Last week’s homework was to make one connection with your husband and then write it down in your journal. Did you go on a date, go out for a walk? Did you get to sit down for 10 minutes away from any children or phones (yes, including yours!)? Did you find out something new about him that you did not know before – does he have new hobby is he interested in trying, did you find out one goal that he has?
This is a fairly simple homework, except that if you are a human being, you have something called “Life” that gets in the way. If you and your husband are not used to spending time together, it can take a little bit of effort and trial and error to figure out how to set even just a few minutes aside, and when you do manage to find a few minutes, it might feel a bit awkward just being there together by yourselves.
When you and your husband were dating, you enjoyed spending time together. You had no problems coming up with things to talk about. What happened? How and why did things change? At one point there was never enough time to spend together, now you can’t seem to find any. Not only that, but it might be that one of you does not seem interested in spending time together and may not even see the need to. How did it go from one extreme to the other?
The answer is simple – Life happened. We start off blissfully happy, get married, and then reality slowly creeps in. It does not happen overnight, that would be too drastic and something we would all notice, no matter how oblivious we might tend to be. It is a slow process. Life slowly happens. Bills need to be paid, we have issues at work, we have children, and the list goes on. Our life seems to get more complicated and everyone and everything seems to be vying for our attention. You know the saying that the squeaky wheel is the one that gets oiled. When the children cry, they get attended to, when things seem to explode at work, we focus our attention there. We think we are needed to put out all those fires, but we forget the one fire that is slowly going out on its own – the one fire that we do not want to go out, but because we forget to put fuel on the fire, it slowly starts to fade away and we do not even notice.
But our children do need us and the fires at work won’t get put out unless we are there, right? Yes, of course our children need us and we need to do our job, however, we must always put one person above all the rest. Our other half, the love of our life, our partner in crime. Our husband. Remember the time when both of you just wanted to be together, to do things together? It (hopefully) felt really good, and you might have even almost felt like you both were one. The two of you were blissfully in love. That is how marriage should be.
So how did things change? Very easy actually. You both went from thinking day and night about the love of your life, each other, to slowly thinking more about other things – work, children, bills, etc. It was such a slow process that you did not even realize it was happening until one day you noticed your life was missing something and you might not even have known what you are missing. The fire has been cold for such a long time that you forgot there was a fire.
If any of this resonates with you, please know this: You can change it. You can light the fire again. You can strike your match and burn the fuel. It can take a bit for the fire from your match to light the logs. You have to start with tinder, then the tinder has to light the kindling and the kindling has to light the big pieces of wood.
All you have to do is make your husband the most important person in your life. When you make your husband your No. 1, you will find some wonderful presents are waiting for you. When children see that their parents are making time for each other, that they are working together, that they love each other, children feel much more secure. Some of you will find that your children will act out less often, that some of their “issues” just quietly disappear. Not everything will go away, (and you don’t want it all to go away, for if they did, you should be REALLY concerned!) But the home will be just a bit more calm, a bit more comfortable and, a bit more happy. The same will go for work. Work will always be there, and issues will always arise, however, when you put your husband first, things will just be a bit easier. You can come home and you have a friend. You can get your mind off work a bit and relax, which will make your mind clearer for the next day. You can work better with a clear mind. And the best present of all – you will be happier. As they say, “When Momma is happy, everyone is happy!” And yes, this applies to a home that consists of just a husband and wife. As we will learn, a husband is happy when his wife is happy.
If you are relating to any of this, please do not be hard on yourself. I do not want you to feel bad. After all, they do not have Marriage 101 in school, so it is difficult for us to know how to make our marriage work. We go about it by trial and error. We were not given the tools. The important thing to know is where you are in your marriage now and how to get to where you want to be, which is to be happy, successful, and fulfilled in your marriage.
