Episode 107: How to Reconnect with Your Partner Without Turning Them into a Project
ITUNES | SPOTIFY
You're great at planning the things that matter. The calendar, the meals, the kids' activities. So why does your relationship keep getting whatever time is left over, which is usually none?
In this episode, we're tackling a question that comes up often in coaching: Is it okay to set a goal around my marriage? If the idea of being intentional about your relationship feels weirdly clinical, or you're worried about turning your partnership into a project, this one's for you.
You'll hear why wanting to reconnect isn't a sign something is broken, why scheduling connection time isn't unromantic (it's just realistic), and how to think about your relationship the same way you'd think about carving out one-on-one time with your kids: with intention, not perfection.
Links and resources mentioned in this episode:
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You are listening to the Life Coach for Working Moms podcast, the show where we are talking about what it actually takes to make life work as a working mom. I'm your host, Katelyn Denning, a full time working mom of three and a certified life and executive coach. I'm so glad you're here and I hope you enjoy this week's episode. Hello. Hello. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. Today I wanna address a question that I received in coaching recently, and actually one that does come up fairly frequently and it has to do with being in a partnership or a marriage. And so if you are looking at the title or hearing this intro and thinking, that's not me, totally fine. And I want to offer that the topic today, while I will use examples that. Draw from the experience of being in a partnership or a marriage, that the topic itself is applicable to any relationship that you want to deepen, that you want to grow, that you want to feel. Connected in again, especially if maybe that relationship or those types of relationships have taken a backseat to being in the thick of parenting and intense work hours. So again, I trust you to take these examples and apply them where they feel most relevant for you. So the question that I received that. Is the spark for this episode was essentially, is it okay to set a goal around my marriage? It feels weird to want or even entertain the idea of optimizing my marriage in the way that I. Have been working on optimizing my meal planning routine, or how I manage our family calendar or my workday structure. I don't want to make my partner a project. It's a valid question and concern and, and I do see it happen. I tend to work with women who are craving structure and routine and organization because they are managing so much. They wanna put some things onto autopilot so that life can run more smoothly. And what can happen sometimes is we start to organize and to optimize things in life. Like I said, a, a meal planning routine. Maybe we establish a weekly check-in, meeting with our partner to review the calendar coming up , and divvy up responsibilities and. Events. Maybe you install a skylight calendar or some other family calendar and chore management system, and you figure out a process to start actually tackling those house projects or to check in with your budget and finances regularly, you start to see improvements because of these optimizations that you've done. You're feeling like you're making progress day-to-day, life starts to feel better, and so you can start to scan and look around your life and think, well, what else could I optimize? This is going so well. I'm getting great results. Let's do more. And perhaps there are more things that you can tweak and update and put a system or a routine in place for. Sometimes we can fall into the trap of optimizing for the sake of optimizing, where every little thing that we do has to be a plan and a checklist and a routine that we've written out all of the steps and we need to follow it to a t. In case it's not clear or in case you're new here. I live my life and encourage others to consider finding the balance between the two, knowing what areas of your life deserve to be optimized so that they do require less mental capacity and energy to manage. And what areas of your life deserve to be a more human experience, a more flexible experience. And so if you notice that your relationships aren't where you want them to be, you can feel torn between wanting to make them better in the way that you've made all of these other parts of your life better, but also feeling like relationships shouldn't need that, or that to approach it like a project can take the humanness out of it. Sometimes I will have clients tell me that their partners get tired or frustrated of how they're always trying to improve things, right? Can we stop with all the systems? Can't we just be, and I get that. So I wanna share today what I see across coaching hundreds of working moms at this point. In talking to you listeners of the podcast, what you can do, because I do believe, as I said, that there is a middle ground here. I wanna start out by saying if part of what has led you to this place of feeling disconnected is that you are carrying a heavier load, you are carrying more of the mental load for the household, for the family than your partner is. That can absolutely lead to feelings of resentment and frustration, which lead to feeling disconnected. I encourage you to listen to last week's episode, episode 1 0 6 if you haven't already. All about the mental load so you can identify if that's where you are. And so if that is one of the major causes for how you're feeling