Creating Balance in Your Busy Lives
For many couples, life can seem out of balance at times. You and your partner may feel that you have too much on your plate and not enough time in the day to get everything done. Managing all your responsibilities and commitments can crowd out your commitment to the quality of your relationship and the well-being of your marriage.
When you feel that your lives are out of balance, your commitments can begin to occur to you as obligations. You feel that you have little or no choice. “We need to get some exercise. We’ve got to paint the bathroom. We have to buy another car. We should go to the theater more often.” Life can begin to seem like an endless “to do” list where priorities become unclear and activities are not getting done.
When having a sense of choice is no longer present, it is easy to be reactive and to take on points of view that don’t serve you or your relationship. Viewpoints as to “the way it is” can begin to take root. “We don’t have any time.” “It’s impossible for us to get anything done.” “It’s hard to stay on track.” When choice is absent and disempowering perspectives hold sway, it is easy for you to feel out of balance.
There are several actions you can take when you are feeling out of balance. First, have a conversation to identify what areas in your lives are out of balance and where you feel you have little choice. You can assess the various domains of your life—your home, your health, your children, your recreation, your finances, etc.—by determining how satisfied you are in each area on a scale of 1 to 10 and how much choice you feel you have in the various areas of your life.
Choose an area that you want to focus on and identify any shared disempowering perspectives in those areas of your life where you feel out of balance. Have a conversation to examine the impact of those disempowering points of view on your sense of connection with each other.
You can choose to give up a viewpoint that is not working for you and create a more empowering way to view that area of your life. Such a conversation allows you to return to being “at choice” in how you view your circumstances, resulting in a shared experience of greater freedom, power and satisfaction. While you may not immediately be able to change the circumstances of your life, you do have choice over how you view those circumstances.
You and your spouse can also support each other in all the commitments you have individually. Do the commitments you’ve individually made serve or support your relationship and your family? Have you asked your spouse to support you in extracurricular commitments you’ve taken on, such as volunteering at church, playing golf on the weekend or committing to a major educational endeavor?
Gaining your spouse’s support can make an enormous difference. It is important to have your partner choose with you. If they do, they will more freely support you in such practical activities as picking up the kids at school, making dinners or cutting the grass on the weekend. When you choose “yes” to a commitment, it is important to remember that for your lives to work together, your partner also needs to say “yes.”
On the flip side, you may be engaged in an activity where it would be appropriate to stop. You may feel that what you are doing is no longer important to you. Or, you may no longer be committed to what you were doing. You can learn to say “no” to those commitments that don’t serve you. You will likely need you to speak to those people who will feel the impact of your shifting commitment.
Balance can be restored by identifying where you and your spouse experience having little choice, by shifting disempowering perspectives to empowering ones and by aligning with your spouse around the commitments you are taking on as well as those you are saying “no” to. Your busy lives will likely be as busy as ever. But you and your partner will be in great sync with each other and happier about what you both have on your plates.
Posted in Partnership Marriage
