Is There a Recipe for a Healthy Marriage?
Humans have been coupling up and canoodling since the Paleolithic period. And while the Stone Age recipe for romance might have been grabbing your cave-buddy and grilling some wooly mammoth steaks on a stick over an open fire, history proves that relationships and recipes keep evolving. Now we live in the age of open and honest communication, couples therapy and online cooking classes. So what exactly have we learned in the last 2.5 million years? Well, a lot actually. Grab yourself a nicely aged glass of merlot and lets reflect.
The base of any healthy marriage is communication. Learning to express your feelings, worries and thoughts with your partner is the very thing that allows you to be heard. Trust me, your partner wants to understand. They also want to be understood. In the past couple of decades we’ve been inundated with high tech ways of communicating. We’ve gone from mail to email, to paging, to texting, to direct messaging, in what feels like the blink of an eye. But are we better communicators? I actually think we’re regressing. These days, we abbreviate our thoughts into textable words that autofill. We chat about everything, but nothing too meaningful. And we often misinterpret the tone of what’s being said because we’ve stopped looking one another in the eyes. It’s like a recipe with so many ingredients, it’s just no fun to make!
Roles in relationships have changed too. In the days of hunting and gathering, our very survival depended on a clear definition of responsibilities and division of duties. But today, our roles are quickly evolving. We can better afford the luxuries of inner purpose, happiness and self-fulfilment. Taking care of one another has moved beyond the realms of safety and finance into the realm of emotional well being. We expect more than ever from our partners. We want them to be our teammate, confidant, lover, best friend, advisor, coach, therapist, audience, co-worker and even oracle. Just to overcook another food analogy, we’ve gone from steak and potatoes to gluten-free beef Wellington with a side of scalloped, herb-infused root vegetables.
Learning how to have a healthy marriage is one thing. Incorporating what you’ve learned into a daily practice is another.
What we haven’t learned in that last couple of million years, is how to get things right all of the time. I’ve been married for twenty five years and just this morning I acted with the demeanor of a neanderthal. I was short-tempered, uncommunicative, and oblivious to my husband’s feelings. And he’s the person I love and adore the most! I acted this way despite having spent the past year researching and writing a book about how to have a more remarkable relationship! Look, we may have come a long way as a species. But we’re still human.
Learning how to have a healthy marriage is one thing. Incorporating what you’ve learned into a daily practice is another. When I wrote Hey, I Love You...I wanted to make a foolproof recipe for creating your best life together as a couple. So I included carefully measured amounts of wisdom, meaningful words to share, and a very analog way to express them. Who would have thought, in this day in age, that an old-fashioned bookmark would be the perfect conduit to getting you interacting and being romantic again? But quite simply, it is. Now communicating is as easy as marking a page that truly expresses how you feel, and leaving the book for your partner to discover. The book makes sure your words are constructive, meaningful and kind. And it allows you to process your partner’s thoughts and concerns in your own good time. It helps you to listen, and even reciprocate your feelings. And when it comes to growing closer as a couple, I promise you, this is one recipe that’s impossible to mess up.
