Try This: Four Minutes in the Morning

It’s Monday morning, and time for our weekly post on tactics to try for a happy marriage.

This is the also the place where we invite you to share your success stories and tactics for what has worked for you in finding time for connection with your beloved while creating an entrepreneurial venture.  Please leave a comment if you have a tactic or story you’d like us to share.

This week’s Try This is to spend four minutes together each morning before the rest of the day gets crazy.

Everyone can do this.  Set aside four minutes to sit on the couch with your cup of coffee and share a few thoughts about your day with each other.  Make eye contact.  Maybe hug long enough to release some oxytocin.  Tell your beloved that you love him or her.

It’s a simple, manageable, no-cost way to set a tone for the rest of the day.

You have already had together time no matter what other whirlwinds of chaos come your way.

Brad gets up at 5:00 most mornings, and I sleep in another leisurely hour or so until the dogs wake me up, so if we don’t make an effort to have even just a few minutes together our days are already on divergent paths literally before I get out of bed.

When we first started this back in Boston more than fifteen years ago, we would turn over a 3 minute egg timer so we could tell how long it had been.  Now we have a good feel for how long it takes to settle down and focus on each other and forget the clamoring email – just about the length of a pop song or the amount of time you’re supposed to brush your teeth for.

We don’t need to have four minutes every day, but there are still definitely mornings where we stop what we’re doing for a calm moment together.

Try this, and let us know how it goes –