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Routines become a part of your every day and help you stay grounded, no matter what you have going on. Routines can have the same impact on your marriage, keeping it grounded and stable regardless of the chaos or peace your lives are currently involved in. In this episode, Amberly shares routines you can set to make your marriage a priority each day and through every season of your lives together.
It feels like fall. We officially hit fall, I think next week, and the weather today has been so good and I’m just in my happy place. The windows are all open. I hope you guys are enjoying the weather as well.
In last week’s episode, I shared a four-step process you can use as a couple to help you continue to make your marriage a priority every time you shift into a new season of life, much like we’re shifting into a new season of weather. Whether that season is going to be your new normal for a short time or the foreseeable future, one of the steps of that process was to create routines. And in that episode, I told you the next week’s episode, which is this current episode you’re listening to right now, would dive deeper into routines that you can start, that you can have going for every season of life, and just tweak and adjust as you need to, to keep making your marriage a priority through each and every one of those seasons. And so that your marriage doesn’t hit the back burner because it is part of your routine.
Routines become a part of your every day, and they help you stay grounded no matter what you have going on. Routines can have the same impact on your marriage, keeping it grounded and stable regardless of the chaos or peace your lives are currently involved in. I want you to think about the routines you currently have in your life. Maybe jot them down as you’re re listening to this with your spouse. Take some time, pause right here, and go together through your individual routines, the routines you have as a couple, and the routines that you have for your family.
As I quickly thought about routines, when I was putting together the outline for this podcast episode, I thought about the routine my husband follows as he gets ready in the morning. We have routines our kids rely on. I especially thought about the routine our kids rely on before bed each night, and I’m going to talk about this a little bit more. Even our dog relies on certain routines when we feed him in the morning, when we give him his insulin because he’s diabetic, when we leave the house without him, and even when we head to bed at the end of the day.
He has specific things he expects from us, and he will let us know if we are not following his routine. So I want to talk more about that bedtime routine with our kids that I mentioned. A bedtime routine is something I’m willing to bet that most families have. Creating that routine is one of the first things they suggest when it comes to sleep training babies. It signals sleep and helps with wind down and ultimately a child being able to fall asleep. The routine can include bath time, changing into pajamas, listening to specific songs, sitting in a specific corner to read books, lights being dimmed. There’s all sorts of pieces that go into that routine.
The routine that we have in our home has changed throughout the years as our kids have gotten older. And it changes when our season of life is different, a day’s schedule is unique, or one of us is gone during that time of day, which I actually mentioned in the previous episode. But even with the changes, our kids rely on certain things to end their day. Our routine includes tucking them in with certain blankets and tucking them in a certain way so they are cozy. I don’t know what defines cozy, but my husband is really good at tucking in cozy. We turn on fans, music, make sure they have water in their water bottles, they say prayers, and we have a few silly rituals.
My kids like a kiss on the forehead and I pretend my kisses don’t work for a minute and blow raspberries on their forehead before finally settling in for the kiss. It always ends with some giggles, but they’re happy with that forehead kiss. My husband tells them to sleep like a, ‘insert something random here.’ It could be sleep like a monkey, sleep like a dust bunny. He comes up with the wildest things and then they’ll ask, “What does that thing sleep like?” and he makes it up. I am not creative in that aspect, but they always want to hear what he has them sleep like. Even when he is away from home, like he was a couple of weeks ago, and we are doing this for bedtime either on speakerphone or a video call, he will tell them to sleep like a, insert something silly here.
Each piece of that bedtime routine serves a purpose, whether we’re creating comfort, helping them wind down and self-soothe, or connecting with us as the day wraps up. It all serves a purpose, it signals comfort, it signals familiarity, and it signals that time for their brain to wind down and go to bed. The routines I’m going to share next will serve a purpose for your marriage, just like the bedtime routine I was just talking about. They are routines you can make happen throughout your entire marriage, no matter what season or situation you find yourselves in. I will also share creative ways that you can adjust those routines to fit every season of life.
The key to these routines helping you to make your marriage relationship a priority is that you don’t let the routine itself become too routine, meaning that you treat these as more of traditions or rituals, something special and intentional that helps you connect, even though it happens as routinely as brushing your teeth in the morning or putting your right sock and shoe on before your left. These routines should be something special, connect you with each other, and create comfort for your marriage.
I hesitate to call them routines because I want them to become routine but I want them to be a ritual. Something that means something. Something that has an impact and isn’t just as routine as brushing your teeth or driving to work where you may get there and wonder, ‘How did I get here? Did I pass that landmark? I don’t know.’ I don’t want it to become too muscle memory that it doesn’t make an impact on your marriage.
