Valentine’s Day provides a wonderful opportunity to show thankfulness for your spouse, reminisce about the good experiences with your mate, and do a review of what makes your marriage work. This week, Bob and I put our heads together and came up with our top three. Here they are:
Relaxed time set aside for us.
When we had been married only a few years, my Bible study leader, big sister in the Lord, and friend, Sally Smith, told me that Bob and I needed a date night once a week. We were blessed. Bob’s mom lived near us and was more than willing to watch our little girls every Friday night so we could go out. It wasn’t fancy—two-for-one dinners at a moderately-priced restaurant. But it gave us a chance to talk and an uninterrupted time to be together. As a stay-at-home mom, I looked forward to a few hours of conversation with an adult I liked each week.
As soon as we were able, we set aside time for family vacations. They weren’t fancy. Mostly camping trips in the national parks. It was a time for our entire family to relax together. Our family is grown now, but Bob and I still strive to have this away-time. We have realized again and again that it is the best time in our relationship.
We realize that a date night every week might not be possible, but do something. Trade watching your friend’s children so both couples can get away. Put the kiddos down early or get them a kid-friendly movie and make it worth their while to stay on the other side of the house and give you some time alone.
Grow together spiritually.
Go to church together. Pray together. Do a spiritual project together. When our children were in upper elementary and middle school, we chose a project that involved the entire family. Each week, we asked each member of the family what character trait every other member of the family needed to work on that week. In a family of five, if three people said Dad needed to stop procrastinating, he would concentrate on not procrastinating. If three members voted that mom needed to stop making excuses or that someone needed to stop griping about doing their chores—then that’s what that person worked on. The following week, everyone commented on how they’d done.
It can be a little humbling to be accountable in this way to your spouse and your children—a good kind of humbling. There is no reason this exercise can’t be done with just your spouse. However you choose to do it, choose to grow together spiritually.
Learn to speak to each other’s heart.
I mentioned our weekly date nights. While they were a good time to get away with each other, the conversation still usually turned to family business and the weekly schedules. We were pretty good partners and we worked well together, so it never occurred to us that there was anything more.
Until we went to John Regier’s advanced seminar. We will always be grateful that he showed us how to speak to each other at a heart level.
“Do you feel that I try to control you?”
“Do you feel you can’t measure up to my expectations?”
“I never want to make you feel that way. I only want you to feel loved by me.”
“Do you find it difficult to trust others?” “Why?”
“Do you find it difficult to trust me?”
We learned to ask the deeper questions, to listen and not interrupt or assume we had the answer. As we listened to each other’s responses, we learned to go deeper still. We now teach “speaking to the heart” in our marriage seminars.
As we approach Valentine’s Day, take time to show thankfulness for your spouse, to reminisce about the good times, and to think about what makes your marriage work. Ask your friends for their best ideas and share some of your own with them. If you got an idea or two to try from us, try it.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Bob and Roxann teach and demonstrate “Speaking to the Heart” at their marriage seminars.
