How much space do you set aside, just for your s/o? And do you ever notice how easy it is to get overcommitted between daily life, work and relationships?
This week we celebrated Tyler’s birthday with a short trip to Lake Arrowhead, which is one of our favorite places for staycations, and not that I’m so dense that I forget how blessed we are to know the reward of fighting for a healthy marriage — I was reminded how seriously important it is to prioritize each other, especially when careers and other commitments tend to be heavily time consuming. It’s not new information to us but with any one of our lives it’s valuable to revisit how priorities are looking throughout each year so they don’t have a chance to become completely imbalanced. The seasons ebb and flow with what my daily workload looks like, what projects command most of my attention and how much actual ‘free’ time I have to spend intentional and quality time with Tyler and secondly, the people in our lives. That’s been a lesson I’ve had to re-visit, quite a lot, actually.
There are some people who function just fine by blending most of their free time with their family and their friends, and that’s a great way to see everybody in a limited frame of time; for us, we spent years operating that way in order to keep everyone (else) happy, but at the end of the day we were left wishing we’d dedicated more of that time to each other, alone. We value the relationships with the people in our life deeply – and we wouldn’t trade those relationships for anything, but as much as we love them, as a married couple, we’ve learned that in our situation, our priority is each other and our life, together… and sometimes that requires saying no to social commitments and being unavailable to spend our days off with other people.
If you can relate, you know that not everyone will understand or support the way you choose to use your time, but there’s no use in trying to keep everyone happy. The ones who respect that as we all grow through the years, it becomes more of a challenge to do all the things, with all the people, are the ones that I believe are supposed to be in your life, so be grateful for them and make time when each of you really can.