Marriage Monday: How To Make Time For Each other

Our life is busy. When you have kids, when you're running a family, when you're running a business and all that stuff, how do you have time for each other? So it's not just going to be me today. It's going to be me and my husband, Blair, and we're going to be talking about how to make marriage a priority when everything is pulling at you. You're going to love this. Here's the big question. How are these average, everyday moms getting radical results in their lives? How are they able to transform their health, money, families, homes, and have fun doing it? The trick? We're not average. I'm Hannah Keeley, and I'm going to spill our secrets and answer your questions right now in that mom show. Okay? So this is perfect time to do this because I'm not just taking the dog on a walk. Blair is with me, and we're taking the dogs on a walk.

Hey, guys. How you doing?

So we are. One is in a puddle right now.

One dog's in a puddle. The other dog is sort of staring at us, trying to figure out why. What are we doing here?

What are we doing? So we want to talk with you today about how to. Come on. Come on, Fitz, let's go. Let's go. About how to make marriage a priority. And what we're doing today is exactly that, because we are walking the dogs. And one reason we do that together is we try to find things that are kind of like a. Kind of like rituals, like habits that we do where we're always together and that becomes our time when we talk and all that stuff.

Right. So, yeah, I think that's. That's a really key point is. Is trying to make a habit out of spending time together. So, you know. Yeah, we do have a. A time in the evenings when we, you know, we'll walk the dogs and, you know, they'll give us about a half hour, 45 minutes of just hanging out and talking about the day and nothing special. It's nothing, you know, you know, gigantic, meaningful date or anything like that. But it. It does give us a. A chance just to catch up and see what's going on with the day. And we really enjoy doing that. But. But how do they do that?

Like, if it's like, because we have seven kids, we run a business, we run a ministry, we do all this, but we always spend time together. So how do we do that? I think that's what we need to share.

Yeah, well, the way you do it is actually carving out that part of the day for yourselves on purpose. Actually getting intentional, being very intentional about it. I need, you know, we're fortunate enough that we spend a lot of time together in work and in ministry stuff already. So we see each other when we're doing that. But that's not, I'll go to the office and you'll be working from your office and we're just not together a lot. But we, you know, we are intentional about, you know, the dog walking for example. That is something that we look forward to doing at a certain time every single day. We're intentional about making at least one night a week a date night. And that date night again doesn't have to be a big production. It might just be going out for coffee, it might be going out for a dinner for a little bit, but, but being very intentional about planning for that. And then it becomes a habit after just repeated practice. I look forward to the nights that we go out on our, on our date, go to dinner or go to have a coffee or you know, go to the store or whatever. That all that stuff is, is great. And it, I look forward to it now because it has become a habit. It's become something that we do. We look for an opportunity during the week. What would be the best night for us to sort of plan for that just happens to be Wednesdays for us. So that's how we, you know, we always look forward to getting together and going out that night.

It is like making habits, like making it very intentional. And I think a problem like what we hear is one complaint from married couples. And also if you want any help with your marriage, we have an entire program called the Marriage Kitchen. So make sure you check that out.

Isn't just marriagekitchen.com marriagekitchen.com it's a great, it's a great eight part training cover. Everything just covers every aspect of your marriage.

But one complaint that we hear a lot is that, well, we just fell out of love.

Yeah.

You know, just grew apart. Just fell out of love. But the, but the truth of that is you don't fall out of love, you fall out of skill.

Yep.

You fall out of practice, you fall out of practice. Right. You don't fall out of love.

Right. And it just, things get mundane when you fall out of practice. When you fall out of the skill.

Well, you know, if you don't practice something, you're eventually going to stink at it.

Right.

Like the best athletes, they practice all the time and if they ever don't like you, you have these athletes who you know, due to an injury or something, they get laid up and they can't practice, and all of a sudden they don't have the skill set right. Like, they got to work extra hard. We don't want you to work extra. You're gonna. You're gonna throw in a sport analogy, aren't you? Okay, go ahead with the sport analogy.

So a lot of athletes that end up being injured and even athletes that aren't injured, when they're not on the field or not on the court or not on the ice, they. They're actually going through their. Their games, their moves, their techniques, their styles in their head, running through it, closing their eyes and running through play. So as far as your turn around, as far as your marriage goes.

Wait, hold on. Okay, let's turn around. Sorry, we came to, like, the end of the street. Now we need to turn around, and one dog isn't moving.

But the point. The point is that you can practice in your own head. How are you going to look for opportunities to spend time with your. With your bride, with your husband? With your spouse? Right. So, you know, going through your head what you're going to. What you want to talk about tonight, Right? And if you happen to be one of those kind of like. Well, kind of like us, we get hung up in our work just because we love it so much.

Yeah, we love it.

Often our conversations will be centered. We will mistakenly, in some instances, spend an entire date talking about work.

