De-Stress Your Marriage

By Fawn Weaver on Thursday, August 16, 2012

I may be the only person with this challenge but I recently realized I do something that, in the long run, could be detrimental to my marriage.  I put pressures on myself and then become so overwhelmed by my self-inflicted stress that I don’t notice the simplest things around me.

Since returning from my trip around the world in search of the universal secret to a happy marriage, I’ve bombarded myself with a massive to-do list and for some reason feel the need to finish everything TODAY.  

On Monday, the first full day following my return, I created a list of the most urgent tasks I needed to get completed over the next couple days and ranked them in order of importance.   By the end of the day, I realized I’d spent most of my day on the least consequential items and the “big ones” still remained.  

This, of course, caused me to become a bit stressed.  Tuesday night, I got so engrossed in my work I completely forgot Keith was waiting for me to do something with him.  By the time I realized, it was bedtime.

Keith is incredibly understanding and gives me alot of “passes” on my oft-times misguided ways.  ”Pass” or not, this is something I’m determined to change.  

One of the things I’ve learned from the dozens of happily married people I interviewed on my journey is those who’ve been married 25-plus years really have a great understanding of what is important and what can wait.  These couples, many happily married 35, 45 and 55 years, determined to make their relationship more important than anything in the outside world.  Their marriage and household is of the utmost importance to both of them.

They determined that in the end, after they’d each retired or could no longer keep up with the hectic pace of their work life, their companies would continue on without them.  But their marriage, if they did not tend to it daily, would not.  I say my marriage is the most important relationship in this world, and I most certainly mean it.  But sometimes my actions, unfortunately, reflect a different truth.  Does that ever happen to you?

Question: What is the best way to ensure stress from the outside world doesn’t creep into your home and interrupt (or distract you from) time with your family?

Until tomorrow…make it a great day!

 

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Fawn Weaver is the USA Today® and New York Times® bestselling author of Happy Wives Club: One Woman's Worldwide Search for the Secrets of a Great Marriage, adopting the same name as the Club she founded in 2010. The Happy Wives Club community has grown to include more than 900,000 women in over 110 countries around the world. When she’s not blogging or working on her next project, she's happily doting over her husband of nearly eleven years, Keith.

 

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