in your relationship, absolutely. Making the work that you do, that invisible work more visible is optimizing and it is important. Sharing your list, inviting your partner to participate. In reviewing that list, starting with a couple of the responsibilities where you can practice ownership, accountability and trust. Trust that the other person is capable, can do the thing and can follow through. That is a huge part of feeling connected. Trust, acknowledgement, appreciation for what each partner does and how they show up for the family. If that is where you are right now and you're feeling that this is the major barrier that we have to feeling connected, maybe even more so than time. I absolutely help clients with keeping score, sharing responsibilities, feeling more balanced with their partner, using fair play and other coaching strategies. So definitely reach out if that is where you are, because it can be hard to set that aside and connect if you are so exhausted from doing all of the things and holding all of the things. So that is a piece of your relationship that maybe does deserve some optimizing. You can make that a goal and a project that you are working on to better balance and share the load. If you are feeling okay with the amount of labor that you hold and you are still just not connecting. Then you might be thinking, what's wrong with us? How do we get back to the way we used to be? How do we even find the time? So many women that I talk to, and I know this has been my experience in the past as well. Say things like, by the time we get the kids to bed, the lunches for tomorrow packed or the kitchen cleaned up. There's hardly any time. I just wanna lie down. I just wanna read. I just wanna do my Duolingo or wash my face. I don't have it in me to have a conversation or to talk at all. I wonder, I don't feel connected to this other person. I hear this one a lot too. We are lucky to get out for a date once a month or even less, but I still hear that hesitation. I don't wanna turn my marriage into a project. I have enough of those already. That feels sterile. What's interesting is I wonder if you had a goal of getting closer to or spending more one-on-one time with one of your kids, how would you approach that? I can tell you that this is a very common goal in coaching especially for working parents. To have more one-on-one time to have more fully present connected time with our kids. And so if you did set that as a goal, you might come at it thinking first about, all right, well, what's reasonable? Where could I start making progress here? Maybe it's 10 minutes a day of conversation with my kid. Maybe it's a monthly one-on-one date or outing with my child with one of my children, and I'm gonna rotate it around. I wanna keep that goal top of mind, and I'm gonna plan for it because I know that if I don't set aside a Saturday, once a month to go out with each of my kids or to, you know, follow their lead and do something that they want, that we'll just schedule over that time. When I ask you to think about your kid , and making that a goal of having a stronger connection and a stronger relationship with them, it doesn't sound strange at all. At least I don't think it does. Sounds like someone who is busy, who wants to make sure that their most important relationships fit in alongside everything else. And so I would offer that your marriage or your partnership or if you're inserting friendships here, they are no different. One of my favorite relationship experts, she's a sex therapist. I follow them on Instagram, Vanessa and Xander Marin, they wrote the book Sex Talks, the Five Conversations That Will Transform Your Love Life. I'll put a link to that in the show notes if you wanna check them out. They talk about scheduling time for intimacy, and that's nothing that they coined or developed. That advice has been around for a long time, and still lots of people bristle at that idea. You wanna be spontaneous. It's not real. If it doesn't happen organically. But parents know better than anyone that if you don't have it on the calendar, you will just fall asleep. You will be too tired. Putting something on the calendar is a visual reminder of its importance. We say yes to things on our calendar that are important. The meeting, the networking event, the soccer game, the birthday party, the concert. When it's on the calendar, it rises in importance because it's scheduled. We've committed. We are reminded that that thing is coming up because we see it every time we look at the calendar. It is something that we plan for and plan around and then even look forward to. You can do the same with connection time, and if you've read any parenting books or if you follow Dr. Becky at Good Inside, you know that it is not necessarily about quantity, it's about quality. 