A Tool I Discovered For My Marriage — It Changed Everything
This Couch Could Save Your Family
Are you married? Do you have kids?
Then this writing might be for you!
To what can life be compared? It is like a person who walks up the steep incline of a hill where every step is a struggle.
Well, if you have a spouse or partner and especially if you have brought forth offspring or other human beings that you are responsible for guiding — then to what can life be compared?
It is as if, in climbing that steep mountain of life, you decided to fill up a large bag full of rocks and carry it up the hill with you.
Marriage is hard. Marriage while parenting is exponentially harder.
The Family System Drift
As change towards health works, you will never mindlessly drift towards health. If you simply allow your relationship and parenting to naturally unfold, it will move towards distance, disconnection, and a lack of intimacy or care. This is why having a family seems like it gets harder and harder as days go by and why many families eventually resort to a business like environment where the only similarity is sharing the same home.
People don’t become distant parents or checked out spouses randomly.
You are carrying a large bag of rocks…distance and checking out is the natural state.
Avoiding the Drift
In order to avoid this drift — having a family of health, connection, and mutual bonds will require intentionality. You can’t just show up, you have to create practices and commitments that guide your family towards its best version.
The simple answer, then?
Embedding into your daily rhythms and habits conversation that create shared bonds & intimacy. Conversations about what needs to be happening to make the economy of your life together as beautiful as possible.
The Tool I Discovered
So here is a practice to help you carry that existence up the mountain — it was introduced to me by a friend and has been transformative for my family system, my marriage, and my life.
It is called Couch Time — but it is really just developing a pattern of intentional conversation.
Why do you need a practice or an intentional discipline? If you asked that, you didn’t read the first part. However, for my family, we had to create a constraint to make this normal. It was so foreign that a guiding mechanism was necessary to embed this into our family’s identity. The practice creates a new normal where the training wheels can be taken off and absorbed into your natural interactions.
Here’s how it works.
- You and your partner sit on your couch, set a timer (10 minutes is a good start), and you intentionally talk to each other until the timer goes off.
- Also occurring during this time, your children, in the same room but not on the same level (i.e., the floor as opposed to the couch) must play, sit, read, etc on their own, without distracting the parents, until the timer goes off.
Of course, these mechanisms aren’t absolute and can be redefined for whatever works best in your context, but the principles are important.
A couple things begin to happen to your family when you do this:
1 — Your conversations become more intimate and meaningful.
There are three ways I noticed this:
Deeper Communication
Our communication patterns always drift towards the shallow. Many couples exhibit something called “Habitual Patterns of Conversation” where they resort to talking to each other how they did when they first met. Back when things were romantic and magical and fresh. Which means they may be ignoring years of development and still using language and conversation patterns like they were still in high school or college or their season of single-ness. This isn’t always bad, unless it becomes the norm…which it tends to do when we aren’t intentional.
By giving permission to speak as the current individuals you are, you can break out of those patterns and move from shallow to deeper communication that reflects your current states of being.
Intimacy Versus Logistics
Another process that occurs is that we fade from intimacy towards logistics.
We will sit at the dinner table and the only thing we can think to talk about is the details of the daily plans and what needs to happen. Great for business relationships. Not so much for intimacy.
So it becomes normal to kindly ask, “So where is your meeting tomorrow?” and becomes foreign and, even, uncomfortable to ask, “What are you struggling with right now?” or, “What are you dreaming to happen?”.
Eventually, your communication might simply be planning the day, configuring travel arrangements, and deciding what is for dinner…and that would be a good day. In the contrary, Dallas Willard once explained marriage as the process of discovering the infinite depth of another’s soul. Yeah…not a natural tendency when we have lots of logistical things to worry about.
So you might have to create space and permission to not ask those questions and ask the questions that continually discover this infinite soul sitting next to you.
Eliminating Relational Drift
Even more destructively, without intentional practices, we can drift towards silence or even the spiral of negativity — where we either stop talking to each other or only have conversation that resembles combat.
We begin to distrust, avoid, or even be disgusted with our partner — because we stopped discovering the endless infinite of their soul and we only focus on what about them gets in the way of my own comfort.
This process reverses that inclination that came from a lack of intimacy and connection.
2 — Your children become more independent members of the family.
The individuals of your family that are in a different pattern of relationship than the intimately connected partnership of the adults are forced to see their parents making each other the priority and that they don’t own control.
For ten minutes, what they want does not dictate what the family does. This patience eventually becomes the norm and their identity is able to be rooted outside of the adults as being their own member of the family which creates a healthier reciprocal relationship with their parents.
We noticed that our children became more likely to do their own thing or join what we were doing throughout the day instead of forcing our will into theirs. Or, at the least, they could handle a prerogative of choosing something to do while we did something else together.
3 — Everyone in the family experiences an alternative rhythm.
Especially if you do this when there are still things to be done — it exemplifies that this period of rest and intimacy takes priority over everything else. Those things can wait because this is more important.
The atmosphere of “Couch Time” sets a new standard and narrative for how the family works. When this is embedded into the identity of the family, it becomes a sustainable definition of who your family is and how it works.
4 — You Locate Your Identity In Something Larger Than Yourself.
In practicing this, you force yourself out of the natural ego-centric state that we resort to when carrying a bag full of heavy rocks up a hill.
Being creatures of comfort — in the stress, chaos, and difficulty of a family system, we crave what is easiest and convenient for us. We resort to looking out for ourselves and being detached because, while a family system creates amazing benefits for our social well being, it is hard and avoiding the difficulty, even if it means sacrificing the loss of what could be generated if we all functioned cohesively, is just plain easier. Self wins over group — even if the potential of the group would be better.
Forcing yourself out of the ego-centric and into another being by investing in them propels you towards the potential of the group.
The children begin to see the world beyond themselves by noticing the dynamic of the parents in the family system as an important component.
The partners force themselves to move past their ego-centric tendencies into the well being of the other.
Everyone recognizes they are a part of something beyond themselves…and it fosters growth to become that larger something beyond just themselves.
We started by doing it every day for 10 minutes.
At first, the conversations were hard and awkward so we got a book with profound questions in them to ask each other.
Eventually, we didn’t have to set a timer anymore and, eventually, we didn’t have to plan “couch time” anymore…that way of relating became natural and the bag of large rocks became less daunting.
I’m working on discovering how to “Become More Human”
If you’re interested, I’d be happy to share what I’m finding to help craft how you live, too. You can find more here:
