6. Make time for fun. Having fun together is essential to keeping the glow going in your marriage. In your busy lives, that may take a little planning. Some things continue to be fun, but others may get to be boring. Add to the fun things you do in your marriage. Try and shake up the familiar patterns. Howard Markman has suggested a simple way to add to your fun things to do list. You and your spouse can each make a list of fun activities you’d like to do. Trade lists. Choose one thing from your spouse’s list. Have them choose one from yours. Schedule the activities. Each spouse takes responsibility to plan the activity chosen from the partner’s list. Make the scheduled activities a priority.
When you were first dating, you probably laughed together a lot. You can still add a little humor to life each day. You don’t have to be a stand-up comic to help your marriage over the rough spots. Learn to bring home jokes or funny stories about something that happened during your day. Cut comics out of the newspaper to share with each other and post on the fridge. Rent a video of a funny movie and watch it together. Try using some props to add humor – like coming to the table in a wig or fake glasses and mustache or serving a rubber chicken for dinner.
7. Balance being a parent with being a partner. Parenthood can bring some special demands and challenges to the marriage including fatigue, increased time demands, increased financial pressures, differing ideas about how to parent, unequal involvement in parenting, and unequal division of household labor. For wives especially, this can result in feeling unappreciated and resentful, and most wives report a decline in their marital happiness after becoming mothers. But one recent study found that about 33% of women experienced an increase in marital satisfaction upon becoming a mother. This was not due to having an easy baby, working or not working, nursing or bottle-feeding — it depended on whether the husband became a true partner in parenting. For their marriage to continue to grow, he has to become a father as well as a husband (Gottman, 1999). To foster this:
• Wives can recognize Dad’s role – don’t exclude him from child care, let him be the child’s playmate
• Dad can give Mom a break sometimes by coming home early from work or being home on a Saturday morning instead of at the golf course
• Dad can share the work – the wife does the majority of the daily drudge work, which leaves her feeling disrespected and resentful. When the wife feels the husband is doing his share, she is happier and couples report a more satisfying sex life. Two other factors are also important – whether he does his jobs without being nagged, and whether he is flexible to sometimes do some of her jobs if she has had a bad day.
Source: strongermarriage.org
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