I wanted to share with you two daily routines that I think you should have, but I also wanted to mention that John Gottman says every single day couples should have connecting rituals. They connect as they leave each other, so saying goodbye. They connect as they have a reunion or greet each other, so as one of you is coming home, you’re coming together. And then connecting before bed.
So the first ritual I’m going to talk about is connecting rituals, and I’m going to link in the show notes a post about connecting with your spouse on a daily basis. Simple things that you can do. I also talked about this in the connecting episode in the first season of the podcast where we talked about the pillars of A Prioritized Marriage and the Prioritize Your Marriage podcast. I will link that in the show notes as well because it dives deeper and I don’t want to bore you, just regurgitate the exact same information again.
But a connecting ritual is something that is fun, that is going to be enjoyable for both of you, and that is going to bring you together and allow you to connect on a personal level each day. A personal level beyond the business side of your marriage, as I call it, the house projects, the kids, the business that you might run together, anything that is that business side of your marriage. You’re going to set it aside for a minute, the to do list, all those things, and you’re just going to connect on a personal level. And you can have questions you can ask each other. I know some, people will suggest you have questions that you ask your kids when they get home from school every day, or that you ask your kids at dinner time or the entire family at dinner time. I’m going to share some question conversation starters in the show notes that you can use for this. But even something as simple as asking your spouse, tell me one thing that made you laugh today. And this could signal an opportunity to share a meme with each other, to share a reel, to look at a funny video together, (that would be a reel), just to connect with something funny or share a funny story that happened. It can include the kids, it can include work, but that it’s connecting on that personal level. You can also have something, share something that made you frustrated today, share something you’re loving today, what was your favorite thing you ate today? Something that is going to allow you to get to know your spouse deeper and deepen the love maps. Love maps are a term coined by John Gottman and I’m going to share a really great post that I found on those recently in the show notes. Today is going to be a very show notes heavy episode because I’m going to dive deeper into each of these in various podcast episodes that I will share and posts that you can go find.
But having a connecting ritual. During the pandemic, I asked couples on my social media something that they do to connect every single day with their spouse. At that time, we were spending a lot of time together. There were a lot of people who were together all day long. They were working together. They were often side by side. They were doing homework with their kids together. They were doing meals together. Everything was together. And it could be easy to get sucked into, we’re always together, so we don’t need to connect, but you still need that special connection time, that intentional time to get to know each other better on a personal level, and really just like, ground your relationship.
And some of my favorites were, in the summer, one couple said that after the kids were in bed, they grabbed a popsicle from the freezer, climbed into bed under their covers because it was still a little cold, and they just sat and chatted while they ate their popsicles, until the popsicles were done, 10-15 minutes, and it was something that they did.
Connecting rituals, I would encourage you to make them last 20 to 30 minutes. Some of the things that we have done is just sit on our back porch and talk as the sun goes down. Water the flowers together. I follow my husband like a little lost puppy, but not really. He waters the lawn and the flowers different stuff and I’ll just follow along behind him and chat with him while he does that. Or it can be dancing together in the kitchen after the kids have gone to bed or after dinner cleanup. It can be climbing into bed and having pillow talk and you ask the same questions every day or just talk about your day, dream about things that you have coming up. You could sit down and watch a new episode of your favorite show and then discuss it afterwards. But make it something that is you are physically, mentally, and emotionally together. And then adjust that as your times and seasons of life change.
My connecting ritual in my marriage clear back when we started dating used to be that we’d go on a long walk together at the end of the day. Like when it was nighttime, it was dark, the world was still. We’d walk for a good hour, hour and a half. When we got our dog and after we got married, we would still do that because that was the time we were home together every day was at the end of the day. We worked opposite shifts and I had school and 10 o’clock p. m. was the perfect time for us to connect. As we had kids that got harder and harder to do and I’ve shared this in a previous episode how we would put them in the stroller and go earlier in the day. And now we’re kind of in this phase of life where if we take them with us on a walk, we spend a lot of time navigating with them and answering questions and responding to their bids, and so focusing on each other doesn’t really work. If we have an opportunity to go on a late night walk together, we definitely do, but you’ll often find us sitting on our deck outside, sitting on the front couch, watching a storm, sitting next to the Christmas tree during the holidays. Finding somewhere that we can sit and talk and connect and unwind at the end of the day. And sometimes we just sit in silence and cuddle or play footsies or we just have our legs next to each other. We’ll hold hands and we’re just sitting and enjoying being together and then talk as we go through that. At some point in time, I would love to be able to leave my kids after they go to bed and go on those late night walks again, but I know that that’s not reasonable for this season.
