I work with a lot of parents who want to have a better relationship. They may feel totally disconnected and have growing frustration and resentment toward each other. I'm going to share one common characteristic these couples have. This is the healthy relationship secrets for parents. My name is Jason a pope. And I've worked exclusively with couples for over eight years, helping them avoid disharmony and create more connection and passion. The mission of this podcast is to save your marriage from parenthood and to help you be great parents while having a healthy relationship.
The number one characteristic that the disconnected stop couples have is that their relationship is a low priority. And before I dive into that, I want to share a couple quotes from my mentor, Terry real. The first one is intimacy is not something you have is something you do. And the second one is, we must have an active relationship to our relationship. And what it means to have the relationship via priority simply means that we actively work on the relationship. That is we actively work on making it. So we spend less time in disharmony, less time and disconnection. And there's different ways to go about that different tools you can learn. And also that we know how to repair, we know how to get back on track, we know how to repair, to go back into connection, or back into harmony. And one way that makes doing all this work easier is if we put more of our energy into the relationship. The thing is that we as people, we are all inherently annoying. You know, you ever lived with a roommate, you know, some of the things they do can be really, really annoying, or even family members, brothers, sisters, any sort of person that you've lived with, they can be annoying, and especially our spouse, especially if we have kids. If we are not feeling connected, our partners, natural annoyances are a lot louder. I probably shared that before on this podcast. But I just want to reiterate that. And so I think it's where those quotes come in. If we want to be intimate, whether that's emotionally intimate, physically intimate, sexually intimate with our partner, it is something that we do, we don't just have it. For example, we get married, we don't just have intimacy, we have to actively work at creating that intimacy. And I'll do a quick example from my own relationship. My wife and I feel like we're really good. And minimizing disharmony, minimizing arguments, we've had our share of arguments, that's for sure. But I feel like we've done a good job on that. But since we're busy since we have kids, our biggest struggle is to constantly put that investment constantly made that investment into our relationship bank account, as John Gottman says, so we have to go on a date, or sit down and talk to each other about everything is going on, at least once a week. And we made a mistake of this recently, her parents were in town, sister, and we were doing so much you know, there was some travel with work and all that. And we didn't make time for each other. So what happens? Our annoyances got louder. We started to become easily frustrated at each other, maybe a little bit snappy, until it's like whoa, hold on. And this and this can create emotional intimacy. If one of us it might have been her. Full disclosure said hey, you know what we're feeling I'm feeling disconnected. We're feeling disconnected. We gotta we gotta hang out. We got to do Something we got to talk that very statement and make it so you're going in the right direction. That very statement is some degree of emotional intimacy, because she's sharing how she feels. And of course, I felt that same way. I'm like, Yeah, gosh, all right. Let's, let's do Zeldin, we gotta hang out. And so we kind of got back on the wagon, so to speak, in terms of date night. But the reason why we do it, we do it for our relationship. And this reminds me, there's a book that I highly recommend, and it's by John Gottman is called the Seven Principles for Making marriage work. And in the back of the book, it's like the afterword. He calls it the magic six hours. And actually, in the book it talks about, they followed up on couples who attended their Seattle workshops. And they were wondering, Hey, what distinguish those couples whose relationships continue to improve, versus those who didn't. And this is page 278. In the book, they said, where we find that successful, the successful group had dramatically overhauled their lives, far from it, and I'm going to read directly from the book. To our surprise, we discovered that they were devoting only an extra six hours a week to their marriage. Although each couple had their own style of spending the six hours, some clear patterns emerged. In general, these couples were giving their marriages, a concentrated refresher course, in the seven principles. The approach works so phenomenally well, that I've come to call it six magic hours or the magic six hours, here's how you can do it, too. And so basically, what he breaks down is being intentional about parties, being intentional about leaving each other. For example, you're gonna leave for the day, make sure you check in, I hope you have a great day, give each other a hug and kiss whatever that is. The next one is reunions, when you to get back together. That's why I recommend a welcome home hug to each other as a way to increase physical intimacy you to get home give each other good, we got a good belly to belly hug. And don't let your partner go. So you can feel them relax. Next one, he shares his admiration and appreciation. And not to brag when my wife and I were we're pretty good at this, Hey, thank you for making coffee. Thank you for picking up the girls. Gas, you know, I heard you on the meeting, you sounded like you really had command of that meeting. You know, things like that can go a long way. Then there's affection, you know, physical affection, hugging, snuggling, having sex. And then the last two are a weekly date. And then the State of the Union meeting. And oftentimes I find myself with couples who have kids, reminding them to have a State of the Union meeting. And put simply, that is one hour a week to talk about the relationship this week. The hand John Garmin says keep this time sacred, then begin talking about what went right. And then get on the same page. You know, what have YouTube and feeling, share some emotional vulnerability, if it's there, share what's really real, but also get on the same page as far as things with the kids maybe get on the same page as far as vacations or financial goals. But if you can do this once a week, then you can create more harmony, and more connection. And this is one of the best things you can do for the relationship. Again, I'm going back. One thing I've noticed with the couples who are not doing so well that come to my office is that the relationship is low on the priority. They simply don't make time for each other. And then what happens when we do that? We start to get annoyed with our partner. And then that annoyance builds to frustration that frustration may grow into resentment. So one of the best things you can do is to start to build that connection. And then I'll end on this. And John Gottman writes, remember, working briefly on your marriage every day will do more for your health and longevity than working out at a health club. I'll leave it at that. Thank you for listening
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