One date night to reconnect with your spouse

It’s hard being in a relationship. You have to think about the other person as well as yourself. The relationship is constant work. Between working your job, kids, and household chores.. it makes it slightly exhausting at times. When the life stuff happens it can get pushed to the back burner. One date night can reconnect with your spouse.

By the time you realize that has happened, you are getting snippy with each other or straight-up arguing. No one wants that when they are in a relationship. When this happens you definitely need to take a break and reconnect with your spouse. One date night can reconnect with your spouse after an argument…

Mike and I are pretty good about communication. Mike just has a harder time with it because I overthink everything and nothing really bothers him. We have been working really hard to keep the arguing to a minimum… because face it… we are human. It will eventually happen. Even when we do our life audit together sometimes we don’t see eye to eye. It’s a work in progress to reconnect with each other. This is one of those times…

Valentine’s day was rough

I am not going to lie… Valentine’s day was rough. I thought Mike was going to be off and it turned out he had to work. Which didn’t make me mad, I was sad. I had brought up to Mike the weekend prior that I was feeling a little sad and lonely. Mike was having his own stuff going on at work and kind of blew off what I had said. I knew though that what was happening at work was taking a toll on him. So I let it go.

A few days later I brought it up again. However, Mike had to leave for work. This was putting a chip on my shoulder. This schedule we had was making us live separate lives. He works nights, leaves by 4p, and is home at whatever time in the morning, sleeps till about 3p. So we are only seeing each other if I happen to be up when he gets home or an hour before he leaves. He is working 6 days a week, only having off Saturdays. I didn’t know that part at the time, but I know now.

Feeling Disconnected

I was feeling disconnected from Mike we were only seeing each other for less than 2 hours a day. Knowing how the night schedule worked before was if you are working nights you work Sunday through Thursday. So, I was so stoked for Valentine’s day. Spending the actual day with my love.

WRONG!

Because of this job he is working on is huge. I mean huge… like million dollar contract huge. They have to work 6 days a week. My bubble burst. I wasn’t mad, I was just sad. He said we would do something Saturday because he was off. I agreed and was really excited again. Being the romantic man when he wants to be he brought me chocolate home and set it on my nightstand. He is not quiet at all and woke me up. It was a sweet gesture.

Feeling Overwhelmed

The last thing he said to me was to let me sleep for a little bit and then we will go do something. I was up now so I agreed and did the housework while he slept. I didn’t know how long he wanted to sleep for so I “tried” waking him up after 5 hours. He just wasn’t having it. Trying again at 3p. I asked him if he wanted to go do something and he said yeah.

I walked out to put on my shoes and came back into the bedroom. He asked why I had an attitude. I said I didn’t I just thought we were going to go do something. He snapped. I HAVE TO SLEEP! Which caused me to burst out into tears.

Fighting fair doesn’t always happen.

I am not going to go into detail about what was said, but we both said things that shouldn’t have been said. The rest of the night consisted of me in the living room crying and he was in the bedroom eventually fall back to sleep. The argument was not resolved at all, but at 1a we both decided to go get food. We pressed pause on the argument and just enjoyed breakfast. That ended quickly when he copped an attitude with me for no reason.

And then we were back to not talking.

Why are you together?

I don’t write this to bad mouth, Mike, or to bad mouth our relationship. I write this because it’s the truth. What you see online is only 10% of the truth. I share this because it’s these moments that define a relationship. You have 2 options, you can say “Eff it” and leave or you stay and fight for what you have.

Through every argument that Mike and I have had (and we have had A LOT in almost 8 years) we always choose to stay and fight it out. It’s all about working together to reconnect.

We are 2 different people

Mike and I are not the same. We are 2 different people with 2 different opinions and personalities. He does not think like me and I do not think like him and in those heated moments during arguments, we forget that. I will say something to him like “ You could have just apologized and we could have moved on”.

He replies “I don’t get why you are upset in the first place. I don’t let things bother me and everything bothers you.” and at that moment it hit me. I have not explained well enough for him to understand. He is taking my frustration and sadness as having an attitude and being angry.

Take some time apart

It’s then I realize we need to take a step back and cool off. We need to come back to this when we are not so angry or easily able to cop an attitude.

This is when we switched rooms. I now went to the bedroom and he went to the living room. He had to stay up now because of his night schedule. I went to bed because I like being up during the day.

We let the argument go for now.

How did we reconnect

Days went by and we were friendly, but the tension was still high. His next day off the following weekend on the 21^st we were going to go to the Florida State Fair but the traffic was horrible. We ended up riding around Tampa and just talking. I brought up the fight and he said he was sorry for blowing me off… He was just tired and cranky. Which I totally get. He was working 70+ hours.

It’s then I explained if he could just take a little time and maybe ask how I was doing? I am in a new city with no friends besides him. I just missed my best friend (which is him if you didn’t know).

We ended up at a local bar around the corner from our house. We had a couple of ciders and I decided that Mike and I were going to answer a few questions. I saw Craig from Wheezy Waiter do this on his Youtube channel with his wife and I thought it was amazing.

36 Questions

We did all 36 questions and were at the bar for 2.5 hours. We had 2 drinks apiece. It was nice to answer these questions that then led to other stories being told and jokes being made. It was the best night we have had in a while. As much as I didn’t want to spend the money. I think it really helped not being home. It was a neutral space neither one of us had been to.

According to Arthur Aron from Interpersonal Relationships Lab at Stony Brook University in New York, who published his results in “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness” in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (1997). He says “These questions only take about 45 minutes to discuss—and they almost always make two people feel better about each other and want to see each other again”.

I think Aron is right. It felt like our first date all over again with a nonstop conversation. It’s just what I needed a night out with my best friend. By the end of the night and we were heading home, We couldn’t wait to have another date night.

If you would like to try the questions click here.

What we needed to reconnect

There were a lot of highs and lows. It was an emotional rollercoaster. I think all in all the biggest takeaway from this is that it’s okay to but head its okay if you fall off track, but in the end, you need to pick yourself back up and get back on your course.

I think we needed to have that argument. Things needed to be said.
I think I needed a good ass crying session.
I think he needed the sleep. (cranky ass)
I think we needed to have time apart to think about the things that were said.
I think we needed to be outside of the house with no distractions. Just us and our feelings/thoughts.

The arguments mean something

All the arguments we have had over the years I know not one of them ever means he doesn’t love me. I know at the time it feels like that because things are said or done. I am guilty of it too. In the end, we choose each other. We choose to duke it out to make our relationship better.

If we never argued throughout our whole relationship something would be seriously wrong. I would be weirded out. We are 2 different people, we are bound to have different understandings of things and different opinions on how it should be handled. In the end, it’s all about just being heard, learning a lesson, reconnect, and move on.

I hope you guys enjoyed this little sneak peek into my perfectly imperfect relationship with Mike and how we reconnect. Let me know in the comments below how do you and your significant other handle arguments/disagreements and reconnect with each other after?

Until Next Time, Have a Good Day!