Keep Dating

After a couple marries, one of the first things to go in their relationship is dating. Most couples stop the very thing that helped them fall in love in the first place. And from a rational standpoint, it makes a lot of sense. 

Before you got married, you had separate lives, interests, and routines. Dates were a way that you could connect your separate lives, and create some shared experiences. 

Now that you’re married, you don’t have the separate lives you used to. Now, you go to sleep together, wake up together, and come home around the same time. Together. There are lots of experiences together. 

You might be asking, “why do we need to go on dates now that we spend all this time together?”

The answer is quite simple. You need dates to remember why you fell in love, and to create new experiences to strengthen your love.

If you don’t spend time investing in your relationship, it’ll atrophy.

Relationships don’t grow without attention, and more importantly, intention. Dating is a way to intentionally pay attention. (If you’re a guy reading this, your wife will 100% agree with me that getting asked out by her husband is sexy.)

Go on a date once a week, or at the very least twice a month. Pick a night, get a babysitter that you can count on, and take turns planning what you do on your date. 

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Marriage Assets

We tend to think about assets in terms of financial perspectives. How do we spend, invest, or save our money? Do we launder our money? How do I/we increase our financial assets? 

These, among others, are financial questions that every marriage deals with. Even if you’re not asking those questions, you’re still dealing with those questions. 

There’s a different kind of asset that needs just as much, if not more, attention: Emotional assets. 

Every relationship has an emotional bank account. Couples make deposits and withdrawals from that account, often not knowing how much is in the account. As is the case with money, when you run a negative balance, life gets really stressful. 

Some marriages live emotionally paycheck to paycheck. Every day there is a desperate need for some kind of positive experience in order to keep going. Others have invested well, and can go for a period of time through emotional debts and be ok. 

It takes a radical change to get out of financial debt. The same is true for emotional debt. 

Consider the emotional ledger of your relationship. Are you over spending your emotional deposits? What feels like a deposit for you, for your spouse? How about a withdrawal? Ask your spouse what their emotional bank account is with you. 

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