So finding a connecting ritual is something you enjoy doing together and doing it together daily. And it does not have to be the exact same connecting ritual daily. If you have a few different things you enjoy doing and maybe having coffee together in the morning before the day starts works for you one day a week, but other days it has to be joining each other for lunch or a quick popsicle break, like I said that other couple did at the end of the day before you go to bed. Just finding those connecting rituals that you can do that get you back into couple space, not parenting partner, finance companions, I don’t know, those other roles that you play. That you go back to that romantic, personal friendship side of your marriage first.
Along with that, I want to talk about having a shared bedtime routine. It can be really hard to share a bedtime routine. This is something that has been hard in my marriage because we do not go to bed at the same time. We do not go to sleep at the same time, and we both have different routines. Some nights my husband’s asleep before me. Other nights I’m asleep before him. So I’m going to link in the show notes. a post all about having a bedtime routine and how it can benefit your marriage. And how you can have a shared bedtime routine even if the two of you have totally opposite schedules, if you don’t fall asleep at the same time, and even if you sleep in different spaces, which I realize is a reality for some couples, and that doesn’t mean that your relationship is doomed, and we may have that conversation at another point in time.
But having a shared bedtime routine, going to the bed together at the end of the night for a certain amount of time, connecting. And then you can split apart and one of you can fall asleep, the other one can go finish work, do homework, watch a show. Whatever that looks like to accommodate your personal preferences and routines, but still have that shared coming together at bedtime. And it’s something that can be really beneficial to your marriage and a great routine to have.
All right. Talking about some weekly routines. The first one I wanna share is a marriage meeting. I have two posts on this that dive in depth on having a marriage check-in weekly or a marriage meeting. I call it a marriage business meeting. And then how you can create that tradition or ritual or routine of that. I know a lot of people have family business meetings to go over what’s happening, what’s coming up, what needs to be planned, what went well the past week, things like that. This is exactly what you are going to do in your marriage meeting. You are going to come together and talk about the business of your marriage. Plan the things for the next week. Look at what your schedule looks like, what your season of life looks like. This is a perfect time to say, ‘Rhis is not working in our season of life. Our season of life has shifted. How are we going to adjust and continue to make each other a priority?’ It’s a weekly check in.
And you can do mini check ins daily, along with that bedtime ritual, if you want, or that daily connecting ritual. You can make time for those mini meetings that are more of the business side of things. So you have given yourself time and space to discuss what is working well, what isn’t working well, how you can better support each other, what you need from each other in the coming week, what your schedule looks like, what you’re planning for date night, dream about the future vacation, all of those kinds of things. I have a list of questions and things to discuss in those weekly marriage meetings, you’ll want to check out the show notes for that because it can be something really beneficial to your marriage. Set it on the weekend. It can happen after date night. It can happen on a Sunday afternoon. Maybe Tuesdays at lunchtime is the best time for you to get together and have your marriage meeting. Maybe your marriage meeting happens via Zoom while you’re each at work because you both have that break, or when you’re apart. However you need to make your marriage meeting work, make it work. It’s something that can be really beneficial.
The other thing weekly that should be routine, but not become too routine is date night. I’m sure you knew I was going to talk about it. There’s an entire episode in the first season about date night, but having regular date nights. Date nights can be an intimidating phrase I’ve learned over the years for couples for one spouse or the other, it just sounds daunting. It sounds like something you have to dress up fancy, spend a lot of money, go out for hours, and that’s not what date night has to look like. You can check out my book Prioritizing Date Night in Your Marriage, and I share all sorts of ways that you can make date night happen no matter your current stage or season in life.
One of my favorite things about the pandemic was the way that people embraced creative date night solutions. They were doing date night in the back of the truck in a parking lot somewhere. They were doing date night at home after the kids went to bed. All of these things are the things we should be thinking about as our routines and our seasons of life change. Instead of saying, date night does not work the way that it used to work, we say, how can we make date night work now? Maybe you’re in a season where date nights at home are your thing. When we had a newborn, we would go out and he would take a little dinner time nap. And that was our date night. It was half an hour and we were out with him for the rest of the time. And then we’d go home and put him to bed and continue our date night. Your date night can be put on pause to put the kids to bed. Whatever that looks like.
I recently shared a blog post on the website about lunch dates and how you can make lunch dates work for your various seasons of life. So I recommend you check those out again in the show notes. And I have a post called adjusting your date night routine in shifting stages of life. And rather than again, regurgitating all of that information here, it goes through how you can make date night happen, the importance of date night, and fun ideas for date night when you’re in the newlywed stage of life, when you are very, very young parents, when you have small kids at home, when you have teenagers as your kids leave the nest, and as you’re in your golden years of marriage. Different ways, things you can do to enjoy date night.
Date night is fun connecting time together. Date night doesn’t have to look like going out. It doesn’t have to look like spending hundreds of dollars. You can even do date night in your sweats. It’s the intention behind date night and how you are connecting with each other when you are doing that.
