How are we doing?
We notice that a lot of social media is going against the New Year, New Me moto this year, instead saying let’s stop striving to change and accept ourselves for who we are. Good point, fair enough.
However, how does this work for us as a couple? Whilst ‘striving’ in any relationship isn’t necessarily a healthy practise, relationships do need a bit of effort. Adopting a ‘let’s just accept our relationship for what it is’ approach could be good but could also be dangerous as it could allow niggles to fester, equally it could hold us back from thriving as a couple.
Have a review?
So instead of a ‘New Year New Us’ approach (which frankly sounds exhausting), how about a review of where we are in our relationship currently and some achievable goals to work towards together.
This could look like taking different areas of our relationship; family life, home, work, social life, intimacy, spirituality and asking ourselves ‘What’s going well in this area? Is there anything we’d like to improve?’.
It might sound like ‘It’s so great that we have such a full social life but sometimes we seem to prioritise it above our time together. Perhaps we could put some weekends in the diary just for the two of us?’
Keep it achievable
You might want to go ‘all out’ and give yourself goals in each area which is great but to make it achievable, we would recommend you agree to focus on 3 areas with one goal in each area.
And in order to keep the momentum, we’d recommend you set a date in about 3 months time to check in and see how you’re doing in those areas. If nothing has changed, gently ask why not? What would it take to make the change? Do we need to tweak the goal?
And of course make sure you have fun stuff planned to celebrate along the way.
Summary
- Review an area of your relationship
- Ask – What’s going well? How can we improve?
- Agree a goal
- Set a date to review
- Have fun
