Nashville Marriage Studio

What you do with 40+ hours of your week matters when it comes to your relationship. Because spending the majority of your time doing something you hate or that you find no value in will take a toll on your relationship. The depression, anxiety and insecurity that crappy jobs breed do not understand boundaries and will be more than happy to ooze their way into your relationship.

What are you doing to protect yourself and the person you love?

For many, we hear the dreary job reports on the news and assume that there is nothing we can do about our job situation until the economy gets better. Or until some magical job fairy comes along to save you. Whichever comes first.

Today, I would like you to step away from the excuses and introduce you to a (free) resource that can help you gain a sense of power over you job situation. This What I Know About Getting a Job is a (free) ebook from Brazen Careerist is a wonderful collection of advice from top HR professionals on tips and insights on how to get your job search truly rolling.

Here’s the thing: Deciding to take ownership of your career and finding what value you bring to the world could possibly be one of the best ways to improve your relationship.

The most common piece of advice I hear is for the couple to try and take it all in, that the day will be over before they know it. Remember to breathe, they say.

The same is true for the time that it takes for your relationship to grow from friendship, to dating, to engagement, and to marriage. It’s easy (especially for us females) to get caught up in getting to the next stage.

When you’re single you want a boyfriend.

When you have a boyfriend you want a fiance.

When you have a fiance you want a husband.

Just like you don’t want to rush through the hours leading up to your wedding day, don’t rush through the relationship leading up to your wedding day.

Remember celebrating Valentine’s Day with your single friends. Remember saying goodnight on the front porch at 3 in the morning. Remember the dreams you shared when you first started talking about building a life together.

Remember to breathe.

If you read personal development/self-help books you’ve probably heard the parable of the Jar of Rocks.

You have a jar and you have rocks in various sizes. Big rocks the size of your fist, pebble sized rocks and grain of sand rocks. The question is how do you get all the rocks into the jar?

Well, you put the big rocks in first. Then the pebbles. Then the grains of sand. Any other order would not be successful. Or so the personal development books say anyways.

So what are the big rocks in your life? What do you make sure makes it into your Franklin Covey planner, and what do you merely hope fits into the crevices of the important things?

Deep down I think we all know what the big rocks should be. They should be  our family, friends, and of course our special sweetie. But those are usually the ones we just wish we had more time for, and in the end they get the leftovers when it comes to time and attention.

A big reason that they fall into the crevices of our schedule is because we don’t have a plan (another self-help book nugget of wisdom: “Failing to plan is planning to fail”). So let me help you out:

15 minutes daily
1 evening weekly
1 weekend monthly
1 week a year

In an effort to help couples in Nashville do a better job with Love Management, I’m starting a weekly newsletter with ideas on how to work this time into your busy schedule. Just sign up here (and it’s free)!

Are you getting married within the next year? Want to do something now that will help prepare you for your future?

Then join us for a Bound Together Workshop at Wedding 101 at The Factory in Franklin!

Nashville Marriage Studio and Wedding 101 would like to invite you to spend a Saturday learning about what it takes to have a successful marriage and feel even more confident with your decision to get married.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

What kind of attitude do you need for a great marriage?

Can we really feel closer after a fight?

If you’re looking for comprehensive education on all things married life then sign up for this workshop today!
And don’t forget that in Tennessee getting premarital education
will save you $60 on your marriage license.

Details:
Location – Wedding 101 in  The Factory in Franklin, TN
Date – Saturday, July 17th
Time – 10am – 3pm
Fee – $100
Space is limited, so email Marie McKinney Oates as soon as possible to register (marie.mckinney@gmail.com)

I don’t know about you, but images from the Gulf, like the one above, break my heart. I know there are so many humans affected by this, but my heart aches for the poor animals who called the Gulf their home. That poor bird, right?!?

The thing is, our problem with the oil spill started long before an explosion on an oil rig. There was our insatiable hunger for oil, companies more interested in profit than safety and a government willing to let an industry regulate itself. These problems have been here for years, but it isn’t until a beautiful bird is covered in oil that we take a closer look.

The same thing happens in our relationships, and it is why I believe that premarital counseling and/or education is so vital to the success of a marriage. The dynamics and issues that exist on your wedding day are the same ones that may eventually lead to your own “relationship oil spill”, such as infidelity, loss of intimacy, or simply drifting apart.

I’m sure that anyone affected by the oil spill would do anything to go back 5 years in order to prevent this catastrophe, so what are you doing today to prevent a similar catastrophe in your future marriage?

Are you a married couple in the Nashville area? Looking for a way to reignite the passion and sense of partnership that existed on the day you said “I do”?

Then Spark just might be for you.

Love, Milk & Honey is debuting a new marriage retreat that encourages you to treasure your marriage in new and unique ways. For example, you’ll be given an interior design consultation, a photography session with Ulmer Studios,  and a tailored date night (that you both just get to show up at!) and various advice and talks regarding marriage.

How stinkin’ cool and “out of the box” thinking is this? I love it.

The retreat will be happening on August 20-22nd at Aloft Hotel in Franklin.

