Thursday, December 10, 2009

Ideas on How to Nurture and Improve Our Relationship as a Couple

I believe that marriages these days face a lot more challenges than in the past. One big reason for this is busyness. The world we live in now is so fast-paced. Couples often find themselves hurrying from one place to another, scampering to finish one task after another. Unfortunately, with all the things we think we need to do, sometimes nurturing our relationships takes a back seat. This should not be; because no matter how so in love a couple is, sooner or later the feeling will die down and hard work should begin to continuously work on keeping the love alive.

My husband and I are not spared from these challenges. Even with all the planning that I do, I still sometimes find myself having so much on my plate. The same is true for my husband who has a very demanding job right now – a tough job that entails him to be on call 24/7. While we are praying and waiting on the Lord to hear our prayer that he would find a new position where he doesn’t need to be on call 24/7, I made a list yesterday of activities the two of us can do during our monthsary celebrations to continuously keep our love alive and our bonding strong. I’m sharing these with you thinking that some couples out there might also benefit from them.

1. Meet with Ninongs and Ninangs to share concerns and ask them for tips on how they were able to overcome similar challenges when they were young couples like us. It’s also a time for us to share with them our joys and victories as a couple. This could be done on a quarterly basis.
2. Have a heart-to-heart talk or dialogue.
3. Watch a love story in the movie house or at home and discuss the good points from the movie that we can learn from or adapt in our relationship.
4. Eat out in a nice restaurant with a romantic ambiance.
5. Go to mass together.
6. Go to a studio for a photo shoot.
7. Visit places where we used to date.
8. Visit Powerbooks and read a book on relationships or marriage and discuss learnings over dinner or on the way home.
9. Post something related to our relationship, wedding or marriage on our blog.
10. Meet with single friends and inspire them with our love story.
11. Do an activity we both like. In our case, these are some things both of us enjoy doing: badminton, dancing, singing, learning to play a musical instrument, serving in a ministry or charitable institution, feasting on good food, having a massage.
12. Visit model houses and discuss dreams for future house and ideas on how to make it a reality.
13. Meet another couple among our circle of friends who are planning for their wedding or who have difficulty conceiving a child and inspire them with our story.
14. Plan and make arrangement for a family time or vacation.
15. Go and discover a new place and share the memory of visiting it for the first time.
16. Serve each other throughout the day using the 5 Love languages.
17. Attend a retreat or recollection.
18. Do a project together (i.e. organize family photos, make a photo collage or mosaic, organize an area in the house or make a D.I.Y. home project)
19. Together, prepare and cook a special dinner for both of you.
20. Check-in in a hotel.

We plan to pick 12 activities from this list for our monthsary celebrations in the next 12 months. The rest we would probably schedule for other bonding times. Hope some couples out there got some fresh ideas from our list.

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