Are you feeling disconnected from your partner or spouse after having children? We felt that way too until we realized how to use scheduling for a healthy relationship or marriage, and it can help you too.
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Making Time for a Healthy Relationship in a Busy World
Whether you’re in a new relationship or have been married for years, it’s important to spend time together in order to have a healthy relationship. However, with the busy world we live in, that’s often difficult to do on a consistent basis.
Spending time with your partner becomes even more difficult once children are in the mix, whether they’re young and don’t sleep through the night or older and need to be constantly driven to friends’ houses or sports, life is busy.
It’s easy to forget to work on your relationship.
Scheduling Time Together
My husband and I have found that if we don’t schedule time to do something, it won’t happen. That includes time together.
To be honest, I started writing this blog post two years ago when our oldest was 5 and our twins were 3. I’m just now finishing it because I didn’t schedule time to do it. lol This also tells me that we’ve been scheduling time together for over two years so that’s pretty cool.
We’re lucky in that our kids are in bed by 7:30pm so we have until 10pm to spend time together, or apart, depending on the night. This gives us a decent amount of time, though I realize that isn’t the case for everyone.
Even when we didn’t have that block of time, we would at least schedule 30 minutes or so together, whether that be cuddling on the couch or in bed watching TV or in conversation.
Schedule Time Based on Love Languages
Our favorite relationship book is the 5 Love Languages which I read when we first were married and helped us know what we each desired and how to help foster a strong relationship. The quiz in the book and quizzes online helped us discover the love language we desire to receive and the one that we prefer to give.
Based on these results, we ensure that our time together fits into our needs.
For example, I desire touch in order to feel connected. To help foster this connection, we cuddle naked every night before bed while we watch an episode of a sitcom. There isn’t anything sexual about it, it’s just great to feel that skin on skin connection and feel connected.
My husband values receiving acts of kindness, so I keep that in mind throughout the day, doing little things for him like making his tea in the morning, bringing him lunch randomly in his home office, and things like that.
Beyond Love Languages
There are things that we’ve grown to enjoy both separately and together, including building things. I like to build miniature dollhouses and he likes to build robotic things out of wood. We both like to build with Legos and will often buy sets for each other for holidays so we can work on them side by side.
We’ve found that working on the same Lego set at the same time isn’t as fun, but that’s just us.
We also enjoy playing games, so some nights we’ll play Scrabble, Yahtzee, Sequence, or other board games.
Find something that you would like to do either with your significant other or side by side with them. Spending time together doesn’t necessarily have to be doing the same thing, it could be doing something side by side and just being in the company of each other.
If we’re working on something side by side, we may or may not have a TV show on in the background or we may just chat with each other. Depends on how we’re feeling that day.
Scheduling Close Time
As I mentioned above, we schedule time every night to be physically close to each other which helps keep our connection strong. As I’ve mentioned in another blog post, we also schedule intimacy/sex. This isn’t because we don’t like it, it’s more so because like everything else in life, if it’s not scheduled it just gets pushed aside (at least in my mind).
We schedule one night a week that we have sex which is what we decided on together. We don’t have to have it the night of the week we have set aside but there is at least a greater chance than other nights. It also doesn’t mean that we can’t on other nights. It’s a loose schedule but helps us keep that connection top of mind at least once a week.
I’m not speaking for all females but for me at least, if it’s been a while I forget that I like it. Lol As stupid as that sounds, it’s true! Then when we do have sex I’m like ‘oh yeah, I do enjoy this!’ and I’m glad that we did.
I don’t know, maybe that’s just me, but that’s why scheduling sex into our week has helped me at least keep it in routine instead of not doing it at all and forgetting that it is enjoyable and does bring us closer together physically and mentally.
Schedule Time Apart
Scheduling time apart is more important than you may realize.
Even though you’re in a relationship, you still are your own person with your own thoughts, ideas, and interests. It’s great to share that with someone but it’s important to be true to yourself as well.
It wasn’t until after we were married, had three kids in two years (twins), and I was crawling my way out of postpartum depression that we started taking time for ourselves. It started with me going to weekly therapy and having Thursday evenings off for that.
Then I also got Sunday afternoons off to go to a coffee shop and read. That’s since evolved as I work more on my blog and no longer go to a coffee shop, but still. I get Sundays off.
