How to Create a Mindful Marriage

A few weeks back, I wrote about being in a mindful place right now. By necessity, I’m learning to stay present and honor my feelings in ways I haven’t done before. Apparently I’m not the only one.

In an interview for InStyle magazine last month, Jennifer Garner said that she and her husband are “in a very mindful place,” regarding their nine-year marriage. She said they’re “making an effort to be together, do things at the same time, and be loving.” With nine years under our belt as well, Mr. Watson and I are on the same page.

Having a mindful marriage implies a certain deliberateness of action, a choice to remain present and accountable to each other as you move beyond the giddy attraction of the early years and deeper into real life and its distractions.

How did this new mindset come about for us? A change in circumstances.

Our Story

Brian and I have shared challenging times before, but those were typically situations that united us against a common enemy, such as the lawsuit my business faced in 2007. But when we moved back to Silicon Valley in 2011, fundamental aspects of our life together changed.

Brian’s job hunt came down to two offers—Google vs. an early stage startup. Because he’s always been so supportive of my career decisions, I told Brian to choose whichever he wished regardless of salary or my opinion (which I didn’t even share with him). He chose the harder route: lower pay, longer hours, and the dream of a financial payout that could set us free long term. In other words, the startup.

With his decision came 80+ hour work weeks and the need for me to step up at home so that he could focus on his job. We didn’t realize it at the time but, with that decision, we were creating a shift in our marriage from dual earners to a single breadwinner and support team.

It was an unexpectedly difficult change. After working from home together for years and then traveling full-time, I was accustomed to having Brian around. We became disconnected. He was more stressed and less available, and I wanted things back the way they’d always been. We began to disagree on big life decisions. And, once, I leveled an ultimatum that he either resign or change his ways.

When you disagree on something so fundamental to your life together, you can begin to feel hopeless to resolve it and shut down. The communication strategies we’d cultivated over 12 years stopped working. We realized that we needed to change the way we were showing up in our marriage.

We completed an exercise: We decided to ask one thing of each other that we believed would make our lives better, and then we’d offer one thing toward the same end.

Brian offered to meditate daily, to help calm the stress he so often brought home with him. He asked me to practice gratitude more. (I had lost the thread somewhere in the daily stresses of life.)

In turn, I offered to do more work with my affirmations, to keep my inner monologue more positive, and I asked Brian to be more present when he was home, to spend quality time with me instead of staring into space, speccing out software designs or watching space shows.

6 Tips for Creating a Mindful Marriage

Over time, we developed six simple guidelines to create our new mindful marriage. We agreed to:

1. Schedule quality time together.
2. Stay present in mind when we’re present in body.
3. Meet each other where we are and manage our expectations of each other. Some days are more stressful than others; we needed to accept that, and to ebb and flow with the changes in our situation.
4. Listen and mirror back what we’re hearing from each other. When we’re having a discussion, it’s helpful to repeat back what the other is saying so we truly understand. This keeps us from jumping to conclusions and ensures we stay on the same page.
5. Make a conscious effort to share our feelings. We can’t help each other if we don’t know how the other is truly feeling. (This is a big one for Brian and probably most of you guys out there.)
6. Focus on what is going right in our lives—and what we agree on—instead of what isn’t perfect just yet.

It’s been about three months since we made our agreements and things are going really well. As with all marriages, we’re not perfect, but we’ve been able to let go of our mutual frustrations and return to gratitude for our many blessings.

We’re deep into this new mindful phase of our relationship, staying aware of how our thoughts impact our actions. Brian now takes two-day weekends and we maintain one date night a week for quality time. We also spend our time together in new ways, including going for walks, taking weekend road trips, and playing boardgames instead of vegging out in front of the television. And I am actively incorporating both gratitude and affirmations into my morning pages.

What do you think about our tips for creating a more mindful marriage. Did I miss anything? What would you add to the list?

For the remainder of November, I’ll be exploring other ways mindfulness is changing our lives. Stay tuned!

Cheers,