When you become a parent, your life changes dramatically. Sometimes it can seem that your life is the kids, and there’s nothing else there… not even a personal relationship with your spouse or significant other.
Kids can be a wonderful addition to any relationship, but they can also be a cause of great stress and strain. It’s common to be wrapped up in a newborn baby for the first few months for instance, but if your lives revolve around that baby solely for the next twenty years, your personal relationship may suffer greatly.
As children get older, and particularly if you have more than one child, life can become even more hectic than it was in the beginning. Instead of trying to schedule private time with each other around friends and work, you’re now struggling against work schedules, sleep schedules, food schedules, daycare and school schedules, home work time, sports time, time with friends, extracurricular activities, after school events, doctors, dentists, and more.
Sometimes that list of things to schedule for seems endless in fact, and the personal relationship between you and your spouse always seems to take a back seat to everything else. Some couples even find themselves sleeping at different times of the day and night, and barely passing each other in the hall a few times each week.
There is nothing wrong with being loving and devoted to your family and children. But adults must have private lives aside from their kids. Keeping your personal time and interests alive is difficult and it can take some work, but it’s more than worth the effort in the end.
The first thing you need to do is start scheduling things weekly. Sit down together, or even as an entire family, once each week. Sunday is usually an excellent time for this. You can all talk about the week that’s ending if you’d like, discuss things that happened, talk about what made you happy, sad, angry or frustrated.
After talking about your lives and feelings, then take some time to conduct family business. This is a time in which everyone discusses their upcoming schedules for the next week. This is not just a time to mark down all the kids events though, you need to block out time and attention for just the adults to spend alone together.
Making a standing date once each week if you’d like, and mark that off right from the start before anything else can be put onto the schedule. Block off and evening, an afternoon or an entire weekend that is just for you and your spouse without any kids. Don’t just block that time off to spend together though, make plans about what you’re going to do. In other words: Make a date.
Plan a night for movies and a dinner for instance, or plan to go see a concert or play. Make plans for a spa weekend, or a camping trip alone. Just make plans, and make them specific. If you leave the time blocked off but have no specific plans of things to do during that time period, you’re more likely to let other events and activities intrude on that time. And spending that time alone with your spouse outside of family engagements and activities is critical to keeping your sanity, and keeping your love alive.
Looking for more information on Marriage or Long Term Relationships YourLifeAfter50.com is an authoritative site for baby-boomers and issues that affect them.
Jerry Stearns is a writer and the editor for YourLifeAfter50.com, which is a website devoted to baby-boomers and their issues such as Family Relationships, Health and Dating.
Copyright 2007 YourLifeAfter50 http://www.yourlifeafter50.com
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