5 Tips To Bring The Honeymoon Phase Back Into Your Relationship | Jon Butcher

Thanks for joining us, folks. This is a series of videos with the one and only Jon Butcher, where I'm going to be asking John a couple of questions which I've always wanted to ask you. Because, Jon, you've built one of the most extraordinary lives of anybody on the planet.

Thanks, Fishy.

Now, one of the most incredible things about your life is your relationship with your wife, Missy. I have consider John's relationship with Missy probably the number one most incredible loving relationship I've ever seen between anyone. So what is your philosophy of marriage, of relationships, and what allows you to build such an exceptional relationship in your life?

Thank you for those kind words. I'm so grateful that we've been able to achieve what we've been able to achieve in our life. We've been together. We've known each other for over 30 years. We've been together as lovers for about 27.

And you've got four kids, two grandkids, and a third grandkid on the way.

That's right, yeah.

And you guys do not look like grandparents. Like that is not a grandpa bond. So let me ask you this. Today in America, one in every other marriage ends in divorce. What do you think is the problem going on there? And what would be your advice to people who are in relationships right now who want to make these relationships not just last, but thrive over decades? Mm.

Well, here's the most common story that I've seen. When we were young, it was hot. It was passionate. We loved each other. We couldn't keep our hands off of each other. We spent all of our time together. We just enjoyed each other's company. And those first couple years were smoking hot. Then the kids came, and then our careers heated up, and we just don't have as much time to spend together anymore. We used to care about how we look when we were together. Now we spend more time getting ready to go to work than we do for each other to look good. And all that passion and romance and heat that we used to have in our relationship has kind of faded. The energy that we used to put into each other has been cannibalized by demands with the kids, demands with our work, demands for after school activities. We don't have enough time to spend together anymore. And when we do finally get intimate time at the end of the day, we're exhausted from our duties and responsibilities of the day. And that's how relationships go from starting out with extraordinary potential to just descending into mediocrity. And that's the most common story that we've seen with couples over the years, I would say they naturally devolve into that story. Isaac Newton has a couple incredible laws of thermodynamics that you can apply to this. Isaac Newton proved that in any closed system, it will naturally fall apart over time unless energy is put back into the system from the outside. So no matter what, everything that we see all around us is constantly in a state of decay. That's why cars rust. That's why bodies get old. It's why everything ends up disorganizing. Newton proved this. The only way to counteract it is to put positive energy into the system and to do it constantly. So how does that apply to our love relationship? The natural state of things is the tendency to disorganize and decay. And that will happen to your love relationship if you don't consciously put energy back into the system continuously. What's the best way to do that is through habits. It's through repeated behaviors that keep things hot, keep things passionate, keep things energetically moving in the right direction. So the most important single habit that Missy and I installed more than 25 years ago was an overnight date. Alone, together every week, no matter where in the world we are. An overnight date where we have killer childcare. Now, that takes a lot of responsibility to set that up. But we've literally got a roster of people from relatives to great babysitters to housekeepers to Nan. We have that wired. Once a week is, you know, it's our date day, it's our sex day, it's our intimacy day. It's the day that I take it completely off of work, completely away from the kids and focus all of my attention on my wife, and she focuses all of her attention on me. So it doesn't matter where we are, whether we're in Africa or whether we're in the Far east, doesn't matter.

We.

We figure it out and we spend an overnight. And that's key. I mean, if you can't do an overnight, which is understandable in this day and age, at least a long day, when you come back, the kids are in bed so that you can keep it going. And that has absolutely been one of the most effective steps.

That is a beautiful, beautiful idea. What other tips would you have?

Well, for us, it has been about habitual connection rituals. So we have our overnight sex day every week. We have our daily connection ritual, which is we have what we call our ring walks, which is where we walk around our garden. You've seen our beautiful garden outside. And so at the end of the day, sometimes with a cocktail, sometimes we just walk around together holding hands, and we reconnect. If we haven't seen each other most of the day, I find out about Missy's day, she finds out about my day, and we spend an hour in our garden together just sort of reconnecting from the day. So we've got daily, we've got weekly, and then we definitely do a week a year together. Once a year, we go to a spa somewhere in the world, and we work on our lifebooks for the entire week. We get crystal clear on sort of the updated version of our life vision. And those have been incredibly powerful. One week a year somewhere in the world, doing nothing but talking about the life that we're creating.

So you're consciously creating your life with your partner by your side. That's exactly in all 12 dimensions of your life. You got it. You got it. That's amazing. I have to ask you this. As I walk around the spectacular home that you live in, the home that Oprah asked you to come on her show to talk about because it is one of the most beautiful homes in America, I see pictures and artwork of your wife everywhere. It's as if this isn't just a home you live in. This is a shrine to your lover.

I'm glad that you picked up on that because that is absolutely the truth. One of the things that Missy and I have done over our 25 plus years together is we've documented our love. And this is an amazing trick for a couple, especially for a couple just starting out, we had so many photo sessions. We met originally in the music industry, so we made a few records together. So photo sessions were kind of part of our, you know, original strategy for getting a few of our projects done. And we just never stopped doing that. Photography was just a big part of our lives. And so you're right. This home is plastered with pictures of Missy, with pictures of me and Missy and Vishen. That is just part of the mojo, man. It's part of the magic. That is a strategy that I haven't really seen many other couples use that I. It's easy to do. And like you and your wife, your beautiful wife, you should be dying documenting that right before you get too old, you're gonna look back on that and be so happy that you did it.

What would be a final tip that you could give people listening on how to craft a relationship as beautiful as yours?

Love requires action. It's not just enough to have romantic feelings or to saying, I love you is a really good thing. But it's not just enough to feel love as an emotion. If you really want to manifest an extraordinary love relationship, you've got to show your love in deeds small and big. So an example of this is I take a nap every afternoon and every single day that I wake up, I come down and get my coffee and Missy's left me a little love note by my coffee every day. And it's just a little tiny friggin, you know, on a little post it note. But what that says is, I'm, I'm thinking about you. You are important to me. You're important enough for me to take a few minutes out of my day to let you know how much I care about you. And that's just one tiny little example of how you can show your love through actions. That's part of the energy that you need to put into the system to keep your love relationship from disorganizing, which is the natural tendency. You've got to fight against that.

What about people who are in established relationships, relationships that might be decades old? How do we bring this back in? It seems a little bit difficult to break the current pattern.

Yeah, well, that's a great question, Vishen. We've worked with a lot of couples that have gone down that road for 15 years and the relationship has disorganized. I'll tell you the number one, the tool that we have found most effective is sexual intimacy. So that's a doorway in. One of the things that is the first thing to go when you're going down that bad road is sexual intimacy. There's a kind of connection that a couple can only get through sexual intimacy. A deep, deep connection. And so one of the things that we try to do early on in trying to fix a disorganized relationship is to reintroduce sexual intimacy. And that can sometimes serve as the foundation for getting things back on track. More than anything else, it takes a commitment. It takes a commitment from both people that they're gonna work, they're gonna do whatever it takes to get that relationship back on track. And sex can be a doorway in.

Thank you, John. Those were incredible. So remember those tips, guys. Whether you're starting out in a relationship or you're in an established relationship, what John just shared are powerful ideas to help you make sure that you are constantly in that honeymoon period.