Feeling disconnected from your partner?
Aug 22, 2024
Hi Happy Humans!
We're here with our weekly 3 things...
1️⃣ A question from our community
2️⃣ Our actionable tip of the week
3️⃣ A resource from our toolkit
1. The question
"What can I do about the growing distance in my relationship with my husband? It feels like we're just roommates lately, especially since we barely have any time together without the kids."
2. Our actionable tip
This question hit us hard.
Although we may come across as having an incredibly solid relationship (or maybe not… we have no idea), in all honesty, our relationship has been struggling this summer.
Saying we’ve felt like “just roommates” is an understatement. Some days, we’ve felt like almost strangers and have been fighting WAY more than usual.
Let’s talk solutions though…
You may have heard of the 2-2-2 rule.
It’s basically a relationship strategy that’s designed to help couples prioritize and maintain a strong connection amidst the endless demands of daily life. The rule suggests that couples should:
- Go on a date night every 2 weeks.
- Spend a weekend away every 2 months.
- Take a week-long vacation every 2 years.
Although we would love for this to be our reality… with four young kids at home, we haven’t been able to make this work.
We do, however, love the idea of intentionally carving out time for your relationship, and we’re all about flexibility and compromise over here. So… lately we’ve been following more of a 4-3-4 rule.
- A date every four weeks.
- A weekend away three times a year.
- A longer vacation (4 to 5 days) every 4 years.
In fact, this past July, we spent 3 nights at The Inn at Harbor Hill Marina in Niantic, CT.
We were treated to:
✅ A balcony room overlooking the marina
✅ Complimentary made to order breakfast
✅ Wine and cheese hour daily
✅ A romantic pontoon cruise
✅ Freshly baked cookies at night
✅ Live music at the gazebo
We talked, laughed, and reconnected.
Without the constant demands of parenting, it felt like we actually saw each other again for the first time in ages. We were reminded of the reasons we fell in love in the first place.
In the chaos of our daily lives, there’s SO MUCH noise that keeps us from being present and seeing just how good we have it.
When we got back home, we brought a renewed sense of connection with us.
And yes… even though we were walking right back into the shit storm that we call home, we were ready to face it… as a team.
Our relationship is the entire foundation of our family. Without a strong foundation, everything crumbles, so we promised that we’d keep prioritizing our relationship, making time to reconnect.
It’s obviously unrealistic to take a trip like this often, but we can do better. And so can you.
It can start with hiring a babysitter to go out for dinner or even just putting the kids down early and turning off the TV to spend an hour talking before bed.
We need to remind ourselves that our love is always there, it’s just buried beneath all of that daily noise.
It’s up to us to intentionally make the time to rediscover it.
3. From our toolkit
While we were away, we spent a lot of time walking along the boardwalk and chatting.
Even though we weren’t planning to ‘work,’ we always end up doing our best brainstorming during these walks.
We reflected on our date nights, even the simple ones like dinner out, and realized how they’re opportunities for us to reconnect and reset.
Our dates usually follow a pattern, which inspired us to create a freebie for you all, a guide on how to ‘date your partner’ in a more meaningful way.
Here are the 4Cs to connect during the rare dinner date and create a more fulfilling relationship.
- Step 1: Drinks (Co-Regulate)
- Step 2: Apps (Connect)
- Step 3: Dinner (Collaborate)
- Step 4: Dessert (Celebrate)
Click here to grab our (FREE) downloadable to take with you on your next dinner date so you can more easily put these four Cs into practice. 🙂
❤️ Jenilee & Greg
P.S. We just started another round of the ‘Release the Stress’ protocol to help us unlock the bound up stress within our nervous system so we can lower our baseline emotional temperature and show up as the calm and supportive people that we want to be.
The protocol takes just 15 minutes a week across four weeks, and you can literally feel the emotional weight lift off of you as you cry during the first session or two. The release is pretty indescribable, and SO powerful! It’s a hard 15 minutes a week, but it’s worth it (this is our third time doing it).
This protocol is science-backed (supported by over 200 peer-reviewed studies), and we’ll teach it to you and help you put it into practice within our ‘Release the Stress’ workshop.
If you'd like to check it out, use this link to grab the workshop while it's only sale for only $15.
Thanks for being here. 🙂
Happy Human Resources:
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- Get Module 1 of our "Regulated Parenting" workshop FREE
- Get Module 1 of our "Release the Stress" workshop FREE
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