The Best Marriage Advice We Ever Got

By Maggie Reyes on Monday, March 31, 2014

The Best Marriage Advice We Ever Got

I must admit, I’m a bit of a ModernMarried.com stalker.  I love the main blogger and chief encourager at MM, Maggie Reyes.  

If you’ve visited Maggie’s blog, you know she has a gift for lifting the lowest spirits and shares her perspective on love with honesty and transparency but always without judgement.

She loves being married and her joy whenever she talks about marriage is infectious.  I just want to rub a little of what she’s got all over the world every day.

As the saying goes, “Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself.”

She is wonderful.  She is a delight.  And her marriage benefits from that spirit of happiness daily.

When I stumbled across her post on the best marriage advice she ever got, I wondered if it was the same as the best marriage advice I’ve ever received.  It wasn’t.  It was entirely different which made it even that much more interesting to me.

Now, I’m not sure which piece of advice I think is better.  Maybe we’ll just call it a draw.  Both are words of beauty, something we can add to our marriage each and every day.

Until tomorrow…make it a great day!

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When The Hubs and I were dating we went to a lot of workshops together.  My favorite of all the different classes we did was about connecting with your heart. It was a 6 week class. I don’t remember the name of the teacher, the place where we took it or what we studied. All I remember from the class is one sentence. One, glorious and powerful sentence:

You create your relationship every day.

That’s it. So simple.

The teacher said that people wonder why relationships die. They go out with someone, it’s all fabulous in the beginning and then suddenly something happens. The relationship gets stale.

He went on to say, relationships do not get stale. People forget – you create your relationship every day. What people do is stop creating and then wonder what went wrong.

Well I guess if you count all that, it’s a whole paragraph. 6 week two hour class – and one paragraph was all I got. Oddly enough, it was all I needed.

We left that class and promised, solemnly swore even. We will create our relationship every day. We will not forget and go stale. We will be fresh. Every day.

Once we decided we create our relationship every day then the next question was – how?

We decided to text each other at least once a day. We don’t like to call each other during the day when we are both focused and working, however we religiously text each other at lunch time.

Texts go something like this:

Monday
Hubs: 1:05 pm Loving my over-scheduled wife kisses.
Hubs: 1:21pm Nashville soundtrack is out.
Wifey:1:33pm Yay! Itunes! Late lunch kisses!

Tuesday
Hubs: 12:14 pm Manipulative Assistant Ellis is out on Smash. New showrunner making changes.
Wifey: 12:18pm Yay!
Hubs: 12:12pm And more musicals, not just Bombshell
Wifey: 12:20pm Yes! They all need jobs on different musicals – more songs.
Wifey: 4:52pm Lovey dovey kisses for my hubsicle!

Wednesday
Wifey: 9:02 am Off to sort mail
Hubs:9:03 am Just whistle while you work

We have fun. We make each other laugh. Sometimes The Hubs reads Entertainment Weekly during his lunch time. He has declared himself my personal news-machine hence the updates on my favorite shows.

We create. Fresh Everyday.

Just like Starbucks and Krispy Kreme.

When we get home we hug. We stop whatever we are doing and hug.

Hugs are sacred.

Then we leave the day behind, change clothes, open the mail and start with our Daily Check-In.

We go on dates. When a new movie is coming out we ask each other out. We plan it. As if we were dating. Because we are.

We plan vacations. We love -with zeal and devotion- planning vacations. Not just the vacation itself, but the planning of it. I love beautiful hotels and magical experiences. The spiritual retreat with my favorite author. The acoustic concert with my favorite singer. The Hubs loves guide books and maps. We both love making memories together.

Whenever handed lemons, we promptly make lemonade. On a trip to Costa Rica we accidentally locked our keys in our car. (Notice that I say we. The details don’t matter, we are a team and it happened to both of us. That ‘we’ really helps when there is a lemon parade. ‘We’ got in this together and ‘we’ will get out of it.)

Anyway, as I was saying, there we were not going anywhere in Costa Rica. For several hours.
So we took a hike. Literally. We hiked up a hill. Saw cows. Laid in the grass and looked at clouds. Laughed and hugged.

One of my favorite memories ever was created when our keys were locked in our car.

Lemonade. It’s the new classic coke.

Fresh. Everyday.

COMMENTS: Name one thing you do to keep your relationship fresh.  Add to the comments section below.  Go!

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Maggie Reyes

Life Coach, Writer + the Founder of ModernMarried.com
Maggie Reyes is a Life Coach, Writer + the Founder of ModernMarried.com. Her romantic-yet-practical approach to wedded bliss has been featured on Project Happily Ever After, Daybreak USA, Cristina XMRadio and Military Spouse Magazine. When she’s not writing, working or creating pins for her fabulous Facebook Community, you can find her cuddling with her hubby, reading a romance novel or embracing how the words “over-achiever” and “TV Junkie” can still go in the same sentence, to describe the same person. Learn how to love like a newlywed no matter how long you have been married at ModernMarried.com.

 

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  • http://www.pinterest.com/jemetri MrsMetri

    I love that you said ‘we’ locked our keys in the car. So easy to pass the blame to each other, but we never consider that our husbands would feel so much safer around us if they knew we weren’t going to attack because we have their back! :-) And vice versa of course.

    • Annett Davis

      I really loved that too @mrsmetri:disqus. I know I have “thrown my husband under the bus” so to speak many times and felt bad afterwards. It really should be all about “us”. What a GREAT lesson Maggie! I’m going to work on this. I love when you said… “The details don’t matter, we are a team and it happened to both of us”. That’s so true. What does casting blame help anyway, we are in this together. Thanks for a great post.

      • http://www.modernmarried.com/ Maggie Reyes

        Thanks Annett! We are always a work in progress and over and over again I find that one of the reasons we are as close and happy as we are is because we embraced the idea of being a team really early on. XO

    • http://www.modernmarried.com/ Maggie Reyes

      So glad you pointed that one out – it is soooo important to have team spirit! XO

  • http://www.modernmarried.com/ Maggie Reyes

    Fawn, thank you for such a generous introduction!
    Being married -aka loving my husband and being loved by him- is the best thing I have ever done. It has healed old wounds of the past and helped me grow in ways I had never imagined. He is noble and generous and kind and renews my faith in humanity daily. In my heart, I truly believe sharing that with the world – or one other person, is the way we help the planet heal.
    Also – Chief Encourager. Love it! Keeping it!

    • http://www.happywivesclub.com/ Fawn @ Happy Wives Club

      You are amazing, Maggie. And just these words say it all, “[he] renews my faith in humanity daily.” You are such a beautiful writer. Can’t wait until the day you wrap all that into a book. OH happy day!

  • SConfair

    Love this Maggie! It is so true- when we choose to hold on to past hurts it slowly erodes the relationship to a state of despair. “Focus on whatever is good and true, starting each day anew” (Totally just made that up- a bit corny but it has a point! lol)

    • http://www.happywivesclub.com/ Fawn @ Happy Wives Club

      Not corny at all!

  • Kwavi

    Thanks Maggie for sharing this. I really enjoyed reading this. Hubs and I call each other alot during the day, however there are some days that are busier than others and phone calls are hard. I like the suggestion of texting. Gotta go, I’m about to text my hubby :)

    • http://www.happywivesclub.com/ Fawn @ Happy Wives Club

      LOVE!

  • Angie Mack

    Awesome post, Maggie! Almost 32 years of marriage, the ONE thing that we do to keep our marriage fresh: we go on a weekly date night. Every Friday. Consistently. Even when we’re tired from a long day; we do it because we’re committed to it.

    • http://www.happywivesclub.com/ Fawn @ Happy Wives Club

      Love this, Angie!

  • http://positivelyaffirm.com Elissa Philgence

    Maggie, thank you for sharing a bit of your world with us. My husband and I have movie nights to keep us connected to each other. We love old movies and old sitcoms.

    However, what I struggles with is how do you go on date nights with two young children in toe. I know I would get a baby-sitter, ship them off to grandma or have date night at home, but those are not a options in my situation. We live in a new town and hundreds of miles from the grandmas.

    Peace to you.