I made a big mistake last night. My husband had been away almost four days straight at work and various meetings. On Monday he had some horribly sick kids at the hospital and was stretched incredibly thin all day. Yesterday he barely had time to catch up with all the meetings he had and checking up on these kids.
So when he arrived home last night at 9:45, after not seeing him for several days, do you know what we did?
We watched a movie. Ugh. It wasn't a bad movie. It was a thriller which had been recommended, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. You see, neither of us had had any down time in a few days, since I had the kids nonstop and he was at the hospital, and we wanted to relax. But we did it the wrong way.
When the movie was over I wanted to talk. He'd been through some pretty stressful things, and I wanted to know how he was doing. So we talked. Until midnight. And by then I was really exhausted. And so was he. So that was it.
It was really quite pathetic.
What we should have done was poured ourselves some nice cold glasses of water, cuddled on the couch, and talked at 9:45. Why watch a movie, anyway? I'm so proud of us because we don't have cable, and we don't get any television channels, but we do watch too many movies. And while movies can be entertaining, they can't create a relationship. You do need to spend time together, talking, and doing OTHER STUFF.
So at the end of a long, hard day, don't turn on the TV. Take a bubble bath together. Look at the stars together. If he's on the television, find a creative way to distract him (I know you can do it!). But share thoughts and feelings together, not just movies. That's how you connect! And women, like it or not, need to connect on that emotional level before we connect on the physical and sexual level. So make sure you connect emotionally when you're still energetic!
In Honey, I Don't Have a Headache Tonight, I said it this way:
Often we get so busy that it feels like there's no way to fit sex into our schedules. But if we're honest, time really isn't the issue. Virtually all of us have the time to have sex. For most of us, it doesn't necessarily even take that long. There may be nights when we do want it to last longer, but on the whole we tend to be content with sexual encounters that are long enough to feel good, but not so long that we start to worry that the kids should be waking up for school sometime soon. Our problem, instead, is that we don't have the energy.
And I go on to talk about how we can recharge our batteries so the energy is there when we need it: in the early evening.
Even though I know this stuff, I stil have to be reminded. We all get into lazy patterns every now and then. From now on, we're not going to watch movies at night, except maybe once a month. That's my new pledge.
What about you? Do you have tips on marriage you can share with us? Here's how you can participate in Wifey Wednesday! Right click the image above and save it to your computer. Then go to your blog and write a blog post, using that image. Come back on over here, and enter the URL for that blog post in the Mr. Linky below. Thanks so much, and I look forward to seeing what you all have to share!
Labels: intimacy, loving, marriage, wifey wednesdays |
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