3 Ways to Show Up for Your Marriage When You're Busy
Marriage is so great - like forreal, I LOVE being married. Permanent sleepovers with your favorite person on Earth? SIGN ME UP. But you know what marriage isn’t? Easy. Marriage takes being intentional. It takes being selfless. It takes nurturing forever and ever.
I mean marriage is 2 people smashing their lives, dreams, and values together to find harmony. It’s hard enough keeping your own priorities straight…throw in another person’s? THAT IS TOUGH!
BUT: it is so possible to show up well for your marriage no matter how busy you are.
While I am by NO means a marriage expert, I love the heck out of my husband. We argue. We disagree. We say things we wish we wouldn’t have.
And we make sure that our marriage stays a priority no matter what else is going on around us. I’ve been married to my husband for almost 6 years and we’ve been together for going on 14 years. We’ve done a lot of life together and we’ve figured out a few things that have really helped us keep our marriage strong and happy even when our plates overflow with responsibilities.
My business is called Hustle SANELY and my heart behind that is not sacrificing our mental health + relationships in pursuit of our dreams. Y’all - it’s no secret that I’m a dreamer. I LOVE working my booty off to make my dreams come to life. But I can attest (from personal experience), that NO DREAM is worth living in a constant state of overwhelm, burn out, and isolation.
Hustle culture teaches us to do whatever it takes to make our dreams happen. And I’m just not on board with that because think about it - what if your husband or wife completely ignored nurturing your relationship because s/he had a business to build or a dream to chase? I’m willing to bet you would not be stoked on that. I know I wouldn’t be happy to not feel like a priority no matter how proud I was of my husband’s dreams. I want to feel like I am chasing my partner’s dream with him, not like he’s leaving me in the dust in pursuit of it.
So if you’re busy (aren’t we all?) then you might be wondering how you can step up and show up well for your marriage. WELL GIRL, I’VE GOT YOU.
3 TIPS FOR SHOWING UP FOR YOUR MARRIAGE WHEN YOU’RE BUSY AF:
1. Learn how to fight fair.
Let’s shoot it straight - you ARE going to have disagreements in your marriage. We are humans and our feelings and experiences are going to push us over the edge sometimes. THAT IS NORMAL AND TOTALLY FINE but part of showing up for your marriage when you’re busy is figuring out a way to gracefully handle these disagreements when they arise. Instead of naively trying to avoid riffs, I think it’s wiser to learn how to navigate them in a healthy way.
My husband does this thing that I think is brilliant: anytime a disagreement pops up, he gives it a rating from 1-10 in his mind.
1 being: “This isn’t really a big deal to me.” and 10 being: “WOW this really matters to me.”
If it’s in the lower number range for him and the higher number range for me, we lean more into how I’m feeling. And vice versa if it’s something that’s a bigger deal for him than it is for me.
Doing this makes the other person feel seen and considered.
In our marriage, part of our “fighting fair” strategy is laying things on the table regularly. I’m talking feelings, expectations, alllll of it. Let your person know what you’re feeling and what you need. Bottling things up OR expecting them to read your mind are recipes for disaster.
Part of what we do to make sure that we are consistently on the same page:
2. Have a weekly touch base meeting.
Our weekly touch base meeting involves going over a rough idea of the upcoming week’s obligations and responsibilities so that we know what the other person has going on calendar-wise, sharing anything that is on our heart, and asking for help/explaining any needs that we have that week.
The way we go about this is pretty informal - we don’t have like a whiteboard or PowerPoint presentation (lol). We just make sure to have an intentional conversation Sunday evening without our face in our phones. Some weeks, the conversation is longer, if one of us has something weighing on our heart.
This touch base meeting is our opportunity to make sure we don’t let feelings bottle up. If something happened the previous week that bugged us or didn’t sit well with us, we tell the other one. Big things AND small things.
We are BIG on communicating well and often in our relationship. It keeps us from unintentionally building walls up in our hearts toward the other.
You can’t expect to be on the same page as your partner if you don’t regularly make it a point to look at the book together, you know?
3. Be the kind of spouse you want to have.
PERIOD. I know we all remember learning the GOLDEN RULE when we were kids: treat others the way you want to be treated. This 100% applies to marriage as well.
A strategy that I use often: if I’m feeling upset toward my husband, I flip our roles in that situation in my head. How would I feel if I was in his shoes during this situation? How would I want him to handle the situation if the roles were reversed?
When we’re busy, it’s easy to stay in our own head all the time worrying about what we have going on or how much we have to do. This strategy prompts me to remember that it is NOT all about me and that part of my role as Adam’s wife is to consider his feelings as much or more than my own.
Anytime I’m struggling or upset in marriage, I always remind myself to be the kind of spouse that I want to have.
Oh and I have a little surprise for you - my husband and I actually recorded a podcast episode TOGETHER (!!!) answering your questions about being married and owning a business. This is a big deal because my husband is typically a very behind the scenes guy when it comes to Hustle Sanely. He helps with things like taking my photos and editing the podcast episodes. ANYWAY, if you want to listen in on how we answered questions from The Hustle Sanely Squad: