In Marriage, Time Doesn’t Equal Success
In your lifetime, you’ll try many new things. You’ll be an amateur at a lot of hobbies. More important than experience, however, is confidence.
I’ve written before about my supposed qualifications for writing this blog, or really writing anything for that matter. The fact is, I’m confident that I’m not a marriage expert. At the same time, I’m confident that I’m getting better at it every day.
In marriage, time doesn’t equal success and it doesn’t equal wisdom. I know, as you probably do too, couples who were married for 30 years before getting divorced. It’s not like a talent or a job where you put in your time and then BOOM, you’re successful.
So what does this mean for you?
No matter how long you’ve been married, and how well you’ve done so far, today is the day that you start being awesome. Today is the day that you can start having an awesome marriage. It won’t be great right away, but it will be better than yesterday.
So if you’ve been lazy or lost the spark, now’s the time to get it back. Now’s the time to focus on your relationship and be a better player. Now’s the time to get in gear.
There are no marriage experts, only people who’ve successfully lived out their vocation.
It’s never too late to do the right thing.
Meet A Saint
We’re card carrying members of the Communion of Saints. While we spend quite a bit of time rubbing elbows with fellow members on this planet, how much time do we spend kicking it with members who’ve made it across the finish line?
Earlier this year, I came across a suggestion for my spiritual life: make friends with a new saint. I have my usual suspects, the saints I know and ask for their intercession. What about the tons of other saints, who have more in common with me than I may think? As a good friend jokingly used to say, “Popular saints have people bugging them all of the time. Pick an obscure saint, they’ve got all the time in the world for you."
Making new friends can be fun. We should take the time to make some new saint friends. Saints are approachable. Remember, the difference between us and them is that they’ve successfully finished the race, while we’re still running it. They had the same temptations, the same miserable failures, the same glorious triumphs. They had the same crazy Aunt Susan and intolerable classmates.
You can find a new saint using any number of criteria. Look for the patron of your occupation or your native land. Maybe it’s a hobby, a challenge you’re facing, or even a nice vacation spot. If you can think it up, the Church probably has a guy (or gal) for you.
Plan on meeting with your new saints monthly. Chat, explore, learn. Much more than monthly and you’ll probably give up… monthly feels just right, for now.
Saints can be powerful advocates for us here in the Church militant. Pick up the phone.
Schedule A Fast Day
We fast twice per year, both days during Lent. Out of the 365 days of the year, 363 are essentially a food fest. So why does the Church ask us to spend the other two days limiting our food intake?
There’s something cathartic about denying yourself. There’s something truly unique about fasting. You notice just how much you take food for granted. You realize that there are people in the world who experience those hunger pains every single day. You focus less on you. That’s the true power of fasting.
Fasting is about more than just food. During Lent, we fast from other pleasures. We forgo the enjoyment for a greater good. We can better feel our part in the universal Church. We can cut through the materialism of our own self and recognize that we don’t need that “thing.”
Fasting was meant for more than just a few days in one particular Liturgical Season. Fasting is appropriate any day. Anytime we’re stuck in a spiritual rut, or we notice ourselves losing our way, fasting can be a great way to right the ship. That’s because fasting is an incredibly powerful prayer. Your sacrifice can directly translate into grace for someone in your life who’s hurt or suffering. It can also translate into grace that will help you overcome your own struggles.
We all have things in our lives that we’ve let take too big of a role. We’re always on our phones, we plop down on the couch for hours a week, we surf mindlessly on the Internet. I do it, too.
We can change all of that. We can integrate prayer more into our lives. We can use our own voluntary sacrifice to help make someone else’s life easier. We can use our sacrifice to prune our own lives.
Fasting isn’t just for Lent. It’s a tool for us to free ourselves or to lift someone else up.
Take Control of Your Health
There are some things in the world that we have absolute control over. Your health is one of them.