But you know what?

My thing is that I will practice, I will go through. When I'm on my way to pick you up, I'm going. Okay, so what happened today that was interesting, that has nothing to do with work. That we can talk about something in current events, something. You know, it just helps. It helps to frame up an opportunity to be together and share with each other just all the cool things that are happening in the world.

I gotta throw something out, though, because I think that one. One thing that builds intimacy in marriage is working toward common goals, like building your empire together. Like, you know, whatever it is. Working side by side. That's that being yolked together thing.

Absolutely.

And so, like, some people will say, well, when you go out on a day, don't ever talk about your kids and don't talk about your home and don't talk about your bills. I think that's a. That's a croc.

I love talking about, like this.

Or that's the empire we're building. We're building our family. We're building our finances. We're building our business. So heck yeah, we're going to talk about that because that's like, it's almost like how, you know, you meet with like military strategy meetings and stuff like that and, and you're all in. And so I think that's exciting having a common goal. And it could be like a ministry goal. I mean, anything, anything where you're seeing the same vision and, and share that together. I think that's really grows intimacy. One thing I wanted to throw out here too, since we're saying, you know, how do you make it a priority is just like anything. Well, we already talked about like it has to be a habit, it has to be intentional. But I want to throw something else out. There is a lot of people are like, they'll go through stages where they don't feel connected to God, right. And that again is just spending time together. Like when you can always trace back if you feel distance from God, it's usually like you distancing yourself. God never. He promises, he doesn't leave us or forsake us.

Right.

So you can go back to, you know, when did I stop like really spending time in prayer and meditation and when did I stop digging into the Bible? I think the same thing is true for your marriage. It's easy to get caught up with the busyness of life instead of the business.

Right.

And like you need to be on the same page with the business of life and make it intentional and you know, just, just like we do every day. It's not something that we have to. And I think first of all, because we've been married 27 years, that's why it's. We form this habit.

Sure.

So it's easy habit to keep. Hey mama. We'll get right back to the podcast, but did you know there is an entire online university just for moms? If you're ready to get radical results in your life, just go to mommastery.com that's M O M M A S T E-R-Y dot com. Make sure you check it out and take your free quiz again. That's mommastery.com M O M M A S T-E-R-Y.com now back to the podcast. We have made it so intentional as a daily thing, like for us to enjoy the morning together at least a few minutes in the morning. For us to have our evenings together and not feel like we have to take care of all the kids and take care of that like the kids know they've always done since they were Little like, no, like mom and dad need to spend some time together. And that's important, right?

I mean, if, if you happen to be in that season of your life. Because we certainly were at this particular.

Point, like with toddlers and babies, with.

Toddlers, or with kids that are at practice every night and you know, they have games on the weekend. So, you know, when you're out of your daily work life, you're, you're getting.

I was pushing you off the road.

You're getting, you know, you're taking your kids everywhere, so you just don't have a lot of time together. Again, we use the example of walking the dog, setting up a date night. But it might be just as you were talking about there, waking up 30 minutes earlier every morning. And if you say, oh my gosh, I need my sleep, well, then turn off the flip of Netflix and go to bed 30 minutes earlier or spend the last 30 minutes of your day together, even if it's in the bedroom.

What I would love to see is the statistics on how much screen time do you have on your phone, social media, and how much intentional time do you have as a couple. You can look at your priorities right there. You're spending more time scrolling on Instagram and Facebook and all that stuff, and watching videos and Netflix.

Here's a great exercise. Here's a great exercise that you can do, right? So for every hour of the day, inclusive of the hours that you are asleep, you know, make up, make a list that starts at midnight and goes through midnight the next day. So every hour, 12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, all the way up through 12, every single hour, fill in what you're doing, right? So at 12 midnight, I would probably.

Take an inventory of your day.

Inventory of your day, of your average day. I'm asleep at midnight, okay? I'm asleep at 1, I'm asleep at 2, and all the way till 6am well, 6am I'm awake and I go run, right? So and at 7am while I'm getting ready for the day, you know, having my breakfast and all that kind of stuff. Eight o' clock on my way to work, you know, and fill out what you do all the way through the day and be completely honest.

Yeah.

When you get. Because when you get home, you know.

That'S the highest form of truth.

