Marriage
Plan Your Dreams
When you dream, dream big.
Alison and I have many dreams. One of them is for us to go on our honeymoon. When we got married, we decided that with our schedules and finances, it would be prudent to delay our honeymoon. We really wanted to go to Italy for a few weeks and that simply wasn’t a possibility for us at that time in our life.
So our Italian honeymoon became a dream. It’s a big dream. There will be lots of planning to do before we’re ready to take that trip of a lifetime. So while we can’t go to Italy today, we can begin preparing today.
Typically a dream is being held up by something. It could be your age, job, health, or any number of other factors. That’s why the dream isn’t a reality, yet. But dreams are meant to be believed, so while it isn’t a reality yet, we do believe that it will be someday.
When dreams are put on hold, it can be a challenge to endure the time between now and when your dream is fulfilled. Planning your dreams now can be a helpful motivation. So if you need to get to a healthy weight before you can travel, each time you exercise, you can think of how satisfying that trip will be. If you need to pay off debt, it will be a lot easier for you to put as much money towards loans as you can so that you’ll be free to do whatever you want.
Dreams that are huge require huge amounts of planning. I hope your dreams are massive. I hope you dream of running a marathon, building your own personal villa, or traveling around the world. While today you can’t run a mile without stopping, while you may be drowning in debt, while you may have a job that only gives you 12 days off per year, one day you will do those things.
Work with your wife now to start planning. Do massive amounts of research, read reviews. Plan your vacation down to the minute. Plan your dream home down to the last foot of copper piping. Write your business plan with the most extensive of details.
With hard work, the question becomes, “When will I live my dream,” instead of “Will I live my dream?"
Waking Up Together
As I write this, it’s 5:18am on a Wednesday morning. I’ve been up for 38 minutes. So far, I’ve weighed in, made coffee, spent time in meditation, and began my writing for the day. All of this is possible because, when the alarm rang at 4:40am, both Alison and I got up at the same time.
If I don’t launch out of bed like an ICBM missile when the alarm goes off, you can bet that I’ll be in bed for the next two hours. It’s hard to wake up early, even when you go to bed early. Since Alison needs to be out the door by 5:30am, I thought it would be a good idea for us to wake up at the same time. If we’re both up, she can get to work on time and I’ll get about the business of the day instead of sleeping until the still morning air is pierced by Benedict’s shrill “FEED ME!!!” cry.
The morning is an amazing time. If you capitalize on it, you can unlock a whole new destiny for your day. I’m a morning person, so even though it can be hard to get out of bed without hitting snooze half a dozen times, I generally feel better about how a day went if I started early.
Generally speaking, we all know that a stable sleep schedule is good for our health. If we go to bed at about the same time and wake up at the same time, we harvest many benefits. We’re more rested, we fall asleep more easily at night, and waking up much more pleasant. If you stay on schedule long enough, you may find that your body naturally wakes you up at the appropriate time, meaning you don’t have to listen to that awful alarm clock anymore.
Waking up at the same time as your wife gives you both accountability. I can’t tell you the number of times I used to tell Alison that I was waking up early and overslept. With us both agreeing what time we’re waking up, we can be sure that the other person can help us along if we need it.
If you both wake up at the same time, you can spend some time together before work. The start to your day might be a tornado of activity with people running all over the house trying to get out the door on time, which can be a challenge if you don’t have those extra wide doors installed in your home. When this whirlwind blows through, you don’t have time to really stop and say hello. Getting up at the same time allows you to find some more calm together time at the start of the day.
If your wife is on board, but you’re having trouble getting up, harness the power of light. Light plays a big role in how our brains operate. We’ve trained them to sleep when it’s dark and wake when it’s light. If you’re up before the sun, turn on lights in your room to help wake up. It’s actually not all that unpleasant. If you want to be a pro, put your lights on timers and use them as your alarm clock.
While you and your wife have different schedules, if you can align them so that you both wake up at the same time, you’ll both get to enjoy a little more “us” time in your day.
Marriage Rules, Secularism Drools
Many people, perhaps a good segment of your friends and peers, have a negative view of marriage. Some believe it’s modern slavery, others see it as a roadblock to fulfilling their dreams, and a few even find the idea of having a single sexual partner for life impossible, or at the very least undesirable. Your experience of marriage is shaped by your attitude towards the Sacrament, not the petty opinion of someone else.
Compared with my peers, I got married relatively young. For me, it wasn’t as much a matter of age as it was finding Alison. Despite my vast travels as a child in a military family, I had not found an equal before her. It’s simply an unfortunate reality that my equal is a Yankee, but alas, none of us are perfect.
Many of my peers have been actively avoiding marriage. They prefer idle pursuits and attempt self-actualization through completion of a subjective “bucket list.” There’s nothing wrong with having a bucket list, it just needs to be prioritized properly in your life. I think that there’s something wrong with intentionally being closed to marriage. I think that there’s something wrong with creating a list of criteria that must be met before you’re ok with getting married.
It all feels so pessimistic. I prefer a more optimistic view of marriage.
Marriage offers something that’s hard to achieve… true freedom. We tend to think that freedom means being able to do whatever we want. That would make us wrong. True freedom is being able to do what we ought to do. For those of us who are called to the vocation of marriage, the sacrament allows us the true freedom to be completely happy and completely fulfilled. In the same way, Holy Orders offers true freedom to those called to the ordained priesthood.
When you’re living your vocation, when you’re doing your best to love and serve your wife, life becomes more enjoyable. It feeds off of itself. So when you have a great day because you were a great husband, you just want more. The more deeply you love and the more you serve, the deeper your marriage becomes. As a result, you both experience a higher quality marriage.
Marriage can offer what so few personal pursuits can… the chance to be the person you were made to be.
Stealing Little Moments
Your day is a series of blocks of time. Every 15 or 30 minutes, you have your time parsed out to one meeting or another project. At home you have time for reading, relaxing, or maybe even gaming. So with your schedule full and your wife’s full, how do you find time for your wife?
MAKE TIME.
It really is that simple. They might only be small chunks of time… 15 minutes at breakfast, 30 minutes during dinner, an hour after the kids go to bed. If that’s the case, then that’s all you’ve got, so make the best of it!
You will never regret spending time with your wife.
Attend to Her Needs
A major theme of this blog is personal service. I believe that the most fun you’ll have is in serving your wife selflessly. If you lose yourself in your wife’s needs, you’ll reap a harvest so abundant that your marriage cannot help but grow.
About once a month, I upload pictures of Benedict to Facebook for my family to see. It’s a nice little tradition that allows them to see him grow without new pictures constantly clogging up their feed. As I was preparing this month’s batch, I ended up looking through all of his pictures since his birth. I’m glad that we live in the era of digital photography where we, “take pictures now, delete some later.” We have a vivd timeline of Benedict’s life. I spent some time thinking back to our stay in the hospital after his birth and how I was Alison’s advocate.
Certainly as a medial professional, Alison can handle her own, even if she is the patient. Yet, in that time after the ordeal of childbirth, I was her servant. I’d get whatever she needed, I’d make sure we both understand what the care team was telling us, and that she was taken care of. It was a time of intense service, and I loved the feeling. So even though I was extremely tired after being awake for so long and sleeping so poorly on the “dad couch,” I was able to put my needs on hold to take care of her.
Caring for your wife shouldn’t just be an exercise in self-actualization. It should be an exercise in humility. It should be an exercise in love. When you attend to her needs, she feels the love that she deserves. When you anticipate what she needs, you honor her place in your life.
Take the time to take care of your needs so you can fully lose yourself in selfless service to your wife.
Golden Hour
Playing with kids all day is fun. As adults, however, we need time for ourselves. We need time to connect to other humans who can form complex sentences and share ideas. I like to call the hour after Benedict goes to sleep the “Golden Hour.”
Benedict is getting more mobile, which makes him dangerous. He constantly needs to be monitored as he squirms all around on the floor. That makes my job during the day much more involved as I chase him around the family room, kitchen, and dining room.
So when he finally goes to sleep around 8pm, I’ve got an hour before bed. Alison and I go to bed at 9pm because we wake up at 5am. That means she can get to the hospital on time and I can get 2 hours of work done before Benedict wakes up.
Our Golden Hour is from 8pm - 9pm. It’s a time for Alison and I to just be together.
It’s important to relax during your Golden Hour, but not to waste the time. The trick to maximizing this time is to find a meaningful way to spend time together with your spouse. Here are a few ideas:
• Play a board game
• Read together
• Work together
• Work on a craft project
• Plan your menu
• Have a Budget Committee meeting
• Watch a movie
The Golden Hour is your time to unwind before bed. No matter how you choose to spend it, make sure you’re both spending time together. You’ve had all day to be apart.
Open to Life
In our society, especially recently, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about ways to avoid pregnancy. When did kids become the enemy?
In the days before I was a father, I knew very little about children. Being the youngest child in my family, I never really had a chance to be around them. So when Benedict came, it was truly a trial by fire. During Alison’s pregnancy, I experienced a whole range of emotions. To be honest, the only times I was stressed or scared was thinking about Alison’s safety or how the budget would bend to accommodate this new little life.
