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A Week Long Celebration of Marriage

in Relationships, Uncategorized

Did you know there is a whole week devoted to marriage?

Marriage Week is February 7 – 14. It is an annual celebration and campaign to strengthen marriage, thereby reducing divorce rates and this benefits children. These days leading up to Valentine’s Day, we want to focus on healthy relationships. Each day we will share our experiences or experiences of others that will inspire you and your significant other to get closer, reminisce and make plans to share new experiences with each other.  Though we are strong proponents of marriage (and not just because I love going to weddings!) we do know many couples that are in healthy relationships but have chosen not to get married, for various reasons. Therefore we wanted to find a way to have this week focus on celebrating and strengthening healthy relationships and not only relationships of married couples.

Last week, I was sitting in my car listening to Watercolors on Siruis XM and thinking about how to structure eight blog posts in 8 consecutive days. I did not want the material to appear disjointed but it needed to have a natural flow. I was really enjoying this song I had never heard it before. I checked the radio display and saw the song was by Marc Antoine and it was called “Unity”. And then it clicked! I can centralize these blog posts around Unity and focus on what couples do together. With the lack of unity in our country today, one side pinned against the other at the leadership level, “politics” that cause division at work and even division in one of the organizations where I am a volunteer, it is refreshing to come home to peace and enjoy the comfort of my best friend. He has always been be supportive of me and me of him through good and bad, just as we promised in front of God and our friends when we took our vows.

Dennis and I met in 1986 and we were friends for many years. We have been through great times and really dark times. Through it all we knew that no matter where each of us were, we would be there for each other. Because of our decades of friendship. we did things a little different. We expressed our love for each other and then started dating, knowing that we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together.

Did you know that according to a 2013 Pew Research Center survey about nine-in-ten Americans (88%) cited love as a very important reason to get married, ahead of making a lifelong commitment (81%) and companionship (76%)

 
Dennis and I have a strong partnership and what we believe is a healthy marriage, but like everyone we get busy and don’t have the time to “check in” on our relationship. Late January through mid April, Dennis works about 70-80 hours a week and October through mid January I am working about the same number of hours. So for about 7 months we are just trying to get through the day at work and enough sleep to do it again the next day. Marriage Week has given us an opportunity to pause and reflect and focus on our relationship.  Just today, we re-evaluated how we handle conflict resolution and decided to try a different approach that is fair to both sides. It was a great conversation, but we would not have thought about it if we were not writing about Marriage Week.

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Over the next 8 days we want to highlight ways to strengthen your relationship. Each day a topic will present a topic related to the celebration of marriage and how to keep your union healthy. The topics will focus on rekindling your love, ways to share new experiences together, and activities that will keep you connected and could elevate your relationship.
 
One activity that Dennis and I enjoy doing is working on projects. Among many small projects, we jointly worked on large initiatives such as planning our wedding and designing our kitchen. We collaborate really well. It gives us the opportunity to spend more time to spend together and we end of talking about things other than the normal “how was your day at work”. Without the opportunity of the projects we work on, we wouldn’t have discovered some of the skills and interests each other had.
 
During this journey of preparing for Marriage week I spoke with 4 married couples at different stages of their relationship to learn why they got married, how they stay connected with there are competing priorities of work, job, and family, what past and future experiences they wanted to share. Stay tuned this week to read more about what makes their union strong. There are many similarities, some differences and some “a ha wished I would have thought about that” moments!

So if love, 💗, enjoy sharing new experiences with your honey, and always looking for travel recommendations, stay tuned for more stories about on couples that have strong relationships as well as tips and recommendations to keep your union happy and healthy.

Dennis and I created AlwaysAHoneymoon.com to provide valuable information and recommendations for couples that enjoy traveling and sharing new experiences together. We are not marriage professionals but just two people that want to share what we enjoy in hopes that others will try it and enjoy too!

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  1. Pingback:A Week Long Celebration of Marriage | Blessies

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