Category Archives: Marriage & Divorce
Michelle Obama's Sage Marriage Advice Is Something All Young Couples Need to Hear – Brides
If there’s one power couple whose relationship has stood the test of time AND two presidential terms, it’s Barack and Michelle Obama’s. With 26 years of marriage under their belts, the pair has mastered the art of adorable social media anniversary shout-outs (that get better and better every year), as well as absolutely winning the date night game. But, the bestselling author recently opened up about her marriage, proving (as to be expected) that it hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows throughout the past two decades.
While appearing on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon Tuesday evening, the former first lady spoke about her new memoir, Becoming, touching on a surprising revelation regarding her marriage.
“Marriage is hard, even for us,” she transparently admitted. “We have a great relationship, but the thing about marriage counseling is like I was one of those wives who thought, ‘I’m taking you to marriage counseling so you can be fixed, Barack Obama,’ because I was like, ‘I’m perfect.’ I was like, ‘Dr. X, please fix him,’ and then our counselor looked over at me and I was like, ‘What are you looking at? I’m perfect.'”
After the audience had a laugh, she went on to sing the experience’s praises. “Marriage counseling was a turning point for me understanding that it wasn’t up to my husband to make me happy—that I had to learn how to fill myself up and have to put myself higher on my priority list,” Michelle added.
The mother of two also directed her marriage advice toward younger generations. “I share that because there are a lot of young people who look at me and Barack, and you and your wife, and people they see and they think, ‘Oh, I want that #RelationshipGoals,'” she said. “But I want people to know that marriage is work. Even the best marriages require work. I call them a vexation—it’s a choice that you make again and again and again, because I don’t want young people to quit the minute they have a hardship. Because I always say, if you’re married for 50 years, and 10 of them are horrible, you’re doing really good!”
See more: Michelle Obama Opens Up About Previous Miscarriage
This isn’t the first time Michelle has publicly broached this conversation topic, though. During an interview with Oprah Winfrey in the December issue of Elle, the 54-year-old shared how couple’s therapy helped her feel more in tune with her own emotions. “I feel vulnerable all the time. And I had to learn how to express that to my husband, to tap into those parts of me that missed him—and the sadness that came from that—so that he could understand,” she explained. So if these two weren’t solidified as your #CoupleGoals before, their ability to gracefully overcome a bit of marriage strife should plant them at the top of your list.
Wedding Planning Tips From Pro Planners – Real Simple
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Advice for working couples: Hold a weekly meeting – Fast Company
I had always vowed I wouldn’t be that woman. You know, the one who makes it look so easy through her brilliant delegation but secretly is taking care of everything behind the scenes. I had always known that I’d need a life partner who would share responsibilities equally.
Fathers now spend a significantly increased amount of time with their kids compared to previous generations, but most household chores—including childcare, cooking, and cleaning—still disproportionately fall to women, and the so-called “housework gap” stopped narrowing in the 1980s. In the U.S. alone, a typical woman from a married household spends an average of 2.24 hours per day doing housework, versus just 1.38 hours a day spent by her male counterpart.
My husband is also a successful and accomplished business leader, but we have very different styles when it comes to running a household, something that became apparent early in our marriage: I’d see a kitchen that needed tidying, he’d see leftover Chinese food as an opportunity for a snack. I didn’t quite understand why to-do lists didn’t immediately appear in his brain as they did in mine as soon as he walked into the apartment, complete with categories bolded and underlined, but they didn’t. After an epic blowout, we came up with a solution that is the envy of many: the weekly meeting.
This insignificant-sounding 45-minute session preserves my sanity and allows the ensuing week to flow pretty smoothly—and without resentment.
Every Sunday, my husband and I sit down, without the children or any distractions, to discuss tasks and goals for the upcoming week. The meeting is never more than 45 minutes (anything beyond that tests our nerves). We alternate responsibility for typing up the list, and assign initials next to the household tasks. We also review the previous week’s list and look at which tasks weren’t accomplished, deciding whether they should be re-added. It is that easy.
