J & B reflect on their experience of our Marriage Enrichment Days
We have been married for almost 3 years and have welcomed our first baby 6 months ago. This has been an exciting time but has certainly brought changes to our relationship (just when we were starting to feel comfortable as a married couple!). Navigating the sleep deprivation and long hours at work (for J) are the current challenges for us. We came along to Christ Church’s Marriage Enrichment course because we want to prioritise working on our marriage, especially when there are a lot of other distractions in our lives.
The section on friendship and communication was really helpful. We have always found that we have quite a strong friendship in our relationship, but the course showed us a couple of areas we improve in. One area has been intentional time to catch up, as there’s so much going on – this looks like having a little 10-minute ‘catchup’ about our days when J gets home from work, without the interruption of phones or any chores. It’s been nice to be intentional with that, and we have had to work on listening to each other.
Another area we would like to work on is to encourage one another with words of affirmation – admiring each other’s positive qualities. We both often laugh about being ‘emotionally-challenged’ and find we struggle to build each other up in this way. So it is definitely still a work in progress but it was helpful to go over some ways to do this in the course!
We’ve also been a lot more aware about the times when we are together but just being on our phones. I think there was a joke in the course about having your phone as a permanent 3rd wheel in the relationship, and while we found it funny it was also very real and an important reminder. We’ll work on putting the phone down in the evenings and be present – physically – enabling more time and energy with less of what is normally a big distraction.
The last time we thought specifically about a lot of these topics was when we did our pre-marital counselling a couple of years back, so it was very helpful to be able to reflect more now that we’ve been in it for a while and experienced some of the joys and struggles of being married. We’d definitely recommend it to others for the same reason!