How can we halt and then change this downward spiral and start climbing back out? Through connecting. You connect with someone else by spending time with them. Start small. If you can, tell your husband you need to talk to him for just a minute and when he comes, tell him that you just wanted to say hi and to touch base with him. You can tell him you are happy to see him and that you love him. After the 60 seconds are up tell him thank you for spending the minute with you because you know he is busy and let him go. Oh, and don’t forget to give him a smile! And yes, take the 60 seconds very seriously, don’t let it go over the minute. If he chooses to stay longer to talk to you, it will be his choice.
One minute is not too long that it will get uncomfortable. Short and sweet. Be creative. If he does not want to come to you, go to him. Sit beside him, maybe even set a timer for one minute, that way you will for sure not go over. One very important thing to remember is to be as sweet and kind as you can when you talk to him. Nobody wants to talk with someone who grunts at them.
He may be a bit leery at first of what you have to say, but if you take one minute of your time to spend with your husband every day to just say hi and touch base with him, he will get used to it and might even say something if one time you miss your daily minute chat! It may not seem like much, but even one minute of quality time can do wonders. And did you know, one minute a day for a week is almost 10 minutes, it’s just spread into easy to swallow chunks.
Hopefully you will find that over time he will be willing to spend more than a minute with you and you can put the timer away. Though, you need to always be mindful of his time. If he tells you he has a meeting to go to or has work to do, be respectful. If the two of you usually spend 3-4 minutes at a time connecting, but one day he has a tight schedule and can only spend one minute, let him go after the minute and thank him for giving up one minute for you and that you really appreciate it. By showing him respect, you are showing him that he matters. When a wife shows her husband that he is important to her, that she always has his back no matter what, he will be happy, and he will have the ability to give his wife affection and attention, and help her fill her needs so she is happy.
Remember, this time is a time for connecting, not disconnecting. Refrain from bringing up difficult topics or complaints you have. Keep problem solving discussions for another time. Talk about positive, happy thoughts or ideas– how you like spending time with him, how he matters to you, goals that you have, goals that he has, it is a time to thank him for something that he has done for you/children/others.
Now, what if you cannot even figure out how to get your husband to spend just one minute with you, no matter how sweet and kind you talk to him? Write him little notes – I like to use sticky notes. (Little notes, not long ones, or he might think you are writing him a to do list and not even read it! Yup, been there.) Tell him to have a wonderful day, that you love him, that he means so much to you, etc. Put them in his lunches, by his plate at supper, stuck to his computer monitor, on the steering wheel of his car, on his pillow. This is where you can get very creative! You might even decide to put them in different places each time.
And don’t worry if something does not work for you or your husband. Not everything will work for everyone. We are all different and we have different likes and different needs. You might think writing little thank-you notes, or appreciation or love notes is an awesome idea, but your husband might not be the type who thinks the same way. Note that and appreciate that about him. Kindness is not just what you feel comfortable doing, it is what the other person needs. If you see a friend is needing something and you go and make her supper for that is easy for you to do, but what she needs is someone to take her children to school in the morning for she is too sick to do so, that supper is not filling the need that she has.
You can halt the downward spiral and start climbing back out by making meaningful connections with your husband. Start small, with just a minute of your time, to say hi and touch base with your husband. Or if you prefer, write him little notes. Express your happiness and love, appreciating his presence even in the midst of his busy schedule. If he starts to look at you strangely for this new behavior, just tell him that you know you have not been very good at showing your appreciation of him in the past and you are working on changing that for he means the world to you. Now, what is he going to say to that?
You are exactly where God wants you to be right now. You are perfect the way you are right now. Tomorrow is a new day. Tomorrow you have the chance to change something you are doing. Tomorrow you will be perfect for tomorrow.
The homework for this week is to spend one minute (60 seconds!) connecting with your husband every day or to write him one thank-you/love note every day making sure to say something different on each note! Be as creative as you want. If one day you forget to do the one-minute connection, write him a little appreciation note the next day. If your husband is out of town, send him a little email that says you are grateful for him and as with the little notes, keep the email short and sweet – one sentence is enough. Don’t forget to write down the outcome in your journal.