How Do I Say This: Spending time alone

Welcome back to How Do I say this? A series where I, a couples therapist, give you specific scripts for your most common communication challenges. Today's challenge is we need to spend some time separately. Okay? So first of all, let's just say that alone time is an important and necessary part of any relationship. So here's what you definitely don't want to say. I want to spend less time with you or you need to leave me alone for a little bit. Obviously, that's going to hurt your partner's feelings and make them feel defensive, right? So. So instead, I want you to focus on yourself and I'm going to give you two different tactics. The first is if you have some sort of activity or interest that you haven't really been pursuing because you haven't had any alone time, talk about that. So say something like, hey, you know, I've been realizing I haven't been able to play my guitar at all lately, so I'd love to take Wednesday evenings to myself to be able to focus on that. Now, you don't need to have a specific activity or interest in order to take alone time. So the second tactic is to focus more on how you are able to show up in the relationship and for your partner when you have alone time. So you could say something like, you know what I've been realizing about myself when I have a little bit of alone time, I'm able to be so much more present with you. Let me know what your communication challenge is down in the comments and make sure to follow along to see if I picks your situation for the next in this series.