10 uninterrupted minutes with your kids, where you're solely focused on them and really listening. pays dividends in your relationship moving forward. That is true of any relationship. It just needs to be intentional. Maybe that looks like a conversation at the end of the day if you have the energy and the mental bandwidth to come up with anything to say at that time. Or maybe it looks like sitting outside now that the weather is nice on the porch, together with a mug of tea, listening to music that you both enjoy. Maybe it's working on a puzzle together or playing a game. If that's your jam, maybe it's reading an article together and discussing it. I had a client years ago who would do that with her partner. They would take turns choosing an interesting article that caught their eye that they wanted to read and discuss, and they would print it out and both read it. Right, because that's so much shorter than reading a full book. Or maybe you enjoy a dessert or a snack, that one of you selected and prepared for the both of you. 10, 15 minutes of time was something that you've decided in advance is easy to do and fun to do at the end of a long and tiring day of working and parenting. Now, not that we, we want to treat our partners the same as we do our children, but there is a lot to be learned from how we would approach spending more quality time with our kids. It would probably start with a conversation if they're old enough, which that's typically more the age where we think about wanting to build this strong connection. You might say something like, Hey, I'd love to spend some one-on-one time, just you and me. Do you have any ideas about what activities we could do together that, you know, maybe don't take up a ton of time, but we could start and could do together? Maybe they toss out some ideas and you toss out some ideas, and then maybe you put it on a list because remembering the next time you go to have that one-on-one time with your kid is hard. You've lived a lot of life in between Then. Maybe with your partner, it starts with a conversation. Hey, this is important to me and I know you wanna watch your show, or you wanna do your thing in the evening, and I do too. We don't have to do it every night, but maybe once a week or twice a week, could we spend 30 minutes together after the kids go to bed? What kinds of things could we do? And then you put them on a list because remembering those at 9:00 PM after a long day is hard. And then you plan it. Maybe this week you're looking forward to an evening hangout after the kids go to bed on Tuesday and Thursday. 'cause those are days that you don't have extracurriculars or you're not out late doing lots of things. Maybe you decide you're gonna play cards one night and then you're gonna enjoy a beer together on the other. You don't have to be rigid. It can be flexible planning. If someone gets sick or you had an unexpectedly hard day and it's just too much to follow through, you can move it. You can move it, not cancel it, move it to another day, but try to follow through. This is important. Then when you have the plan and you've decided, Hey, it seems like these days work best, let's aim for Tuesday, or let's aim for Wednesday. Look forward to it. Something that you get to do at the end of the day. Yes, you have a goal. You have a goal that you wanna spend some one-on-one time with your partner, that you want to connect with them in a way that goes beyond just looking at the calendar and talking about who has what going on when, and whether we need toilet paper or what we're gonna have for dinner. You wanna connect again, and so you make a plan because it's important. That's not optimizing just for the sake of optimizing or wanting to be as efficient as possible with your relationship. You're doing these things because it's important and when something is important, we do need to proactively and intentionally plan for it. Otherwise, the rest of life will just fill our time. Think about any other thing in your life that you've been wanting to do. If you don't put it on the calendar, if you don't commit to it and have a plan for it, it doesn't happen. I have been saying that I want to sew an apron for myself for. This is embarrassing, at least a year now, and I have not made a plan to do it, and so therefore it hasn't happened because there are always more important things in the moment to do the same is true of your relationships, so start with the mental load. Reach out if you want, help and support with that. And then make your plan for reconnecting. Where do you want to start when it comes to focusing on and setting a goal around your relationship? This work is so common. In my one-on-one coaching program, yes, we cover routines and systems and time management, but we also get into the bigger things in our lives, like our relationships with our partners, with our children, with our friends and community. I have two one-on-one coaching spots open right now. I'm looking for two working moms who want to make time. Not just for their relationships. So that's certainly something we can work on, but also for their own goals as well. Maybe you wanna work out consistently or spend more focused time with your kids or create stronger friendships or community in this season of life, and you just need help fitting that in with a demanding job and all of the responsibilities that you have at home and with parenting. If that sounds like you, I would love for you to answer a few short questions. over at themothernurture.com/application. Once I receive your answers, I will reach out with more information from there. And if you wanna check out any of the show notes, links to things that I've mentioned here in the podcast, you can always find those over on my website at themothernurture.com/podcast. All right, I hope this episode was helpful for you today. I can't wait to talk to you again next week. Until then, take care, I'll talk to you soon. Thank you for listening and as always, for being a part of this working mom community. You can find everything related to this episode in the show notes at themothernurture.com/podcast, you can also find information about how I support working moms just like you through one-on-one, and group coaching, as well as access a number of resources and articles all on my website at themothernurture.com. I will see you again next week for another episode of the podcast.
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