We got married because we made a good team. We are good at doing things together; in fact, we enjoy doing things together! Then the wedding planning came along and suddenly “things together” often evolved into “wedding things together.”
Now that the wedding is over, I am no longer constantly thinking, worrying, stressing, planning, organizing, and doing wedding things. It left a noticeable vacuum in my life. And while it’s okay to still think about the wedding, feel about the wedding, and even obsess about the wedding, I feel like I’m ready to move on now.
But some of the things my partner and I learned and implemented while planning the wedding are going to carry over into married life.
Here are three good habits my husband and I have carried over from wedding planning to married life:
- Stir Fridays
- Tasting Tuesdays
- Wedding-Free Wednesdays
Stir Fridays:
One of the things we enjoy doing together is cooking. So on Friday, we make stir fry together. It’s an easy meal to make that has a big payoff!
We shop for ingredients together, choosing whatever sounds good this week. Then we chop vegetables together. Then one of us cooks while the other gets the dishes ready. It’s an excuse to hang out together, to remind yourself and your partner why you make a good team.
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Bonus: Stir Friday can help you practice working as a team if sometimes you struggle with that!
Tasting Tuesday:
We wanted to try out different rehearsal dinner restaurants, so we made (and keep) a running list of restaurants to try.
We tried going on weekends, but the places were always packed and sometimes the prices were a bit higher. We decided that there was nothing stopping us from going out earlier in the week, so Tasting Tuesdays began! We pick a new restaurant every week and go out for dinner on Tuesday. If we tried a restaurant but were not quite sure if we liked it or not, we add that restaurant back to the list for later. If we find a restaurant we really like, we add that one back to the list too. If the restaurant doesn’t make it back on the list… at least we had an adventure together trying something new!
Wedding-Free Wednesdays:
We both needed a break from the wedding planning. It was nice to have a no-pressure day, where we had permission to focus on other parts of our lives, where we gave ourselves a break from the stress and worry of our To Do Lists. It was nice to be able to forgive each other, even if the wedding leaked into the day, which it often did.
Wedding-Free Wednesday is a free day to just be together and not talk about the most stressful part of your life. While we no longer have to limit wedding talk, we take turns deciding what topic our Wednesdays will be free of each week. Sometimes it’s family, sometimes it’s friends, sometimes it’s work. Work is a bit tough, because we still have to go to work, but at least we don’t have to rehash the problems of the day when we get home.
When your relationship is overshadowed by stress, it can be a pretty miserable experience. When you have islands of time where the stress is brushed aside, overlooked, and perhaps even forgotten while you focus on each other and your relationship without all the guilt or pressure, your relationship in general becomes a lot more fun!
Inspired by wedding planning, work, or whatever: What are some stress-fighting relationship habits you’ve adopted?
Our big enlightenment moment came when my husband had to do the Myers-Briggs assessment during his MBA course. In addition to the usual information, there was a large section on how your personality type reflected in your conflict resolution strategies. This was huge for us. We’re almost identical personality types but our one difference had a huge impact on how we each saw conflict resolution. It has truly helped us realize that the other person isn’t crazy, just seeing and reacting to things in a completely foreign/different way.
What great ideas!
In general, we’ve found that scheduling things works wonders. We’re not married yet (September is fast approaching though), and some of the scheduling is related to wedding and some isn’t, but it’s been really effective for us. Getting things on the calendar keeps us accountable. We cook together nearly every night, and Saturdays are our designated date night. Nothing is allowed to impede on date night unless we have specifically discussed it and agreed ahead of time, which is great, because it means that we always have a time set aside just for us where we go out and actually do something relaxing and fun instead of bumming around the house or working. Other than that, we schedule gym nights at least two, preferably three nights a week (though lately that has been getting pushed off due to me being under the weather).
For tasks like wedding planning and house cleaning though, we’ve started to implement a time block system, where we set aside 30 minutes or an hour on certain days to accomplish a few things. And it can be anything, as long as it falls under the block umbrella. So if it’s house cleaning, and neither of us feels like vacuuming, we might decide to dust and clean the bathrooms instead. Or maybe for wedding planning, we don’t feel like designing the programs, so we decide to email the DJ to set up a meeting or whatever. We can both be procrastinators, so this works pretty well– we can hack our procrastination on one task by doing something else that still contributes to the whole project. 🙂
I read the title of wedding-free Wednesday, and thought maybe it would be a day for you and your husband to spend apart. My husband and I spent SO much time together when we were planning our wedding last year that we realized spending time apart is absolutely necessary.
We get up early and go on a date every Friday morning before work.
I think the rituals of a relationship strengthen a bond!