We are two-thirds of the summer in.
So there’s a third left.
And my question for you is: what of the things that you and your spouse decided that you wanted to make happen this summer—what of them are yet to be done?
What is it that you’re still to either touch on or go back to?
Re-decide.
Make happen.
Make a plan.
Buy the ticket for.
Go on the trip.
Get in the car.
Pack it up.
Go camping.
Whatever it is, this is the time to do the right thing.
Do a check-in with one another before the entire summer’s over and it’s too late.
What are the things that you have talked about ad nauseam, dreamt about for years, for months, and looked forward to—and have yet to take action on?
I encourage you to do that today.
In your marriage, what is the part that’s missing?
Here’s what I mean.
Is it the head knowledge?
Is it that you two don’t know what to do, how to do it, when to do it well?
That you don’t have the tools?
That nobody—right, as with most married couples—nobody has taught you how to go about being married in a way that raises your marriage satisfaction?
Is it the pieces?
Is it the skills?
Or is it the tools?
Is that what’s missing?
Or is it the other piece of it?
That’s, “We know what to do, but we don’t do so well putting it to practice.”
Or, “We haven’t had—or we haven’t gotten—enough reps yet.”
Or is it a combination of the two?
Figure out what it is.
And then get help on whichever side you land.
How is it that you can’t see that this is the worst time of them all?
How is it that you don’t know by now when a good time is and when a bad time is for the two of us to talk?
And How is it that this is where we’re still at?
How are we so out of sync that you think this is perfect, and you can’t see that I have my hands full doing all the hundred things that I’m doing?
Has this been your experience?
Has this been what you two—you and your spouse—have been reiterating to one another anytime that one of you needs to talk to the other about something?
Is the timing always off?
I want you to know something.
It’s really not that complicated.
It’s really not that complex.
I walk you through how to do this.
I walk you through how to know when the best time—when a good time—is for the two of you to talk.
It’s too long to do it here, but I have a video where I talk about it.
Come see me there.
You know when I celebrate?
I celebrate when my couples are celebrating.
You know what somebody said just the other day?
“We had a money conversation. We literally had a sit-down, and we talked through it—and we didn’t even fight.”
And their faces were just beaming, right?
Just lit up with, “We can’t believe that we actually made this happen.”
So naturally, when somebody comes and asks me that same question—
“Is it ever possible? Or Is it ever going to be our situation where we’re going to be able to talk about money, talk about the hard things, talk about the topics that we’ve put off and put off again and put off one more time?”
And “Is it ever going to be that for us, where we can say we talked about fill in the blank—whatever—and we didn’t even fight?”
This is how I know.
Because we get to celebrate.
I want you all to celebrate.
You know why I work with my couples for six months to start?
Because when you’ve been in situations—when you’ve been and created cycle after cycle of ways of being together—
And for you, it may be 20 years, or 25, or 30—
For all of those years, you’ve been perfecting this way of being with one another.
When it’s been that long, it takes a little while to walk yourselves back out of that forest.
That’s why.
But you do that exact same thing!
What are you talking about?
Has that become your automatic response when your spouse brings something up, and you’re like, “Wait, but you did that same thing a week ago Monday”?
And then sort of put that back in their lap, right?
Like transfer it back?
I want you to know that the moment that you do that—
The moment that you take what you’re hearing from them and you put it in their lap—
You stopped listening.
So, I want you to take it back.
I want you to, like, pull it back in.
Own it.
I want you to hold it in your hands and say, “Okay, I’m listening.”
“I really want to hear what you have to say.”
Or “I don’t want to put it back on you.”
“I don’t want to distract us from anything else that you’ve done or didn’t do.”
“I’m here to listen to what you have to say.”
Do you, too, have a system?
Here’s what I mean.
Do you have a system of cleaning out your closets—so to speak?
And I’m talking literally, maybe, also.
But do you have a system of cleaning out whatever you’ve collected over time between the two of you?
The things that you talked yourself out of talking about?
That you said, “Oh, I wouldn’t even know how to start talking about this,” or “I wouldn’t even know why or how I would explain this to my spouse”?
And then they end up sitting in a pile—collecting and gathering dust.
And bugging you.
Creating trouble in the meantime.
If you are wondering how you know when to bring something up, I created a video around that.
And I invite you to watch it.
I’ll see you in there.
If you are married to a human, and you are finding yourself annoyed with what they’re doing over and over and over again—
Something comes up, and it’s either the same thing or different things—
And you come, like many of the people that I work with, to me and say, “How do I know the difference between what a pet peeve—a true pet peeve—is that I just need to let go of, and what’s a thing that, even if it’s small in size or minimal in significance, I still need to bring up?”
How do I know the difference of what to let go of and what to actually bring up with my spouse?
I talk about that in my last video, if that’s helpful.
If you’re finding yourself in that same place, go check that out.
I’ll see you there.
