I love new beginnings and New Year’s Day is no exception! It’s an opportunity to reflect back on the past year and plan for the new year without boundaries. For most, resolutions revolve around fitness goals or financial planning but they shouldn’t stop there. Couples should take this time of year to outline what you can do to allow your marriage to flourish!
Here are ten (five here, five in the next post) resolution suggestions that can make your marriage stronger this year. Feel free to tweak, add, or subtract from this list as needed to make it meaningful to you and your spouse. The main thing is that you’re intentional about building a strong, Christ-centered marriage. Like any goal worth pursuing, building an awesome marriage takes grace, determination, and vision!
1: Pray together every day
This is first on the list for a reason; it’s absolutely vital to a strong marriage! Consider scheduling a time slot where you automatically pray together. For Selena and I, we usually pray just before one of us leaves for the day. Other days, we bring our concerns, stresses, and excitement to God while lying in bed just before falling asleep.
Find a time/method that works for you and stick to it; then watch your faith grow together and your love deepen.
2: Have more experiences together
This is simpler than most realize. Set aside a few weekends and drive someplace where you can escape your typical surroundings – for us it’s the mountains or the beach. We love to find inexpensive hotels or places to camp for a night or two. We love to browse unique places on Airbnb.com and find great deals within a 4-5 hour drive; you can find great rooms/homes for rent for pennies on the dollar.
The point is to get out and purposefully spend quality time together where laundry, bills, and housework don’t matter.
3: Schedule regular dates
About a year ago, Selena and I decided that we would have breakfast together every Friday morning. It has become the highlight of our week. We usually get up a bit earlier and hit up the local greasy-spoon for coffee and some eats. For us, having breakfast together allows us to be energized and fresh – we’re usually pretty tired by the time evening dates roll around.
To each their own; the main point is to have regular time with your best friend where you can just connect and have fun together.
4: Plan and dream together
What are your dreams together? One of our dreams is to have a lakefront house w/ horses some day. These desires, so long as they don’t become idols, are healthy. Planning and dreaming for the year will energize you immediately, and help you realize your joint dreams eventually.
5: Identify and remove destructive habits
We love Netflix. It’s become our sole source of TV entertainment. It’s great because we don’t have to watch commercials, it’s horrible because it can consume hours of our time if unchecked. This usually leads to undisciplined sleeping habits (staying up way too late, I fall asleep on the couch too often) which in turn makes quality morning routines hard to build.
One goal we have this year is to get up earlier, which means we need to go to bed at a reasonable hour. Hopefully curbing this destructive habit will allow us more quality time before bed as well as more productive morning routines (devotions, praying together, working out etc).
Other problem areas could include spending habits, eating habits, or even how you communicate (lazy communication causes loads of issues). Identify your problem areas and resolve to do something to fix them; with God’s grace you can see some improvement!
There are our first five resolution suggestions for this year; see the next post for another five! We hope this year is memorable for you and your spouse as you live and grow stronger together.
Questions: What resolutions do you and your spouse have for this year? What past resolutions have you made that have helped strengthen your marriage?
Have you heard of the The 31-Day Pursuit Challenge?
Every marriage begins with passion, purpose, and pursuit, but few stay that way. That’s why we wrote Husband in Pursuit and Wife in Pursuit Together, they make what we’re calling the 31-Day Pursuit Challenge. Couples are encouraged take the challenge together. We’re already starting to hear stories of transformed marriages! Are you up for the challenge?