Marriage and Intimacy Tips for Christian Couples: Secrets of Happily Ever After

How to Build a Foundation of Trust and Romance

• Monica Tanner • Season 3 • Episode 258

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Are you ready to supercharge your relationship in 2024?

In this episode, I'm sharing a game-changing lesson from my own experiences in 2023 that I'm carrying forward to make this year the best yet!

After examining the last year to understand what worked and what didn't, and embracing the lessons learned from challenging moments, I'm sharing with you a practice that will help ALL couples build more trust and intimacy this year.

I'm revealing the key habits that keep couples thriving, including the essential practice of regular date nights.

Click HERE to get my list of 102 creative winter date night ideas to make prioritizing time with your partner even easier.

Monica Tanner:

I feel like this lesson has been very poignant, and so I want to make sure that I give it to you and that I apply it into my 2024 kind of goals or intentions, or whatever it is that you like to call them.

Monica Tanner:

Have you ever wondered what makes the difference between those couples who absolutely love to be together and the ones who merely tolerate each other in their old age? Hi, I'm Monica Tanner, wife to a super hunky man. Come to For Kids, relationship Coach and Intimacy Expert. My goal with this podcast is to help you and your partner swap resentment for romance, escape the roommate rut and nurture a bond built on trust, communication and unconditional love. Each week, I'm sharing the secret strategies that keep couples madly in love, dedicated and downright giddy about each other, from the honeymoon phase to the golden years. I'm on a mission to craft the code of happily ever after, and I'm sharing those juicy secrets right here, because an awesome marriage makes life so much sweeter. Let's get to it. Hello and welcome to the secrets of happily ever after podcast. I'm so grateful to be with you today.

Monica Tanner:

We are just about a week into the new year and I don't know about you, but I am not the kind who makes New Year's resolutions like right on New Year's Day. I feel like we're still with family. There's still a lot going on. I have to wait a little while until my kids go back to school and things start to wind down a little bit and I get back into my routine and then I can really pay attention to what is it that I want to accomplish this year, and part of what I do when I do that, which I believe is one of the most important parts of making New Year's resolutions, is going back over all of your experiences in the past year, figuring out what went well, what didn't go so well, what did you learn? And for me, I like to draw out what were some of those challenging moments of the past year that taught me something that I want to make sure that I bring into the new year, and for me this year it was something very specific and very poignant that I felt like came up over and over and over again.

Monica Tanner:

So, as I plan for the new year and all of the things that I want to accomplish and improve upon, I want to make sure that I really honor this lesson from 2023 and bring it with me into 2024, so that I have that extra supercharge, because I am certain that the universe teaches us exactly what we need to know when we need to know it and, instead of beating ourselves up for taking so long to learn it or whatever, I think that when we know better, we do better, and always tell us to my clients, but the most important part is that once we know better, that we start to implement it. So in this episode, I really want to touch on something that I learned this year in my own life working with other clients and in my continuing education certification for relational life therapy that I have been absolutely loving. I feel like this lesson has been very poignant, and so I want to make sure that I give it to you and that I apply it into my 2024 kind of goals or intentions, or whatever it is that you like to call them. But before I tell you what this very important lesson is, I want to encourage you that, if you're thinking about things to do to make 2024 your best year ever, I want to encourage you to really make a commitment to put date nights on your calendar each and every week. I know that there's lots of marriage experts out there who have lots of different advice about how often and how to do date nights, but I think that one of the most important things that you can do as a couple to keep that fire alive, to keep working on the relational skills and to keep the curiosity and fun available to you in your couple ship, I think you have to make the commitment to spend at least three hours with each other every single week.

Monica Tanner:

Now, of course, there's going to be extenuating circumstances or times when you're traveling or things that you can't quite make it look exactly the way you want to, but I think that, no matter what, you can commit to spending three hours getting to know your partner better, doing things that you enjoy together, making memories, and so to help you in this process, I created a download which is absolutely free, and it's 102 different creative winter and holiday themed date activity ideas. So some of them are free, most of them are very, very cheap. Some of them cost a little bit of money, but there's 102 ideas on there for you and all you have to do is go to Monica Tanner dot com. Backslash winter dates. That's how you get that free download from me and then start putting date nights on your calendar like a non-negotiable appointment with your spouse to do something fun together. That doesn't have to be expensive or elaborate or far from home. It just needs to be planned in advance and intentional. And I know that we're busy, everybody's busy, and things come up. So my husband and I have a rule that date nights can be slid around on the calendar, like if a sporting event comes up or somebody comes into town or something like that, but they cannot be erased, and so if I could encourage you to do one thing in the new year that would be really, really powerful for your relationship, it would be to put date nights on your calendar every single week. All right, enough of that.

Monica Tanner:

In today's episode, I want to talk about one of the lessons that stood out to me the most, which is this idea that many of us, as humans, have a hard time receiving the things that we want most. Now let me explain. One of the things I think is so important that I teach couples is to always be asking for more of what you want. A lot of us feel like our spouse especially if we've been married for a long time should just know the things that we want to, just know how to treat us or know the things that make us happier, light us up, when, in reality, we are always changing. We're always growing, and the best way to get what it is that we want in our relationship is to ask for it, and not just ask for it, but to be specific about teaching our spouse what it is we want and how they can give it to us. So I did an entire episode on how to get more of what you want in your relationship. That's episode 252. It was not very long ago, but you may want to go back and review it or listen to it if you haven't already, but in it I line out very specifically how you can ask your partner for more of what you want in your relationship.

