Is Your Marriage Time-starved?
December 30th, 2005 (Loving Relationships)
In one particular way, a relationship is just like a small baby. And although a baby is a very strong and resilient creature, without food and nourishment it will surely die. In the same way, couples who are living a time-starved lifestyle finds that their relationship dies unless they feed it emotionally.
You may have heard the term called “The 2 day marriage” before. This is a term that describes the hundreds of thousands of couples all over the world who are both so locked into their careers, mixed with the tasks of raising the family at night, that the only time they get together is on the two days of the weekend.
Although these 2 days may sound like fun and relaxing times to most people, couples find that even these weekends seem to drain their marriages of emotion and closeness. This is because so many of the forces of the weekend marriage try to suck the energy out of it.
During the week the schedule if full with work and then taking care of the kids, and of course sleep. But on the weekends, it seems that we have to take care of all of the other little tasks that we couldn’t get to during the week.
Stephanie, a married mother of two says “When we have much less time then we don’t give anything to ourselves, and of course we don’t have time for each other, and the stresses we face make it easier for us to turn on each other. My husband and I found each other arguing every chance we had, even when we set aside time on the weekends. Something had to change.”
We still love each other, but the distractions of our lives cause us to stop doing the things we know to do to take care of the relationship. So what is it that couples that are left with only time on the weekends do to heal and ultimately enjoy a better relationship?
One important way of getting close and dealing with time issues in a marriage is to take care of yourself. Successfully married couples who get in only a couple of days per week to be together made it a priority to take care of themselves as individuals and made sure that they each got t heir important needs met.
They understand the fact that if they do not give to themselves love and self attention, then they will not have love and attention to give away. Let’s put it another way: A little less for the relationship in the short run means a lot more for the relationship in the long run.