husband or your wife if you haven't had enough time together. Tell them if you've had too much time together (personal time is necessary too). Whatever you are feeling, communicate! Together you can find the right balance of time spent together.
Being open with your spouse goes beyond finding time for each other. Simply sharing overwhelmed feelings of work or excitement about a new opportunity.
Letting your spouse in on what's going on with you is one of the quickest ways to feel connected with that person.
When in doubt: schedule it. I have heard of couples planning weekly check-in meetings with each other. When the chaos of child-raising reaches the point where you're only seeing each other in passing each day, schedule a one-on-one appointment with your spouse. It may only need to be fifteen minutes.
This appointment is the time to check-in on how the week past went and how the week ahead looks. Take this opportunity to give thanks for any way your spouse supported you that week or maybe to rearrange something that did not work for you. Any team needs to have meetings. You and your spouse are the most important team. So make sure you are meeting regularly and keeping that line of communication open.
Although these efforts may seem like more trouble than they're worth when you're in the heat of childrearing, and you might catch yourselves slipping now and then, it is vital to your marriage. I have seen marriages find themselves in a mess of hurt, only ever speaking to each other by way of argument. This cycle of animosity is because they have nothing else anymore.
They no longer enjoy spending time with each other. Don't let this become your marriage. And if you're afraid you're already there, take a time-out from the arguing. Go on a date (even though it may be the last thing either of you want). Staying in love with your spouse may sound like common sense, but it's not a guarantee.
Keep up with it, and your empty-nester selves will thank you.
Take this day of love to remember what you had before life overwhelmed you. Then keep that feeling going every day! Date again, laugh together, and always prioritize each other.