Monica Tanner:

Now here is the problem that I see a lot of couples run into, and that is when we start to get more of what we want in our relationship, we tend to have a hard time receiving it. A lot of times we want to disqualify it. How you taking the intimacy level quiz. Yet If not, you absolutely should. All you have to do is go to monnecatannercom backslash quiz and take a three minute quiz. At the end I'll tell you what level of intimacy you and your spouse are at, and I'll give you next steps to be able to increase your intimacy. Regardless of what level you're at, you can always make improvements. So do yourself a favor and go to monnecatannercom backslash quiz and learn about your level of intimacy and how to improve it.

Monica Tanner:

Now my mentor, terry Reel, calls this transmission reception work, and so often what happens is when we start to get the things that we asked for, we start to disqualify it, like maybe it's too little, too late, or that didn't feel sincere, or they're only doing that because somebody asked them to, or the dreaded, they're only doing that because I asked them to, which, if you think about it, makes no sense. But it's just human nature. For some of us it's really hard to just take in the things that we've always wanted, especially if we had to ask for it. So I'll give you an example of how I've seen this very recently in my own relationship. So I have two teenage daughters, so teenage daughters can be super difficult. One moment I'm super annoying to them, the next moment I'm kind of cool, the next moment I'm totally embarrassing them, and the next moment they want my help with something right.

Monica Tanner:

It's like a roller coaster of emotions all the time and I really consciously have tried to make an effort to not get triggered by their ups and downs and their emotional swings and all the different emotions that they have in relationship to me, and to just kind of and to just show up as the best mom I possibly can. And what I want is to create a really good relationship with my girls and sometimes all I want is them just to be nice to me, right, and I know I've talked to my husband a ton about this. I'll just like at night, I'll just like, oh my gosh, one of the girls was just totally on one today, like I feel like I spent my whole day doing stuff for her and then she just treated me like crap. And you know like I'll just kind of vent out to him, right, and so I know, because my husband is awesome, he'll go to my girls and be like you know, try to be nicer to mom and, you know, try to show some appreciation and things like that, right? So then the next day one of my girls will be really, really nice to me and I'm so grateful.

Monica Tanner:

But in my head of course I'm saying I'm disqualifying it somehow by thinking, oh, she just wants something from me or oh, she's just doing it because my husband told her to, which completely puts up a block. Do you see to me just receiving, like, okay, my daughter is being really nice to me, let me just take that in and be really nice back to her, and that's how we're going to bond. And we do the same with our romantic partner, we do the same with lots of the different relationships in our lives. And so I think that this one thing, this difficulty that we have oftentimes receiving the things that we want the most, blocks us from actually appreciating and enjoying it. Because the reality is and I like to ask myself this when I'm thinking those thoughts, I don't try to resist them or make them go away.

Monica Tanner:

If I think she's just doing this because she wants something from me, and I realize that I'm thinking that, or even my husband right, I like my husband will do something really nice that I've asked him to do and he totally does it. And what if I have the thought he's just doing that because he wants to snuggle with me later? Right Now, what is actually the purpose of that thought? What is having that thought doing for me? Sometimes it's protecting me, like, okay, I don't have to just feel gratitude and love for him because I've totally disqualified what he just did. Sometimes it's protecting me because if maybe that is the reality, then I don't have to like feel bad about it, right? But the truth is is if I asked him to do the thing and then he did the thing, the chances of him doing the thing again and again and again are much higher.

Monica Tanner:

If I can take it in and just be grateful and reward him for doing the thing, like thank you so much, I noticed you did this thing and I really appreciate it and I just love you, right? Even if he did the thing for the wrong reason, who cares? He did the thing that I asked him to do. And how can I show more gratitude and encouragement for him to keep doing that thing that I really always wanted him to do, right? So that's the lesson. That's the lesson I've seen repeated in my own life. I've seen it in my client's lives as they get better at asking for what it is that they want the difference between when they just qualify their partner's actions versus when they just open their heart, receive it with gratitude and then show appreciation and reward their partner for doing exactly what they asked them to do. We can even turn this on ourselves.

Monica Tanner:

So here was the original thought I was having. As you are making your New Year's resolutions, as you're getting together with your partner and talking about maybe some shared goals or a shared vision you might have, maybe you're giving each other some feedback remember that as your partner starts to do more of what you want them to do even if you had to ask them to do it, which, in my view, is the best you ask them to do it, and then they start to do it. That's awesome. Instead of disqualifying it, take it in Same thing for when you come through for yourself, when you hit that awesome weight goal or exercising goal or studying goal, or you go on your first few dates, instead of disqualifying, make sure you open your heart, celebrate your victories fully, receive the thing it is that you wanted, and then reward yourself or your partner or your children for doing exactly what it was that you were hoping that they would do.

Monica Tanner:

All right, so that's it for today's episode. It's just this little lesson, but I've learned it in such a big way and I hope to bring it to your awareness, that ability to receive the goodness, to receive the efforts of those around you, to really come through for you without disqualifying it, showing more appreciation and love and rewarding their efforts. So it is my sincere hope that you're feeling hopeful that this next year has so many remarkable things in store for you and for your spouse, and I'll see you next week. Same time, same place and, until then, happy marriageing. If you had as much fun as we did just now, I hope that you'll head over to your favorite podcast player and leave a rating and review for the show or share it on social media. That's how other people can find this awesome content and we can spread the message that happily ever after is possible. Feel free to check out my website, monnecatannercom, to find out more ways you can work with me and, as always, thank you so much for spending this time with me. We'll see you next week.