How to go from “meh” to “Madly in Love”

If you could explain your marriage in three words what would those be? Just off the top of your head. Ready, go.

If you thought of words like…

Dry

Distant

Dull

Overshadowed

Forgotten

Same old same old

Lacking fun

Kid-focused

Coping

Disconnected

Flat

Tense

Stressed

Stagnant

Tired

you would not be alone.  These are words women from my community shared with me when I asked them the same question.

I know you probably want to have a fun, nourishing, equitable, exciting marriage so why do the majority of women feel so “meh” about their marriages?

It’s because none of us were ever taught how to have a great marriage. And the only thing we ever learned was watching our parents, who probably never talked about marriage and they learned it from their parents who definitely never talked about marriage, who learned from their parents and so really we are just living out the same outdated dynamics that were happening in marriages in the 1800s!

Obviously there have been some explicit updates updates, like marital rape is no longer legal and women can open her own bank account 🤦🏼‍♀️ which were only passed in 1993 in 1971 respectively.

But the tiny unconscious dynamics, rolls, responsibilities and ways we treat each other have gone mostly unchecked and undiscussed for generations.

Because we just don’t talk about it.

We’ve been on autopilot. We’ve made assumptions. And we’ve gone blindly into what is probably going to be the most important relationship of your life.

And what do you know, everyone is miserable.

Jonathan and I have been dedicated to working on our marriage for the past five years and through our experience research and professional help, we’ve concluded that couples that go from meh to madly in love answer YES to ALL 3 OF these questions:

1. Do you run your marriage and your family life like a super successful Business? is your partnership equitable? Do you have clear systems for your finances? Do both of you share financial power even if one person makes more money? do you have super clear responsibilities, strategies and roles within your “company”.

If you said no, then you are probably endlessly frustrated and resentful with each other. When the logistics of family life are not a well oiled machine, often women feel incredibly taken advantages of and resentful and men feel under appreciated and useless. Obviously this dynamic does not lead to feelings of romantic love.

2. Do you make time and put in a considerable effort to connect with and romance your partner? Do you plan dates? Do you tend to your own sensuality and vitality? Are you nice to the other person? Are you your best self for your partner? Does your partner feel more like a lover than your child or therapy patient?

If you said no then you are in the majority of people who believe that one should never have to create love, connection and passion, it should just magically be there if you are meant to be together. But think about it this way, if you never connected or spoke kindly to your child and made time for them would you consider yourself a good parent? Probably not. Do you understand that if you want to be successful in your job that you must create a connection and a rapport with your coworkers? I’m sure you do. For some reason we all got in our heads that marriage is the only relationship that we have in our lives that we don’t need to work on. A lot of us show more affection to our dogs than we do to our partners. But also, some of our partners are getting a lot more love and attention from our dogs and they are from us. Passion does not spring from nowhere, it’s created. And your partner is not a punching bag or your parent.

3. Are you BOTH committed to personal growth? Maybe that looks different for each of you, but you’re both thinking about how to be the most alive, healthy, relaxed, successful, loving version of yourself.  You meet every day as if it’s your last, you care about how you’re showing up as a parent, and you aren’t aimlessly going through life acting like it’s someone else’s job to make you happy. Do each of you have a sense of self responsibility? Do you trust your partner to take care of themselves and show up for what they say they’re going to do without you needing to remind them?

If you said no to this question then you can relate to the majority of women I know. There’s been an incredible emphasis on women doing personal development work over the past 10 years. I have felt very lucky to be a teacher within the space. But there’s one thing that I’ve noticed, no matter how great of a coach I am or how hard a woman works if she’s married to a man who refuses to work on himself she can only go so far in her own growth until she either feels so distant from her partner that she consciously hold herself back or she feels that her only option is to leave her marriage if she truly wants to be free to be herself. I believe that working on ourselves is an important part of our generation and it isn’t just for women, in fact if we’re married to a man it can’t just be for women.  If you are dedicated to your own personal growth, as I’m assuming you are because you’re getting this email, you have to be married to someone who’s just as committed to their own personal growth as you are to yours, else it’s just not gonna work.  Jonathan‘s personal growth looks like different from mine (he’s not in Whole Woman 🤣) but he’s done his own work and now we share a language, we’re interested in more similar things, and I don’t feel like a 36-year-old married to a 23-year-old. Believe me, I did feel that way for a long time and it was not great for our sex life.

If you didn’t say “yes” to ALL Of these questions, you are in a “meh” marriage. I would also go so far to say that you are in an outdated Marriage.

An outdated marriage is based on unspoken, outdated, agreements passed down from generation to generation unchecked. The marriage you’re in is not the marriage you need to be a modern woman in 2021.

The truth is marriage just hasn’t progressed as much as the outside world because no one has stood up and said that these dynamics are broken.

But we are!

If you want to move from meh to madly in love, from an outdated marriage to a modern marriage, then I invite you to take the leap and join me and Jonathan in Modern Marriage.

Sign up for Modern Marriage TODAY

Love,

Sarah