These two breaks as a stay at home mom have really helped me find time to find myself again beyond my feelings of ‘just being a mom’. This includes new hobbies and reviving some old hobbies.
I feel having at least an evening to yourself is important for everyone, whether you’re a mom, working mom, stay at home mom, single, or in a relationship.
Have time to focus on something that brings you joy.
We also instituted an evening each week for my husband to have as his own to work on his own hobbies or just chill alone.
Other Things to Schedule
Beyond time together and time apart, we schedule things including:
- Meal Planning I do this every Wednesday morning
- Updating our Budget – I do this biweekly
- Having a Budget Meeting – we do this monthly at the end of the month to close out the month and to plan for the next month.
- Shared Hobbies – we schedule time to work on household projects together or our own projects, side by side.
- Discussions – as odd as this seems, often there is something I realize I want to talk to my husband about throughout the day but instead of bugging him at work, I make an event in our shared Google Calendar with notes of what I want to talk about. I make the event for later that day, typically around when we eat dinner, so we can chat then or after the kids go to bed. I am able to add notes to it throughout the day and refer back to them later.
Sound Too Complicated?
I realize this might sound too complicated or too strict for your relationship. For us, it started small with scheduling a budget meeting every other week on Wednesday evening. Years later we added in my Thursday therapy then added in more time apart and time together. You don’t have to do it all at once.
Even just scheduling one evening a week in which you and your significant other are together without being on a phone or computer, that’s a start!
Then work on building in a night for each of you to be able to do your own thing, whether that’s at home or out with friends.
And go from there.
You don’t have to have the whole week scheduled like we do, it’s just helpful to us to know what’s expected. We still have a lot of variation throughout the week as needed because things do come up!
Our Weekly Schedule
Below is our rough schedule, if you’re interested. Definitely not saying this is the way to go, it’s just what’s worked for us.
As I’ve stated above, we do build in a lot of flexibility and aren’t rigid about most of it.
However, we do always make sure that we have a night together and a night where we each get to do our own thing w/o needing to be the one to tend to the kids if they wake up.
- Monday Evening: varies but usually sitting next to each other in bed watching TV and working on our computers, but that varies. Sometimes I stay in my office and work if there is something I need to finish up and is easier to do at my desk with two monitors.
- Tuesday Evening: ‘his night’ where he gets to work on whatever hobbies he wants such as woodworking, his blog, etc. If kids wake up I deal with them, he has the night off.
- Wednesday Evening: either our biweekly budget meeting or variable like Sunday and Monday
- Thursday Evening: my night off to do whatever I want, generally alone in our room working on my blog or watching TV
- Friday Evening: Our couples night…usually we have sex but not always. Sometimes we do another night. But not like the whole night is just that but we’ve found it’s good to have it on the calendar because if we don’t…then it’ll never happen. Even if we don’t have sex on Friday nights, we at least spend that night together without being on phones or computers.
- Saturday: I get to sleep in and then we typically spend time together as a family.
- Saturday Night: In the evening, my husband and I spend time together without being on devices such as phones, iPads, or computers. We usually watch something on TV for the evening while cuddling, play a game, or work on projects.
- Every Night: we spend the last 30 minutes before going to sleep cuddling naked in bed watching TV. Like I said earlier, this has nothing to do with the act of sex, just being physically close helps us feel closer emotionally as well.
- Sundays: On Sundays I get most of the day ‘off’ from being a mom. It’s tiring being home with the kids all day everyday and needing to tend to them constantly when they need things. I never get to just be “off”. On Sundays I get up with the kids at 6 a.m. and my husband sleeps in. By 9 a.m. I’m on my own to watch church via livestream and start my day on my own. He’s even super sweet and brings me coffee throughout the day some days and lunch.
- Sunday Evening: sitting next to each other on our computers most of the night working on planning for that week and hobbies, sometimes also watch TV or talk.
I’m not saying I have a perfect marriage but these things have really helped us ensure we have time to work on our own hobbies and such yet also have time together.
Other Blog Posts on Relationships
As a mom of identical twins and a son two years older, I have gained invaluable experience in the realm, and chaos, of parenting. With a Master's Degree and Education Specialist Degree in School Psychology, I spent years as a school psychologist, helping children navigate through their educational and emotional challenges. Now as a stay at home mom and professional blogger, I combine my areas of expertise to help you in your parenting journey.