Exactly. You're not doing anything, right? So 7 o', clock, 8 o'. Clock. If you are one that plops down in front of the TV screen and watches three hours of television a night, okay. You're gonna see that, but be honest with yourself. Fill it out all 24 hours. If you notice first off that you haven't carved out any time to hang with your bride, with your husband, with your spouse. You have. Okay, so there's an issue. And you can look for places you cut. And what you want to do is trim the fat. You don't want to trim the muscle. So the muscle is where you're doing your good work, where you're spending time with your kids or you're building things. Trim the fat. If it happens to be a ton of TV every night, dude, cut an hour, just an hour. You know, and the world, if you're going to miss an episode, great, you can stream it the next day, whatever. Cut an hour. But anyways, make that chart, make that list of everything that's going on in the day and then make another list, same hours and put in there where you want to with your, with your spouse spend, you know, time that you have planned for every single day. And where would it fit? Yeah, where would it fit? You have it on a piece of paper. Then comes. It comes to practice. It comes to. All right, so if we said that every night the kids go to bed at 9 o', clock, let's do 9 to 10. No TV. That's you and me. It's our, it's our, it's our date at home. Or you know, let's say 7:30 to 8:30 in the morning. Right. It's a great little exercise just to give you, you know, insight into what your day really, truly looks like and where you can carve time.

But some people may feel awkward, literally because it's like, you know what, we're just kind of like going through life and it would be weird if we just like hung out together. Like, but, but again that's. That you're just out of practice when, when you spend a season off, that basketball is going to feel weird in your hands again. You know, you're, the dribbling is going to feel a little bit awkward and you're not going to be able to hit all the baskets of course that basically fast. You know, I'm basketball, so that's what I think about. But, but you know, like if you spend a year or two years or three years out of practice, you're going to get back on the field or on the court and it's going to feel awkward, but it's going to come back to you.

But it will, it will. If you stay on the field and you keep going, keep practicing and you.

Can also have little fun things that you could do. Like, you don't have to make it awkward. Like, okay, now we have to sit and look at each other and be weird.

Right?

You could. There's so many activities. Oh, my gosh. The. The bonus that we have in Marriage Kitchen, like the date night all year long.

Right.

We have. We literally have a date night all year long. So we have date night plans. And it's not like some are really intricate, but then some are like, so easy and simple. Like, you could just. That bonus would be so awesome because that gives you. What is it like a date for every single week.

Every single week. Yeah. So 52.

Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. It's crazy. But we got kind of carried away with that, didn't we?

Yeah. But still goes back to being intentional. That's the whole thing. That's our. That's our secret. And if you aren't consciously.

Yeah.

Making plans to. To do this then. And then fulfilling it. You know, do it for 25 or 30 times to create sort of this habitual nature about it.

Yeah.

I mean, if we don't walk the dog, I feel like something. I feel like. I feel like something's wrong at the end of the day if we haven't taken the dog on the walk. I know he needs the exercise, but.

We need the time.

We didn't get time. So it becomes habitual and it's being intentional about it every step of the way.

Awesome. So there are ways. If you feel like you haven't made a priority, it comes down to making that decision and following through. And just be honest, like I said, like, be honest with how you're really spending your time. But be intentional and follow through. And it can feel awkward at first, but this is. This is how we grow. It always feels uncomfortable and then it becomes second nature. And that's where the joy happens. And so I want to encourage you just to make it a priority. Don't ever use the excuse of life is too busy, because guess what? There's not going to be a time when it's any less busy.

Right.

And. And that's the facade. You tend to think, well, you know, when the kids are older or when, you know, work gets a little calmer. That's a lie. Like, it doesn't get any calmer.

Yeah, nothing gets calmer. Nothing gets. You will fill in those gaps when something.

Yeah.

Something stops with other busy work. It's just. It's just sort of a 21st century habit for adults these days, especially where we live.

It just expands. The chaos expands to fit the time a lot, right? So you have to make it.

You have to be intentional. You have to make it priority. You have to make it those hours or that hour or two that you make available for that in the day. You have to be intentional about stopping whatever it is, else. Whatever else you're doing and making it a priority.

All right, cool. All right. And remember to check out marriagekitchen.com take.

A look at Marriage Kitchen man. Because I tell you, there are so many.

We got so many great stories. People have come through it.

But for what you're talking about, you know, couples that may have lost the spark just a little bit, right? Whether you're young or you've been married for a long time or you've got young kids or adult kids. Doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter. Check it out.

There are so many great ways that you can learn to communicate better with each other and get closer with each other and sort of reignite that flame.

Yeah, yeah, we got you covered. We love you. We got your back. We'll talk to you later. Bye bye. Are you ready to get radical results in your life? I can give you the jumpstart you need for massive success as a mom. In fact, I've got that mom show starter kit right here with your name on it, girl. And I want to give it to you absolutely free. Just go to thatmomshow.com or text the word kit K I T to 345345. That's the word kit to 345345. That mom show starter kit comes with my best selling time management program for moms. Squeeze the day, My guided faith based master mom meditation and a printable copy of the Master mom manifesto. Print that baby out. Say it every day. Just watch what happens. That mom show starter kit is valued at over $300, but I want you to have it for free. Just go to thatmomshow.com or text the word kit. That's K I T to 345345. Again, text kit to 345345. I'll talk with you later.