Tips For Prioritizing Your Marriage/Relationship
A balanced marriage takes more than just date nights
Prioritizing your marriage is not just about date nights. Weekly date night is not a guarantee of happiness. In some cases, it causes more stress and frustration. It may also mean that you find other times, and ways, to come together for that quality time.
There are a number of factors that have been identified as being the most important to consider when prioritizing your marriage. These include whether you prioritize one another, how much time you spend together, and what activities you enjoy doing together. As a result, it is significant for couples to be aware of these factors and take steps towards making their marriage stronger by focusing on them.
When these aspects of your life get out of balance, then it can lead to resentment and loneliness in the relationship. When you live in resentment and loneliness, how will that affect the balance in other areas of your life, such as your parenting, profession, home, you as a person?
3 Ways For Prioritizing Your Marriage
Prioritizing your partner
Marriage is a large commitment, and it’s important to take the time to have your partner feel they are a priority. We all want to feel loved, accepted, wanted, appreciated, valued, etc. Below are a few examples to make your partner a priority
– Making your partner feel loved – I highly recommend the book The Five Love Languages to learn how your partner receives love
– Doing things together – This can be as simple as going for a walk or prepping a meal together.
– Being honest with each other – We should be emotionally intimate, transparent, and vulnerable with our partners.
– Spending quality time together by doing activities outside of work or chores around the house – This could be playing a game, enjoying a meal (without the kiddos), finding at least five to ten minutes every day to connect as partners, learning about the others’ hobbies, etc.
Prioritizing your partner is important for a long-lasting, healthy relationship. It’s not just about spending every second with them, but making them feel important. When I think of my professional career, I want to feel valued and wanted by my employer. We should want to feel that, if not more, from our partners. A healthy marriage is one that involves equal love and attention from both partners.
Stay motivated through relationship challenges and prioritizing issues
Marriage can be difficult, but there are ways to stay motivated through relationship challenges. By being open with your spouse and communicating on a regular basis, you’ll have the opportunity to address any issues that may arise before they become bigger problems. We all want our partners to be mind readers. We all want our partners to just know how to ‘fix it.’ But we are human. We are not mind readers. We might feel something is off. We might sense there is a challenge or an issue to work through, but remember, as partners, you are a team. You need to work together as a team to strengthen the bond of your relationship.
Marriage is a relationship that needs to grow with both of you together and as individuals. Your relationship is organic, like a garden. It needs attention, it needs water, it needs nutrients, it needs tending. It may become stressful at times, at times it may flourish. Like a plant, if your relationship is strong, you will weather the storms. Finding time to tend to your relationship is important even if everything is going well. Investing yourself, your time, your energy, into your relationship will only make it stronger.
It takes a good look at yourself, your habits and your tendencies in order to strengthen yourself too. Personal growth leads to wanting to grow within relationships. Some challenges you might need to work on yourself, some challenges you might need to work on together. However, you need to always support one another through the challenges.
Why should your marriage be prioritized over kids?
I wouldn’t change anything about our story, but I do think becoming parents made it tough for our relationship in the beginning. Everything we did revolved around her schedule, her needs, our lives became about her. Our marriage was still strong, we still made time for each other, we were still each other’s priority, but also so was our daughter. I only felt 50% of me being brought to our marriage. I knew I wasn’t bringing 100% to the marriage, and I didn’t feel 100% from him. Our relationship simply stopped growing, briefly. We allowed our marriage to become complacent.
When your marriage gets stuck around the focus of children, you can end up in a cycle of loneliness and resentment towards each other. This is because there are many other things, mortgage, careers, baby number two, etc., that could be taking priority for both parties, but one party might not realize this until it’s too late. When your marriage gets stuck around the focus of your children, then you can end up in a cycle of loneliness and resentment. It is important to prioritize your marriage so that you can get back on track with it and have a healthy relationship.
I want to clarify that, YES, our kiddos are a priority. They need our love, time, attention, etc. What we had to learn in our journey of becoming parents, is that we still had ourselves, we still had our relationship. We should not stop growing ourselves and our marriages just because we are now growing our family. Growing a family should enhance the love, the joy, the happiness, in our lives. We were grounded and rooted as partners for many years before we became parents. We can be more nurturing parents when we also prioritize nurturing our relationships. We want our children to develop healthy relationships in their lives, and the first place they learn this is at home.
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