How Improving your Marriage is like Taking a Vacation!

The steps you take to ensure you have a good vacation are the same steps you can use to improve your marriage. It really can be as simple as that! Keep reading to find out how.

Whether you plan a vacation a year in advance or on the spur of the moment, you know that sometimes you must make solid plans to rejuvenate. Just so, marriages need regular times of rejuvenation.

Sometimes marriages go stale. The love, passion, companionship, friendship, and joy once found in each other can seem to have gone missing. When that happens, you don’t have to give up. When life goes stale, you don’t give up. You plan a vacation! So take time and do some research so you can find a means of relationship transformation that works for both of you.

You use care and creativity to plan your vacation. These come in handy here too.

Many people buy marriage help books, read them, and set them aside. Some first set them aside where they hope their spouse will find them and read them. Usually, the dust collecting on the jacket cover wins and the book winds up on a shelf. A stale marriage is an invitation for you to apply your creativity and care to imagine how things can be different, what it will take to make it so, and who you need to be in the process.

You begin “living” the vacation in advance as you dream of it, set things aside you want to remember to take with you, and finally pack.

Are you familiar with a practice the best world athletes do of imagining their victory before attaining it? Every single world class athlete would tell you they never achieve a goal they haven’t first imagined. Imagining the improvements and success you will have in your marriage is a vital part of the manifestation process. You change your habitual thinking from the things that disappoint and frustrate you to the differences you want to experience. This imagining reveals to you what you need to do and how you need to be to make the changes. Without it you’re on the ocean with busted sails.

Before you leave on vacation, you take care of the details. You handle the mail, newspaper delivery, and figuring out if and how you’ll go online while you’re away. If you have children there are decisions pertaining to them whether they go with you or stay at home with a relative or trusted sitter.

When a relationship is under stress or going stale, it needs undivided attention. It needs time to breathe and relax so that it can open to new possibilities. This means details need to be attended to. Projects around the house, extracurricular activities, volunteer and committee work, these kinds of things and more may need to be set aside for a short time so that you have the time and space you need to relearn how to play together, pleasure each other, share your dreams and desires, and learn to respect and cherish each other again.

Once there you enjoy the vacation for all it is worth! Perhaps it’s all about total relaxation at a resort or on the beach. Or maybe there are local sites and flavors you want to take advantage of. You make it your own.

Once you begin using the resources you’ve gathered to help you make a difference for your relationship, give yourself over to them. If you are constantly measuring or judging your success in incremental stages, you will drive each other crazy! For instance, if the route you have chosen is to learn to appreciate the differences between the sexes and how that affects your relationship, if you judge yourself or each other every time you fail to appreciate the differences, you won’t enjoy the process and will likely sabotage it.

While you are on vacation, you rejuvenate. Even if it is one of those vacations so full you feel you need a vacation from your vacation once you get home, that’s ok! You got out of your box, out of your routine, you stretched yourself with a new place and things to see, hear, touch, smell, and do that were out of the ordinary. Exhilaration can be exhausting just because it’s unfamiliar!

Sometimes trying new things with each other can feel threatening. Whether new things has to do with sexually pleasuring each other, learning new ways of communicating, trying new hobbies together, etc. you can feel as though it isn’t working when all that is happening is you are out of your comfort zone. Give it time. For instance, new ways of pleasuring each other can become a matter of what once made you blush now makes you feel like a powerful lion (or lioness)!

You come home from vacation a different person, richer and fuller, for having taken time off – for having new and different experiences.

The time you take to attend to your marriage, honoring yourselves for putting in the time and energy, allowing your love to grow and deepen; these things make you different people. You “come home” richer and fuller for the experience. You have more joy and satisfaction in your marriage because you took responsibility for re-creating it that way.