When you’re dating it feels like you can’t possibly get enough of each other. It seems like any time spent apart leaves you with a deep urgency to connect and you can hardly wait to spend more time physically present with one another.
Then, you get married…
Time passes and suddenly you feel low on the totem pole of priorities. “What happened?”, you might ask yourself. “Why doesn’t my spouse make time for me anymore?” If this sounds at all familiar, here are some tips to help get the ball rolling again.
Get Curious and Ask Why
If you want to spend quality time with your spouse, you need to gently speak up and figure out what’s going on. Maybe your spouse doesn’t realize that the two of you are spending less time together than you would like, or maybe there’s a very real and tangible reason. You can’t know for sure unless you ask, so try starting a conversation in this likeness: “Honey, I really miss you. Is there a reason we haven’t been spending as much time together lately?”
Be Fun To Hang Out With
This might be a great time for you to do some personal soul searching. Have you changed? In the recent past have you turned down one or multiple invitations to hang out with your spouse? Have you personally become stressed out, negative, critical, or overall unhappy? Let’s face the facts: no one wants to hang out with a critical, negative, or unhappy person. So check yourself and see if there’s any room for you to make some positive changes.
Shake Things Up
Routine is great for a lot of things, but in regards to intimacy… routine is a mood-killer. So, try and shake things up! Remember the rush of new-ness and adrenaline when you first started dating? Your marriage needs that. So, plan an activity for you to do together that neither of you have done before. Take a cooking class, go together and serve dinner to those in need, go rock climbing – anything new and fun!
Re-Connect Emotionally AND Physically
Our blog is full of Connecting Questions. Do what you need to do to plan a couple of hours alone and ask as many questions as you can back and forth. Try to learn new things about one another and plan to make sex happen afterwards. Newness is life-giving to a relationship. It leaves you craving more of each other and that’s exactly what we want!
Don’t Give Up
If you and your spouse have fallen out of the routine of spending time together, it might take some time to get to the root issue. So persevere and don’t give. Your spouse and your marriage are worth it!
Spending regular quality time together is a key sign of a healthy marriage. So if you and you’re spouse are not doing that, it’s vital you figure out why and fix the problem!
Watch our popular video “When Your Spouse Stops Trying” to get more help right now
Written by Anna Collins
Anna Collins lives in sunny Southern California with her husband and two children. She is passionate about her marriage, staying at home with her kids, writing, coffee, good conversation, and game night. Her life dream is to someday write a book and see it published.
