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There are a lot of reasons couples give when talking about why they don’t have more time for their marriage. Work, school, kids, opposite schedules, the list goes on when it comes to obstacles that could get in the way of prioritizing a marriage. In this episode, Amberly shares the one big reason couples aren’t able to make their marriage a priority, regardless of their season or situation in life. And then, of course, she challenges you to evaluate your own marriage and change that!
My voice is finally back to normal. And then, of course, my recording app gave me grief for half an hour, but we’re recording! And today’s episode is going to be such a good one! I hope you will listen to the whole entire thing. As I outlined it and made my notes and made sure I had all my thoughts in a good order, I was really excited to get recording. So, let’s get started.
In today’s episode, we’re gonna do a little bit of mindset work. So I hope you’ll humor me, and I hope you will sincerely look inside of yourself and your marriage during and after you listen to this episode. While listening to, after listening to. I personally am going to re-listen to this episode and think about it myself, because as I always tell you, I am not just the expert, I am also doing the work alongside you. I am far from perfect in my marriage, but it is something that I am trying to make a priority.
Something I said in my first episode or the trailer, I can’t remember which, but I want to say it again. I can share all of my best advice and ideas, and I can give you suggestions specific to your unique circumstances. You can attend marriage conferences, read the best marriage books, and listen to every marriage and relationship podcast out there. You can even attend weekly therapy. But unless you are really taking action to make your marriage a priority, none of those things are going to do any good. You have to take what you are learning and put in the work. I want you to remember that as you listen to today’s episode.
So our mindset work. If you guys haven’t heard of mindset before, a fixed mindset, when it comes to marriage specifically, and when it comes to making your marriage a priority, it looks at all the other things happening in your life and says, we can’t possibly make time for our marriage right now. Where a growth mindset looks at all of those things and says, we need to make time for our marriage right now, and then follows that with the question of how and puts in the work and takes action to do something. And then if your ideas don’t work, you pivot and find something else instead of settling into a fixed mindset of “That didn’t work, I guess we’re giving up.”
There are a lot of reasons couples give when talking about why they don’t have more time for their marriage. If this sounds familiar or sounds redundant, it’s because I’ve said it in at least one or two other episodes, specifically multiple times in my last episode, episode five. Work, school, kids, opposite schedules, the list goes on when it comes to obstacles that could get in the way of you prioritizing your marriage. My list of obstacles of prioritizing my marriage is extensive. Regardless of the reasons couples have for not making time to work on their relationship with each other, I personally believe that there is one underlying reason that is the same for everyone if they are not finding or making the time to work on their marriage. Married couples are not able to make their marriage a priority because they keep finding reasons not to instead of making a way and doing something to prioritize each other.
I once heard a marriage expert say to stop finding grounds for divorce and instead find grounds for staying married. It’s important to note that there are marriages that have definite grounds for divorce but those things aren’t what this concept is referencing. I really wish I could remember who said it. But, I did a quick internet search, and that was fruitless. It only turned up a romantic comedy from 1959 with the title, ‘Grounds for Marriage’.
So let me kind of explain grounds for divorce, grounds for marriage, and how this relates to making your marriage a priority. If you are looking for things to hold against your spouse, or grounds for divorce, those will be the only things that you notice. But if you start to look for the things that make you love your spouse and want to remain married to them or those grounds for marriage, the annoyances that you see as grounds for divorce will seem insignificant and you will have a harder time dwelling on them.
So, similarly, if you are only looking at the things keeping you from having the time you want to focus on your marriage and your spouse, you will continue to find it impossible to make time for your marriage and to make your marriage a priority. But if you look beyond those barriers and think creatively with that growth mindset I mentioned, you will find more ways than you thought possible to make time for your marriage.
I have asked my Instagram community on more than one occasion what is currently keeping them from making their marriage as much of a priority as they’d like. The list is extensive, and I could spend an entire episode discussing each of those obstacles, I might do that, ask you guys what those obstacles are, and help you brainstorm a few ways to overcome them. But I would encourage you to verbalize the list of reasons you can’t make your marriage a priority. Put it on paper, discuss it with your spouse, and then turn each one around and make them the reason you prioritize your relationship with each other.
For example, kids is a common obstacle when it comes to making time for your marriage. But your kids need you to make time for your marriage. I’ll share a post in the show notes for that one. They should be a significant reason that you make time for date night. That you shut the door and set all of your partnerships aside and focus on that romantic relationship.
So here’s a quick reminder as you are looking at those reasons you see for not having time to make your marriage a priority and instead shift to looking for ways and reasons to make your marriage a priority. Prioritizing your marriage doesn’t mean that you have to put all of your energy into your marriage every hour of every day. And it’s not about saying no to all of the other important things in your life. Prioritizing your marriage is about finding moments in your everyday chaos to focus on each other and your relationship. It means that you find ways to connect with your spouse and spend time together, just the two of you. It also means that you take time to think about your spouse often and consider them when making big decisions. It means that your spouse is regularly on your mind and that their well-being and happiness are important to you. And it’s letting your spouse know every single day that you love them and you will continue to love them.
When you’re making your schedule for your week, what is the first thing you account for? For a lot of couples, for a lot of individuals, it’s work, maybe their own kids school schedule, maybe their own personal school schedule. We all have those must-do tasks that we plan around. And I’m not necessarily saying that you schedule your marriage ahead of your non negotiables, those things that you have to do, but what if you added your marriage to those must do things and made it a non negotiable in your life? Make date night and daily time with your spouse one of the first things you put on your calendar. before you commit to things in the free time you have to fill. In some seasons of life, it will be really easy to make time for your marriage relationship, and in others it will feel near impossible. But the more you do it, the more easily you will be able to find and make that time, even in the most chaotic seasons of your life.
