Tag Archive for: Marriage

‘Magic 6 hours’ could dramatically improve your relationship

/in , , /by

 When John Gottman talks, I listen.

Actually I’ve never heard him talk, but when he writes, I read.

So when a newly revised edition of his best-selling “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work” (Harmony Books) hit my desk this week, I cracked it open immediately.

Gottman is a psychology professor at the University of Washington and the founder/director of The Gottman Institute, a marital research and counseling center in Seattle.

Maybe you’ve read about his theory on “master couples” versus “disaster couples.”

Co-authored with Nan Silver, “Seven Principles,” which has sold a million-plus copies, was first released in 1999 — before Tinder, before Facebook — heck, before some of us even had cellphones.

The updated version (out next week) offers tips for dealing with digital distractions, including Gottman’s suggestion to agree on rules of tech etiquette: How much are you comfortable with your partner sharing on social media? When is texting/posting off-limits (mealtimes, date nights)? Do you create cyber-free zones in your home?

Most compelling of all, though, is Gottman’s “magic six hours” theory, based on interviews with couples who attended marital workshops at The Gottman Institute.

“We wondered what would distinguish those couples whose marriages continued to improve from those whose marriages did not,” Gottman writes. “To our surprise, we discovered that they were devoting only an extra six hours a week to their marriage.”

If your first thought is, “Only? Where am I going to find an extra six hours in my week?” — I hear you.

If that was not your first thought, forget I said anything.

Anyway, back to the winning formula.

Couples who saw their relationships improve devoted extra time each week to six categories.

First up: Partings

“Make sure that before you say goodbye in the morning you’ve learned about one thing that is happening in your spouse’s life that day,” Gottman writes. “From lunch with the boss to a doctor’s appointment to a scheduled phone call with an old friend.”

(Two minutes per day for five days, for a grand total of 10 minutes per week.)

Second: Reunions

Gottman recommends greeting your partner each day with a hug and kiss that last at least six seconds and ending each workday with stress-reducing conversation that lasts at least 20 minutes. (About 1 hour and 40 minutes per week.)

Third: Admiration and appreciation

Spend five minutes every day finding a new way to communicate genuine appreciation for your spouse, he says. (35 minutes per week.)

Fourth: Affection

“Show each other physical affection when you’re together during the day, and make sure to always embrace before going to sleep,” he writes. (Five minutes per day, seven days a week: 35 minutes.)

Fifth: Weekly date

For two hours once a week, Gottman recommends one-on-one time, during which you ask each other open-ended questions. “Think of questions to ask your spouse, like, ‘Are you still thinking about redecorating the bedroom?’ ‘Where should we take our next vacation?’ or ‘How are you feeling about your boss these days?'” (2 hours per week.)

Sixth: State of the union meeting

Spend one hour a week talking about what went right that week, discussing what went wrong and expressing appreciation for each other. “End by each of you asking and answering, ‘What can I do to make you feel loved this coming week?'” he writes. (1 hour per week.)

All of it adds up to six hours per week.

Some of these suggestions sound a tad awkward. “What can I do to make you feel loved this coming week?” reminds me a little too much of the last time I bought a car. (“What can I do to earn your business today?”)

But I like to think of marital advice like the food pyramid: You’re not going to adhere to it every day, but it’s an instructive guide to shape your habits around.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct-improve-relationship-in-six-hours-balancing-20150430-column.html

There’s No Such Thing as Equal Parenting

/in /by

I have a feminist marriage, except I also don’t.

I’ve been meaning to write this piece for weeks, but I’ve been too busy parenting. In fact, I’m only starting this after the dog’s been walked and fed, the baby’s had some food placed optimistically in front of him and been convinced to go to sleep, and the dishes have been (mostly) done. There’s a pile of clean, unfolded laundry in the hamper and another wet one festering in the washer, but I’m choosing to ignore both. I know that if I take those five minutes to put the damp clothes in the dryer and another 15 to fold the dry ones, it’ll somehow be 30 minutes before I’m back at my computer, and this sliver of nighttime quiet is precious, precious time.

My husband and I didn’t give much thought to what would happen when our careers ran up against the challenges of having a child. We had muddled through the domestic stuff fairly decently until then―or at least that’s how it seems in retrospect. And then we dropped a kid into the mix and what seemed like occasionally uneven scales tilted dramatically in one direction. I don’t mean to imply that my husband doesn’t help. He’s a modern, enlightened, all-around good sport who is especially receptive when handed to-do lists, although he often greets them with an “I’ll do my best”―a phrase I’ve come to loathe for its impervious good intentions.

Man washing dishes

GETTY GEORGE DOUGLAS

But the truth―and he would not contest it―is that I do more. Once, in a fit of peevishness, I tracked every minute he and I devoted to household work and tallied the figure at the end of the week. I had done over 12 hours, my husband just over five. I accounted for our totals for a few more weeks and then gave up because of―what else?―lack of time. Was this tabulating ungenerous and shrewish? Probably. Did that make its conclusions any less annoying? No.

The disparities are augmented on nights like tonight when he’s across the ocean tending to business, and I’m at home white-knuckling it on my own. Because of some combination of social, professional, and financial pressures, he travels more for work, works longer hours, and when, in a few weeks’ time, we have our second child, I’ll take about 12 weeks of leave from my job and he’ll take two.