I think our real problem is that we’ve stopped seeing children as a joy and now view them as a burden, an expense, a roadblock.
Although children do require a lot of time, attention, care, and resources, they do have something to offer us. They’re a source of pure joy. They’re a reminder of the beauty in life. They help us to remember the little things. They help us to see the world with optimism.
Nothing is as amazing as making a small child laugh. Nothing is as amazing as when a child looks at you.
So let’s just agree to stop treating them like a disease.
Sync Status
Relationships have seasons. Sometimes they’re going really well and other times, well, they’re not.
Over the past few months, as Alison and I have been spending more time together, we’ve found ourselves getting in better sync. We’ll finish each other’s sentences, read our moods better, and are generally more caring. It’s a great feeling, really. We’ve been through the stress of four years of medical school and are to entering the stress of residency, but right now we’ve just been spending lots of time together.
Have you ever been at a stoplight and looked at the cars in the turning lane? Their turn signals blink at different intervals and were activated at different times. Yet, if you watch long enough, you’ll eventually see them all blink in complete synchronization, and then will fall back out. A few moments later, they’ll be in sync again.
Our marriages are just like those turn signals. The syncs happen in waves. Just as it’s unrealistic to expect to be 100% happy and satisfied in your marriage at all times, it’s unrealistic to expect complete synchronization. It’s something that doesn’t just happen. You have to work on it.
So when you want to improve your marriage, when you want to get in sync with your wife, how do you do it?
• Set non-sexual time apart for each other. You each have a morning routine and evening routine of sorts. How much of that time is you both spending quality time together? How much of that time do you reserve just for each other? If you don’t plan to have quality non-sexual time together, you won’t grow closer.
• Serve her. I’ve been beating this drum a lot recently. That’s because it’s something we all need to be doing, at all times! There are little things you can do for your wife to make her life easier. I get water for Alison each night for her nightstand. Some mornings I prepare her coffee. If she forgot something downstairs before bed, I’ll go down and take care of it for her.
• Work on your dreams together. You have your own dreams, but do you have dreams with your wife? Alison and I have dreams of being debt free. So we have a visual reminder in our dining room. That means that when I want to go buy something, she has the ability to tell me that I’m out of line. When you push for a dream together, you can accomplish amazing things!
• Take a more active role in your relationship. Your wife wasn’t made to be your butler. She’s not responsible for initiating everything in the relationship. We need to be active in our relationship. That means helping with the kids, helping with the house, and going out of our way to do things for her.
Being in sync with your wife is a wonderful thing. It takes time, it takes effort, but in the end, the payoff is well worth the effort.
Cash is King, but Not God
Money makes the world go around. Currency allows us to buy things, both needs and wants.
Cash is king, but it shouldn’t make your major life decisions for you.
So if you’re thinking about getting married, make the decision based on your intellect, not your bank account.
If you’re wanting to grow your family, make the decision based on prayer, not on your debt level.
In all things, be prudent, but don’t let money be your god.
The Blame Game
Perhaps the most crippling and meaningless activity in American workplaces is the blame game. Every single worker can easily recall a recent time when an error occurred, and the workforce spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out who to blame, instead of fixing the problem.
The scary part? We do this in our marriages all the time.
When you’re a young family, there are a lot of errors going on. Benedict will roll around on the floor until he gets into trouble. Alison forgets to lock the car. I screw up the daily schedule and don’t make dinner on time. It’s part of the human existence to make mistakes. If I spend time blaming Alison for something going wrong, I reduce the amount of time I have to either fix the issue or respond in love.
Blame creates division. Division leads to fights.
That simple chain of events results in what I would estimate to be the vast majority of marital fights. So when something goes wrong, how should we respond? We have three options:
• Ignore fault. Let’s face it, most of the things that go “wrong” in our daily life are completely inconsequential. Who cares if dinner isn’t ready on time and we eat 30 minutes late. Does it really matter that the car was unlocked for the 15 minutes we were in the store? So the kids got into something they shouldn’t have. They’re kids… it’s what they do. If we chose to just not care about who caused the situation, we can devote our energy to other worthwhile things.
• Acknowledge it was an accident. Your wife does very few things to intentionally offend you. Hopefully it’s vice versa. So when something happens, she didn’t do it on purpose. Acknowledge that she’s human and just move on with your life.
• Respond in love. Many of our mistakes are embarrassing. Screwing up the finances, getting into a car accident, or even your child eating something they shouldn’t have. When you know you’re the root cause, it’s a miserable feeling. Understand that your wife is going through those emotions and show her that it’s not a big deal and that you still love her.
Don’t let blame ruin your relationship. It’s an exercise in wasted time and effort.