I want to use an example from my own marriage to illustrate this concept, and it’s one that you have all probably heard before. If you haven’t, maybe you’re new and welcome to this story of my life. Seven years ago, we were fresh out of a three week stay in the NICU with our youngest child. I use that time, like I said, a lot as an example, but it’s because it’s a time when I feel like we did these things well. As we settled into the NICU, we had to evaluate our priorities and create a routine for our family for the foreseeable future with a timeline that was unknown. It could be anywhere from a week or two to two or three months. Both of our kids were at the top of the priority list for both of us. They needed our care and attention and we couldn’t just set that aside. Time to work was a top priority for my husband because the NICU was expensive and we couldn’t lose his job and I wasn’t working currently because I was on maternity leave. And then time to feed the baby was a top priority for me. We could have easily focused our entire schedules on those things and been justified. But we knew that we also wanted and needed time to connect with each other, both to discuss and work through the chaos of our lives and to set that all aside and feel like life was normal for just a moment and to keep that foundation of our relationship strong so that when we got to the end of that time of our lives that we didn’t know a timeline for, we would be stronger and ready to continue forward with life as we planned it.
Joe adjusted his work schedule so he could spend time at the hospital each evening to connect with the baby and support me, but also have time to pick the toddler up and spend time with him before he went to bed. I left the hospital every night so I’d have some time to spend with Joe at home, time to spend with my toddler in the morning, and time to refresh myself to be at my best for all of the roles I was juggling. During that brief but very chaotic season of our lives, we did a few things that stand out to me as making our marriage a priority. I do want to note that we had a significant support system, and we had three different family members spending time with our toddler on a daily basis that made this all possible. But I do think that even if we didn’t have that support system and we were a little bit more strapped on our abilities, we would have found other creative solutions to make time and connect with each other.
So here’s what we did. I packed a homemade lunch for Joe each morning while my toddler was napping and I’d take a 10 minute detour after dropping the toddler off with family to drop that lunch off and say hi to him at work before heading to the hospital for the day. It was an acts of service, quick connecting moment that said I see you and I care and you matter to me in this crazy season of our lives. Every evening when Joe got to the hospital, he’d spend alone time with the baby while I pumped, because remember my first priority was feeding the baby, and then we’d sit together across the hall in the parent’s lounge or down in our room eating dinner and connecting. That kind of was a forced thing because we could not eat in the NICU and we needed to eat It was an important priority to have, so we used that time to connect. Each night when I got home from the hospital, we’d hold hands in bed as we fell asleep, exhausted from our chaos and just connect physically and share affection. And then the few Fridays that we spent in the hospital, we’d have a date, which was maybe a little above and beyond, but I’m gonna post a link in the show notes where I share more about what our balance looked like, and what we did for those dates if you’re curious about how we made that work.
So I want to, again, repeat something from last week’s episode. Making your marriage and your spouse a priority takes conscious effort every day. When we were in that NICU season of our lives, we were consciously setting aside time. It didn’t just come naturally because it was outside of our regularly scheduled routine and it was outside of what we were doing in survival mode. But the more you do it, the easier it will be and the more of a habit it will become. There’s a quote on my makeup bag that says practice makes permanent. Not practice makes perfect, practice makes permanent.
Making my own marriage a priority in various seasons of life hasn’t always come as easily or looked as ideally as I’d like, as illustrated by our NICU situation. But knowing that my marriage is a priority and factoring it into every plan I make makes a huge difference. in how I am able to show up in my marriage.
So my challenge to you this week is to look at those grounds for not making your marriage a priority. Ask yourself, what is keeping me from making my marriage a priority? Write those things down. Truly evaluate. Maybe you need to go through the week and have that in the back of your mind and as you see things, write them down. Make a note in your phone. Are you giving too much power to some of the things in your life? Are you giving them too much time? How will you make more time for your marriage on a weekly and daily basis? What things did you do while you were dating and how can you do them now?
So I have three things I want to share with you as I wrap up today’s episode.
If regular date nights are something you want to fit back into your marriage, I would encourage you to check out my book, Prioritizing Date Night in Your Marriage. It will provide you with resources and ideas that will help the two of you make date night more of a priority in your marriage, no matter what your current season of life looks like. And it includes over 300 creative date night ideas and solutions. for couples in every stage of life.
If the everyday efforts and connection are what you’re looking to work on, I would recommend my book Beyond Date Night. It provides you with simple connecting ideas and a variety of ways to implement each one to continue to make each other a priority throughout every stage of life. I believe there are 19 chapters in that book and each of those chapters is a suggestion and multiple actionable ideas.
If you’re feeling like your marriage is too far into that roommate stage or that flirting, date night, and physical touch would be really awkward for you two at this point, I’m going to tell you to tune in to next week’s episode because we’re going to talk about starting over, in a sense, from where you are now and growing your relationship back to at least as connected, vulnerable, and intimate as you were when you got married.
So what do you think? How is your mindset? Are you having a fixed mindset about your marriage saying we just can’t do that right now or are you willing to brainstorm with me? Are you willing to have a growth mindset and think beyond those obstacles and creatively brainstorm and problem solve for making your marriage a priority? Because it is important. Your marriage is more important than work, than school, than your kids. Those other things are important, and like I said, sometimes they are non-negotiable and your marriage time feels negotiable. But I would encourage you to put your marriage right up there with the rest of the things. Put it on your schedule. I always say calendar it. And start to make your marriage more of a priority so that it becomes a habit so that it is part of your day, just like taking a shower and brushing your teeth and that you are finding ways to make time for each other.