We are far from alone, although we are, in many ways, on the extremely fortunate end of the spectrum. We have a babysitter who works pretty much full-time Monday through Friday, allowing us both to have careers, and local grandparents who help out with childcare. We’re able to pay someone to clean our apartment every now and then and someone to come fix cabinet doors that won’t stay shut. All this means that we spend less time than the average American woman or man on household work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics: She clocks in at 2.6 hours a day; he logs 2.1. (Childcare, in the BLS’s metrics, is broken out as a separate category, but women still exceed men in those responsibilities.)

WAS THIS TABULATING UNGENEROUS AND SHREWISH? PROBABLY. DID THAT MAKE ITS CONCLUSIONS ANY LESS ANNOYING? NO.

But all that good fortune doesn’t stop me from harboring resentment about the disparity in our household labors and wondering if the dream of an egalitarian marriage―hell, even the honest attempt―inevitably collapses under the responsibilities of child-rearing, when social pressures amplify and leisure time diminishes. Because, I thought in some subconscious section of my brain that I’d married a Marty Ginsburg (husband of Ruth Bader) or an Andrew Moravcsik (husband of Anne-Marie Slaughter), a man with ambition and drive but also a willingness to put his own career on the back-burner when his wife’s was taking off.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg being sworn into the Supreme Court
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with her husband in the background, as she’s sworn into the Supreme Court.
http://www.elle.com/life-love/news/a31821/egalitarian-parenting/

How To Get Your Sex Life Back On Track After Having A Kid

/in , , /by

Kids chuck a frag grenade at many parts of your life, but it doesn’t have to ruin your sex life. A new baby too often causes a sexual dry spell for the parents that extends beyond the months it takes to recover from birth — in some cases, it can go years. This is the product of a new family struggling to find a new normal, focusing too much energy on the kid, and forgetting the couple who created the kid. Or, more to the point, the coupling that created the kid.

A family forces you to focus your resources that once went toward the couple — time, money, energy, hours in bed — toward the family’s newest member. Your supply of resources stays the same, but demand just increased by a factor of screaming human libido killer. “We now want a balance between me, us, and family,” says Esther Perel. “Those were not tensions that existed before.”

You probably remember Perel from her wildly popular TED talks on maintaining desire in long-term relationships or how a couple can survive an affair, so you already know she knows this topic better than most. Unless you’re one of those annoying couples whose sex life actually improved after having kids, read on …Redefine “Sex”
Contrary to popular opinion, the hokey pokey is not what it’s all about. “You can do the act in 5 minutes, done, and it has zero effect on you,” Perel says. She’s talking more about “the erotic presence — the feeling of connection, pleasure, aliveness, vibrancy.” Loss of erotic presence in a relationship is the reason sex stops, so focus on fixing the cause not its effect. “If people had a less narrow definition of what sex is, there would be an ability to feel much more sexually connected after having kids,” she says.

“If people had a less narrow definition of what sex is, there would be an ability to feel much more sexually connected after having kids,”

Learn The Erotic Ingredients And “Eros Redirected”
This may be the most important sentence you ever read: The erotic ingredients are playfulness, novelty, looks, curiosity, and touch. Perel points out that every one of these things are at risk of being entirely redirected toward your kid if you’re not careful. There’s even a fancy term for it: “eros redirected.”

For Perel, the core of the issue in any couple where the sex life has faltered post-kid is that all the energy that once went toward the erotic ingredients in your relationship go to the kid. Here’s how she puts it (and try not to wince if it sounds too familiar):

“Playfulness: You have loads of playfulness, but it’s all with the kids. Novelty: I see you constantly looking for new experiences with your children but you do the same old, same old [with your partner]. Looks: I see your kids walking around in the latest fashion, and I see you in your old schmattes. Curiosity: I see you being curious about anything your child is doing, but when was the last time you gazed at each other? Touch: I see you often living on a diet of quick pecks, and I see your children experience languid hugs and affectionate everything.”


Break Your Routine And Plan Together
Undoing eros redirected is in some ways as simple as behaving toward your partner the way you behaved before the kid was born. “When people meet and are in love, they live face to face. When people have children, they create this whole enterprise, and they live side by side. What they need are moments of turning their bodies back to each other in face to face situation.” That means date nights, complete with touching, playing, and all those other ingredients.

Among Perel’s clients, there are couples who hire a babysitter to attend Burning Man and couples who haven’t left the house in 4 years. Guess which ones have better sex lives. You don’t have to drop peyote in the desert to appreciate a novel couple’s activity, but you do need to occasionally break the schedule that parenting has forced you into by planning together. “The reason everybody talks about planning dates and all of that is because it’s not just about putting it in the calendar,” She says. “It’s about assigning value. It says it’s important.”

[ted http://www.ted.com/talks/esther_perel_the_secret_to_desire_in_a_long_term_relationship?language=en expand=1] Whether it’s a date night or an annual couple’s vacation separate from the child, which Perel also recommends, plan together. For many couples, she finds it helps if one person is responsible for the adult end of the planning (date nights, researching vacations, booking reservations, etc.), while the other focuses on the kid’s end (reserving babysitters, packing overnight bags for the grandparent’s house, etc.).

Divide, conquer, and turn “eros redirected” into “eros directed,” with the direction being straight to … well … use your imagination.

https://www.fatherly.com/parenting-and-relationships/how-to-get-your-sex-life-back-on-track-after-having-a-kid/