If you’re into creative ways to strengthen your marriage then I’d seriously check it out – Registration Info.

I had a high school math teacher that had an interesting way of forcing me to confront my fear of failure.

Every Friday we’d take a test covering whatever we’d learned that week. We’d get the test back on Monday and our homework would be to review our incorrect answers. And then correct them.

It didn’t matter how high your grade was, unless you got a 100, you had homework. The homework assignment forced me to deal with a couple of things: 1) I wasn’t perfect, even if I was doing really well in the class, and 2) Mistakes are our friends as long as you learn from them.

Even as a teenager I knew that Ms. Barbee was teaching me something that was much more valuable than just the Pythagorean Theorem. She was teaching me how to deal with failure.

She reframed failure from something to avoid to something to learn from. Seeing incorrect answers on a returned test no longer filled me with dread over how I screwed up, instead I was curious about how I screwed up and wondered if I’d be able to figure out where things went wrong. I was also able to get a clearer picture of the mathematical concepts I was truly getting and had simply made a silly mistake, and which concepts  were still way over my head.

Where has your relationship or marriage been tested?

How did you guys do?

How did you do things right? How did you fail?

Did you confront the failure?

How do you normally deal with failure? Your partner?

How is your normal failure approach different when it comes to your relationship?

What would you have liked to have done differently?

What makes your relationship still valuable, even in light of its weaknesses?

Learning to love is just as much about learning to fail.

My husband and I had a pretty heated argument a few weeks ago. In the midst of it my husband stayed relatively calm and collected which only seemed to infuriate me. I wanted him to react, I wanted him to understand how badly I had been hurt. I did the only thing I felt I knew how to do at the time…

I went for the jugular. I said something that I knew, without a doubt, would hurt him.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t helpful. It was not loving. But I did it anyways because I quit thinking about our bond and about the man I loved and had promised to take care of, and instead all I cared about was feeling better and having my point heard.

I waited for him to retaliate. I waited for him to throw a blow that would equal mine, but he didn’t. He simply said that he knew I was hurting and that he was sorry.

Once I calmed down I asked him why he has never, in the two years we’ve been married, retaliated when I’ve been mean and he said, “On our wedding day I promised to love you and take care of you. That promise doesn’t go away just because you’re being mean.”

Touche, my friend, touche. And thank you.

What are some vows you’ve made that you’re finding difficult to keep?

Here in Nashville we’re being told to conserve water because the floods have taken out one of our water treatment facilities.

(btw, this poster is a great way to show support for Nashville…get yours here)

The first couple of days of the mandated water conservation were kind of a, well, bust. We heard that we should cut our water intake by half but I’m guessing most of us just thought the mayor was talking to… someone else?

At one point our water reserves dipped below 50% which had the city begging us to take them seriously. Cut your water usage, they pleaded.

And Nashville listened.

A week later our reserves have doubled to 88% (keep taking short showers and no car washes quite yet), and I have to say that I’m quite impressed with my fellow Nashvillians. I mean, that was pretty fast and I didn’t hear even a whisper of a complaint.

I’ve been wondering if we will be able to keep it up. If we’d find that it isn’t that unbearable to take 2 minute showers instead of 15 minute ones. Or staying committed long after the flood of 2010 to catching our unused water rather than letting it run down the drain. Would it be possible for this horrible event to produce more water conscious Nashvillians?

And then I started thinking crazy thoughts…

How did we go from halfheartedly listening to becoming water conserving ninjas? More importantly, how could we use the same process to cut down on the criticism, negativity, defensiveness or contempt in a relationship?

Identify the Crisis
Most change happens in response to a crisis. Running out of clean water would have been a pretty big deal and we would have felt the effects immediately. We wanted to avoid that so we turned the faucets off.

What will happen if the criticism and negativity continues in your relationship? Recognizing how your relationship can be affected (breaking up, divorce, being miserable) can be easy motivation to change your behavior.

Define the Desired Behavior
Sam Davidson wrote a great article about what half your water usage actually looked like. It was hard to know whether you were doing a good job cutting back on water when you weren’t really sure how much water you normally used. When people made concrete suggestions (take Navy showers, don’t flush every time someone peed, or hold off on washing clothes for a while) it made it a lot easier to conserve.

You have probably paid the same level of attention to the amount of negativity in your relationship as the amount of water you use while brushing your teeth. Both go relatively unnoticed. Once you start paying attention to where most of the negativity occurs (being annoyed when you walk in from work, grumpiness due to hunger) you’ll be able to decide on concrete behaviors that will make a difference.

Supportive Community
Soon after the flood a rumor started that Metro Nashville would be cutting off water. This rumor caused some people to get scared and fill bath tubs up with water which further drained Nashville’s reserves. It could have easily been a disaster if everyone operated out of this fear because then there really would have been no water. Instead of depleting our water reserves, we calmed down and made jokes about being stinky together.

It’s always easier to change a behavior when we have the support of a group making the same change. Surround yourself with a community that values relationships and wants to curb the criticism, too.

Become a criticism conservation ninja. Today.