We all have soft spots in our health. We have factors that we acquired genetically. The human body is a complex machine, and complex machines break. The great thing is that for almost any ailment, there are choices we can make that can significantly improve our medical conditions and overall quality of life.
At the end of the day, it’s up to you to be in control of your health. Staying in good health requires work, and work is sometimes the hard choice. You can either do the hard work and reap the benefits, or you can just float down the river and deal with the consequences.
We’re incredibly lucky to live in the information era. Most of the information that we can access is garbage, but there are still a good number of websites and publications that have high quality resources. No matter how obscure or rare a condition, you can find someone else who has it and a physician who’s having success in treating it. We can find information on the benefits of exercise, different forms of exercise, and raw data that proves that a 30 minute walk once a day can make a world of difference.
Benedict and I take a morning walk each day and then come back to the house for a 7 minute workout. It gets me the energy and exercise I need, it gives us a great time together, it gets fresh air in his lungs, and it helps him explore the world. For those keeping score, that’s a win-win-win-win-win.
You have access to a care team of medical professionals. While they have a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge, they can’t help you if you don’t take an active role in your health. Ask questions, understand what’s going on, and help plan out your path to health.
Be involved with your wife! Be an active participant in her healthcare, and rely on her wisdom in your own. Sometimes you’ll both be in the same appointment and walk out with two completely different impressions of what just happened.
The point is this, and it’s very simple. Our health is a gift and it’s up to us to preserve and improve it. No matter what’s going wrong, you can always make it better.
Your health isn’t just for your benefit, it’s for your family.
How to Start Your End of Day Conversations
Questions are powerful. Through the power of questioning, you can open up a whole new world. You learn about people, who they are, their unique story and how they view the world.
Conversations are driven by questions, including conversations with your wife.
There is one question that can really set the gears of gratitude in motion. “What was the best thing that happened to you today?"
I miss Alison during the day. Certainly I’m engaged in many different activities, but no matter how great of a day I’m having, I really look forward to when she’s home and we have some down time together. One of the practices that I’m starting to implement is asking her that fantastic question, “What was the best thing that happened to you today?” I want to know about her day, but I really want to focus on something that she really enjoyed… something that she really knocked out of the park.
Our days have ups and downs. Some days, we’re on it! Other days, nothing seems to go right. Despite what each day looks like to us, there’s always at least one thing that went well. By asking what was the best part of your spouse’s day, you can both start looking at your day from a positive light. Instead of dealing with the negative that bubbles to the surface, you go hunting for the really good things.
The funny thing is, the more you look for the “best thing,” the more good you see. It helps to grow your gratitude muscles. You start to recognize that even in a bad day, there was plenty of good, if you’re willing to look for it. You become more grateful for your work and for the experiences that you had.
We are incredibly lucky to live the lives that we have. Experience deeper gratitude today by asking your wife about the best part of her day.
Keeping Family Prayers Fresh
Family prayers, just like personal prayers, can get a little stale. The problem with stale family prayer is that your little ones will get bored.
It’s a wise idea to set a schedule for changing your family prayer routine. This will help you keep things fresh, but also give you some lead time for planning. Here are a few ideas for ways to change up your routine:
• Pray the rosary. It really only takes about 15 minutes, which is manageable. If it’s going too long on a school night, moving it to your weekend prayer time might be your best bet.
• Petitions. Go around the room and have each family member share their intentions. At the end, collectively pray for them all.
• Scripture lessons. Have you ever had someone blow your mind with the background story of a particular Scripture? It may have been a parable or verse that you’ve heard dozens of times, and when they tell you the historical surroundings, it changes everything? Seek out lessons (my suggestion is to start with anything by Mark Hart) and then teach them to your children.
• Adoration. If you live in an area that has Eucharistic Adoration, take your family and spend some time. Bonus points for making this part of your regular routine.
• Evening Prayer/Night Prayer. The Catholic Church has the Liturgy of the Hours (also known as the Breviary). The Liturgy is prayed by priests and religious five times daily. Have your family pray Evening Prayer (about 10 minutes) or Night Prayer (about 5 minutes) together.
There are endless prayer possibilities. Keep things fresh and keep your family engaged.
Managing Your Daily Prayer Time
Do you ever go entire days without talking to your wife? Of course, not! Yet, we often find ourselves going days without spending quality time in prayer.
Certainly we pray before meals, but is that enough? Imagine you and your wife only spoke three times a day and you didn’t really share what’s going on in your life. Imagine you simply thanked her for making the food and then you ate in complete silence.
Sometimes we forget that our relationship with God is just that, a relationship. His expectations are reasonable. He wants us to follow His Will, He wants us to phone home daily, and He wants to feed us weekly at Mass.
If you really seek to improve in the spiritual life, you need to implement a daily prayer routine. It’s something that is fairly straightforward and can literally be started today. At the beginning of your day, block out 15 minutes for prayerful activities. You could spend time reading the Bible, reading a spiritual book, praying a rosary or even just talking with God.
When it comes to prayer, it’s easier than texting. You literally just start talking and you and God are linked up.
As with anything in relationships, too much repetition can lead to boredom and fatigue. Change your prayer routine frequently. You know yourself best, but monthly or quarterly is about right. We both know that when you get bored with something, you move on. Your relationship with God is too important to simply “move on” from.
The great thing about changing up your prayer routine is that it will broaden your spiritual horizons. You’ll learn about some new saint or explore a new facet of the Church.
Establish a daily routine and change it often.
Candlelit Dinners
There’s something really special about candlelit dinners. I’m not sure which committee in history voted that candlelight is a requirement for romance, but they were right. The low flickering light puts everything in a better light.
But do candlelit dinners need to be saved for romantic dates?
Every night you (hopefully!) eat dinner with your wife. You sit at the dining room table, talk about your days and experiences. What if one night, your wife came home to find that you had made dinner and pulled out the candles?
Candlelit dinners are perfect at home, especially after a rough day. They might even be the perfect ice breaker after a martial fight. They can elevate a simple dinner, nothing outside of the ordinary, to a romantic one.
• Candlelight sets the mood. Low light helps us to relax. Have you ever seen anyone fighting at a candlelit dinner?
• Candlelight adds an air of elegance. When you pull out the candles at home, you take simple elements and make them special. By simply adding a few candles, you can completely transform your dining experience.
• Candlelight invites us to slow down. We’re always so busy. Someone spends an hour to cook dinner and we finish eating in 10 minutes. Dinner isn’t just a meal, it’s a special time to be together. It’s about sharing, communicating and caring.
So grab the candles and put them on your dinner table and watch your whole dinner experience transform.
Loving On A Budget
Romance doesn’t have to be expensive.
Alison and I have a series of financial goals for ourselves. We first want to be debt free, then we want to buy our first home with cash, and finally we want to invest in her career. These are massive goals which require focus. They also require every financial resource available to us. So how can we sustain our marriage without spending lots of money on dates, gifts, and flowers?
There are certainly an unlimited number of romantic gestures that cost money. I’m interested in doing many of them. At one time or another, we all find ourselves in a position similar to Alison and I. We want to show our wife that we love her, we want to spend time with her, but we don’t want it to cost money.
It was this very quandary that led me to writing the “101 Days of Love.” In it, I lay out 101 ways to show your wife that you love her, with the majority of them costing no money at all. I knew that in the days while Alison and I are becoming debt free I would want to show her that she means the world to me, and I would want to do it in unique and creative ways. I also knew that our budget wouldn’t give me the financial resources for anything too grand.
But that’s the great thing about marriage. It doesn’t survive on grand gestures. It thrives when each day we make smaller gestures. These small gestures are just big enough to make a big impact in her day. They’re tiny surprises that she will love.
We all have the resources around us to show her that she’s special. It just takes a little bit of imagination.
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?"