Video Transcript
Hi, David here again. Welcome to part 2 of Quarantine, Your Marriage, and Surviving this Madness with Your Relationship intact.
In part 1, I spoke about mindset and the important of being tolerant of how your wife handles the stress of being on lock down. I also spoke about open communication and getting to know your wife again now that most of the distractions are gone.
In this video I want to talk about two different sides of the same coin. The first is about spending quality time together and the second is about spending quality time apart. Both are important if you want to maintain a strong healthy relationship, or if you want to achieve one.
Yes, it’s easy to spend all this down time binging Netflix, but I want you to resist that urge. Instead, focus on what the two of you can do together.
Cook a meal together. Go all out and learn how to create a Korean BBQ feast. Maybe let Netflix babysit your kids for a few hours and have a candlelight dinner on the deck where it’s just the two of you, a bottle of wine, some music, and great food.
Take online dancing lessons. Plant a vegetable garden. Learn a new language together. Paint your bedroom. Read a book out loud to each other.
Make crafts.
Create silly videos and put them online. Play video games together. Exercise together. Scrapbook old pictures. Camp in the back yard.
The ideas are endless. Start going for a walk together each morning. Do yoga.
Heck, play hide and seek. Play cards, maybe a long game of RISK of Monopoly.
Go for a long car ride. Have a dance off where the kids are the judge.
Play Chopped at home with weird ingredients and see who can be the most creative.
I think you get the idea. Have fun with your wife. You know, like you used to before life got in the way.
So, what’s the flip side of all that? Alone time. We all need it. You need it. Your wife needs it.
Before the lockdown you probably spent the bulk of your days apart, with one or both of you at work and unless one of you is an essential worker, you are now with each other morning, noon, and night.
For some couples, this is great, for others, not so much.
In the beginning, this may be okay, but as time progresses and you're at home together more and more, you have to acknowledge the importance of alone time.
Since one or both of you were working away from home before the quarantine, you had plenty of time apart, but now that you are together all the time, you may find that you needed that time alone to help regulate your emotions.
If that's the case, you may only need 5 minutes to collect yourself before re-engaging after a tense situation. While excusing yourself from those tense moments to collect your thoughts is okay, you should make some amount of alone time each day a priority.
You can put some headphones on and meditate, read a book, pray, or do something else to occupy your time alone. Just don't make your alone time an all-day, everyday sort of thing.
One last thing. Touch your wife. Romantic touch does not happen only in the bedroom.
During the day, while you two are on the couch watching a movie or anytime really, rub her feet, cuddle, or just hold her hand. Touch is a fundamental human need and essential for emotional and social health.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Margaret Atwood, “Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language, and the last, and it always tells the truth.”
We are wired for touch. I’ll see you in part 3.