And then two things that I suggest you do on a regular basis with each other. Manage the mundane. I have talked about this before. But doing the dishes together, spending an hour cleaning together, putting the laundry away together, folding and just talking while you’re doing it. Find those mundane tasks that are already part of your routine and do them together.
Which leads to my second one. Have you heard the phrase divide and conquer? Divide and conquer is a great way to be efficient, to get things done. We divide and conquer in our marriage quite a lot. Currently, we have one night a week where our kids have extracurricular activities that we’ve signed them up for, and I didn’t really organize that well. But I drop one child off of their extracurricular activity. My husband and I wave to each other as he drives into the parking lot and I leave with the other child. He stays and picks that child up while I take the other child 20 minutes away to their extracurricular activity. Like I said, I didn’t plan that well. And then he gets home with said child that he is with, and I finish up with the other said child, and we come home and finish our evening, and it’s chaos. But we divide and conquer, and that’s how we make it work.
However, If you are dividing and conquering more than you are conquering together to connect, you may be missing opportunities. Managing the mundane, going together to games, going together to practices, driving together to run errands, doing the grocery shopping together. If you can conquer a task together and you’re both free, I’m not saying you have to do this all the time because I am all about that multitasking, divide and conquer, making things happen and efficiently crossing to do’s off your list. But, I’m going to guess that you can tackle some of those routine tasks, some of the things that you are already doing and do them together. Maybe you need to clean the car out every week and also do the laundry every week. Instead of doing them apart at the same time, fold all the laundry and put it away together and then go out and clean the car together. Except while you’re vacuuming, you can’t really connect, but you kind of get what I’m saying.
Manage the mundane. Conquer together to connect. That’s gonna be my new phrase. I came up with it while I was writing the show notes for this episode. Conquer together to connect more than you divide and conquer. If you are looking for opportunities to be together, to connect, to do life side by side, rather than ways to efficiently get everything done in your life and be a part, you are going to automatically be making your marriage a priority. You are going to be making more time for each other and making more time to connect, and you’re going to find your relationship grows through whatever season you are in, even, again, if your routines do not look the same as they used to.
I want to go back to when our child was in the NICU. I use this example all the time because it sticks out to me as just the perfect opportunity we had and the way we approached it and making our marriage and each other and our kids a priority and how we balanced that and it’s not the situation that it gets to be every time. But we really tried to divide and conquer but we also did things together. We tried to have dinner together. We spent an hour or two together with each child, at least once a day with the child in the hospital, and then made time, whether it was meeting up at my mom’s house for lunch, and I stayed a little bit extra after I dropped the child off and my husband met me there, and we connected together and connected with the child. And we tried to find ways to conquer together and connect more than we were dividing and conquering, although that divide and conquer was something that had to happen. And we adjusted those routines almost daily and made them work.
So as I said, routines are routines. They’re something that are going to help you maintain the health of your marriage. I think of my routine of when I take my meds every single day, when my kids take their meds, when I take my vitamins, when I go on a walk, when I brush my teeth. Those things are things that I’m doing to maintain the health of my person and your routines should maintain the health of your marriage.
So going back to last week’s episode, find those routines you want to start or that you want to make more intentional. Identify what you’re already doing in your relationship and already doing in your life and find what you could be doing better or what you could be doing more of and create those routines. Put them on the calendar, set alarms. When my kids went back to school and my life schedule changed, I had to set an alarm to remind myself to eat lunch. It didn’t make it any less intentional. It just meant that I was recognizing I needed that in my life and that my routine had changed that signaled for me to do lunch and I needed to get that routine going again. Set calendar reminder, put alarms on both of your phones, schedule texts to remind yourselves, whatever you need to do. Create routines.
And again, check out the show notes for this episode because I have lots of great content over on the website. And rather than talking to you for an hour, I wanted to share those pieces of content so the things that you are looking to do more of that you need a little more help with, you can do right now and you can find those opportunities and ways to do them using that extra content that I have available to you.
I’m not 100%sure what next week’s episode is going to be. I have a few different episodes recorded that would go along with this and I also have another idea that I might record to put in there. But, in two weeks, I’m going to have a guest, my first guest on the podcast that I’m super excited about. So I hope you will continue to check it out. If you haven’t listened to season one, go back and listen to season one. Even if you have listened to season one, go back and listen to it again. A few of the final episodes of season one tackle, the holiday season. They’re really good. And I’m going to encourage you to re listen to them again as you head into the holidays coming up, because we are heading into spooky season. It is Friday the 13th, and Halloween is just around the corner, if you ask anyone, even though it’s a month and a half away. And the holidays just come with their own chaos and changes in routines. And so you can put this into practice and use those other episodes to do that as well. Thanks for listening! I’ll see you again next episode.