I have suggested this simple weekly meeting to my friends, who start off skeptical but change their tone when they see how well it works. Husbands who previously appeared allergic to housework now take a more participatory role in the home. The results are real: Some studies have shown that the difference between a happy household and a miserable one came down to devising a system for household tasks. What the simplicity masks is all the underlying reasons why the meeting works:
No more nagging
No partner wants to be hounded daily to complete chores. It’s infantilizing, and hey, they didn’t (consciously) set out to marry their mothers. Before we established our weekly meeting, I was constantly reminding my husband of tasks and errands. I used to make him to-do lists, and each time I handed one to him, I wondered if it was a mistake. Was I setting up a dynamic that would hurt me later on? Affect my independence? How did the short-term gain of his getting garbage bags, bagels, and paper towels all in one trip stack up against the possible longer-term loss of a real partner who loved me and our family life because he resented me? On the other hand, there are only so many times you can ask someone to do the dishes until you get fed up and it becomes easier just do the chore yourself, which is when my resentment would appear.
We have agreed on a seven-day cycle. During that period, I promise not to hound him. Not at all. That can be hard for me, and in the beginning I would catch myself about to follow up on an item, and then suppress the frustration of not knowing where things stood. Now I make myself wait until Sunday. Giving your partner the seven days of space to execute his share is critical for this system to work.
Your partner becomes aligned with your life goals
Why do people spend a year planning a wedding but often don’t devote even an hour a week to apportioning work and family and responsibilities in the long run? After several months of dating, my partner and I had a conversation that ensured we would be starting our marriage on the same page. He asked me: “What’s important to you in a husband?” I answered quickly, “That he takes paternity leave—real leave—and spends time with our children when they are born.” I also told him I expected my husband to be a hands-on father. He was perhaps surprised, but didn’t show it. I think back to that moment as a real statement of values on my part, and his acceptance of it as important.
In short, our weekly meeting is a form of self-preservation. It creates clarity, reduces resentment, and liberates the rest of our time.
You split responsibilities equally
The key word is “equally.” Typically, men spend more than twice as much time doing activities related to lawn care or doing maintenance and repairs, while women spend more time on cleaning and laundry. In our household, this isn’t the case. After deciding our priorities for the week, we assign them equally from categories that include “children,” “work,” and “home.” Creating a shared sense of responsibility is critical in the success of anything—whether it is a business or a blissful home. I’ve never once heard from my husband that something “isn’t his job.” Within each category we break it down further. I may be better at selecting children’s gifts for birthday parties, but my husband is no slouch at coordinating playdates on weekends or communicating with our son’s school bus driver.
It works (at home and at work)
My work at is about solving problems for our business clients, whether that means helping them scale, laying out multi-year strategies, and creating partnerships to broaden their reach. It’s not that different from life at home. The weekly meeting is about creating a common agenda on which we both agree, and allocating responsibilities through a collective process. If I can’t do this for four people in my family (including two half-pints), how could I possibly do it well for an international conglomerate?
And hey, if the Sunday meeting works well for you at home, you could always also try it at the office.
Alexandra Stanton is the CEO of Empire Global Ventures LLC, a New York City-based international business development firm that assists companies in complex and untested markets.
The Marriage Advice For How To Make A Relationship Work That Happy Couples In Love Have Perfected – YourTango
No, it’s not “healthy communication” or “quality time together.”
I read a lot about relationships.
Being a top writer in love, psychology, and relationships on Medium requires a lot of research when you’re not actually a psychologist (or married, for that matter).
Recently, I read a book called The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman and Nan Silver. Admittedly, I picked this title because my boyfriend and I plan on getting married soon, and, well, we’re really hoping to make it work.
The overall idea each of these principles (and every great psychology book I’ve ever read) boils down to this:
All happily married couples exhibit best friend behavior.
According to Gottman and Silver, “Friendship fuels the flames of romance because it offers the best protection against feeling adversarial toward your spouse.”
Think about it: when you identify your partner as a best friend before a spouse, positive thoughts about him/her become overwhelming disproportionate to the negative thoughts.
If you meet a friend for lunch and she forgot to order your sandwich without onion, would you give her “the look” or start shouting about how “selfish and inconsiderate” she is for not remembering the way you like your sandwich? Of course not; you would you pick off the onions, make a joke about onion breath at the office, and thank her for buying lunch.
The positivity bias of a friendship makes it easy to look past mistakes or small frustrations. Positivity bias occurs when a relationship has had so many positive interactions that negative interactions can be chalked up to an anomaly. Instead of thinking your friend was careless enough to forget that you hate onions, you might attribute the careless mistake to the stress she’s been under at work lately instead.
Positivity bias makes it easy for both partners “to feel optimistic about each other and their marriage, to assume positive things about their lives together, and to give each other the benefit of the doubt.”
The human attachment theory helps to explain the need for best friend behavior in a marital partnership. Research conducted on the attachment theory suggests that humans tend to attach themselves to one primary person when they are upset or scared.
“Relationship partners are especially important when people are faced with a stressful event,” says social psychologist Paula Pietromonaco of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, “because [partners] have the potential to comfort and calm the person who is experiencing distress or to hinder that person’s efforts to feel better.”
In other words, happily married couples turn towards each other during an argument — even if the argument is about each other — because they prioritize each other’s sense of well-being.
Best friends don’t fight ‘til the death of their marriage because the point of the conflict is not to cause the other person pain — the point is to find a solution and move forward.
Happily married couples find a way to calm each other down when an argument is escalating, either by making a joke, apologizing, offering a warm embrace, or simply by acknowledging that you both need some time to walk away and cool down.
When you’re married to your best friend:
Nobody cares who makes the money.
…as long as you’ve got enough resources to support each other’s dreams and sustain a desired quality of life.
A best friend doesn’t mind paying for two concert tickets because he/she knows that a concert without their partner would suck. They also never make you feel bad if they pay more than you because they recognize the other ways you contribute to the partnership (i.e. manual labor, acts of kindness, doing the taxes…).
Vacations are easy to agree on.
Chores are divided 50/50.
…or whatever split both partners see as “fair.” Some couples split household chores by task (I’ll take care of the laundry if you mow the lawn), by day of the week, time of day, or simply by who gets home first. The point isn’t that the actual workload is split evenly between partners, but that there is a sense of equality in the effort contributed by each person.
In fact, best friends may actually take on more chores voluntarily when their partner is feeling sick or stressed out, knowing that he/she would do the same if the roles were reversed. While it may seem uneven at the time, best-friend-first couples trust that this temporary imbalance of effort will even out over the course of their lifetime.
You have incredible sex.
…because you can openly communicate what you like in the bedroom. Couples that are friends before lovers feel a sense of gratification when they play a role in their partner’s sexual satisfaction; they view sex as a two-player game where the object is not to ‘win’, but for both players to have as much fun as possible playing the game.
What fun is it unless your best friend is having fun, too?
You feel understood.
…and emotionally connected 99% of the time. There might be a few slip-ups here and there (even the most loyal friendships endure forgotten birthdays once in a while) but best-friend-first couples pride themselves on knowing details of one another’s individual lives.
Best friends check in with each other daily to find out how they are feeling, what kind of stresses they’re facing, and if there is anything they currently need or want. Best friends know each other’s biggest dreams, inquire about their progress, and celebrate every win (big and small).
You still fight (a lot).
…because all couples argue, whether they are happily married or on the brink of divorce. Couples who identify as best friends first, though, fight productively — that is, they fight with the intention of resolving a conflict instead of fighting solely to feel emotionally connected.
Best friends also respect each other’s style of fighting as much as they can emotionally handle. The way best-friend couples fight is no different than any other marriage; some people like to retreat for clarity during conflict while others like to confront issues head-on until it’s resolved.
The difference is that best-friend couples have found a way to fight about issues in a way that incorporates both partner’s style of processing emotions.
Could it really be that simple, though? Does treating your spouse like a best friend guarantee a lifelong happily ever after?
According to my grandma, a recent widow after 62 years of marriage with my grandfather, yes — as long as you work at remaining best friends throughout the years.
“I thought he was the cutest thing on earth,” she laughed, her eyes lighting up at the memory of meeting my grandfather back in 1956.
“But marriage isn’t heaven on earth all the time. You have to work at it, and that draws you together — the work. We had a lot of ups and downs, some worse than others, but I loved him. The more you love each other, the more you have to work at it.”
According to science — and my 86-year old grandmother — happily married couples commit to putting in the work required to maintain their friendship through the inevitable ups and downs of life.
If you feel like your relationship is more of a partnership than a friendship, shift your perspective to think, act, and respond the way you would to a best friend.
One of my favorite exercises for cultivating a sense of friendship in your relationship is to act like a puppy (i.e. man’s best friend) when your partner gets home from work. Get excited! Give them slobbery, passionate kisses, nuzzle your nose in the collar of their shirt, squeeze them in a hug until your arms ache, and tell them how glad you are to be reunited with your best friend in the whole wide world.
As an unknown source once said, “a friend is someone who knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow.”
Happily ever after doesn’t start with a champagne toast at a wedding; it starts the moment you turn towards your partner and realize you’re looking into the eyes of your very best friend.
Rachel Clements enjoys eating plants, lifting weights, teaching yoga, living in a van, and writing all of the things. Check out her website for more.
This article was originally published at Medium. Reprinted with permission from the author.
