self-care: changing relationships & staying connected.

It's been a while, but as I try to get back into my blogging groove, I want to return to thoughts from Austin author and life coach Renée Trudeau's wonderful book, The Mother's Guide to Self-Renewal: How to Reclaim, Rejuvenate and Re-Balance Your Life. The book is available at Renée's website, at amazon.com, or locally at Book Woman, Book People or The Crossings.

The following is from chapter nine, Changing Relationships: Staying Connected.

Often, after having children, couples find they begin to feel disconnected. This feeling is usually more intense when your kids are young, but it can continue as they get older as well. The physical, emotional, mental and spiritual stress of parenting can be extremely exhausting.

Here are some things you can do to help foster and nurture the connection between you and your partner:

Nurture yourself first, so you feel like giving to your partner. If neither of you is making your self-care a priority, you won’t feel like nurturing the relationship. Schedule alone time for self-renewal just like you would schedule a doctor’s appointment. Then you’ll be able to fully enjoy and be more present during your time together.

Touch each other every day. Hugs and kisses in the morning and at the end of the day, quick neck or shoulder massages, gentle arm touches and holding hands are all thoughtful and easy ways to stay physically and emotionally connected to your partner.

Get your financial house in order. The top two reasons couples fight stem from issues around money and communication. Make a commitment to have monthly discussions about finances, create a budget, address your debt, decide who will pay bills each month, meet with a financial planner or coach, or find a way to come to peace with your money issues. Everyone has them. Decide how and when you and your partner are going to address yours in a way that best supports your relationship.

Get support, sooner rather than later. Don’t wait until things get really bad to get the support of a therapist or relationship coach. Visit http://www.imagotherapy.com/ to find an Imago therapist near you (a really effective dialogue-based therapy model), ask friends for referrals, or if your partner is unwilling to go to marriage counseling, go by yourself. Author Wayne Dyer says, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

Schedule and keep regular dates. Ideally, have a “date” with your partner at least every two weeks. Three to four hours of time for the two of you to connect, talk and just be alone together. You can have some of your dates at home in the evening if you can’t get a sitter, but I recommend you ban any conversation having to do with the kids or money. Also, save movie-watching for another night, since it keeps you from engaging in conversation.

Now, for folks paying attention, the information I promised concerning doing date night right . . . According to a recent article from The New York Times, "Reinventing Date Night for Long-Married Couples," (2.12.08) brain and behavior researchers — using real-world experiments, lab studies and brain-stem data — now claim many couples' approach to date night is all wrong.

The bad news? The decline of romantic love over time is inevitable. And just spending quality time together is probably not enough to stop a relationship from going stale.

The good news? All you need is a little date-night revamp to rekindle the romantic love that originally got you two together.

Brain scientists suggest couples should center their date nights around new and different activities they both enjoy, trying to find ways to continually inject novelty into the relationship. The activity can be as simple as going to a new restaurant, or something more unusual or thrilling, like taking an art class or visiting an amusement park together.

Apparently, new experiences activate the brain's reward system, flooding it with dopamine and norepinephrine — the same brain circuits sparked during the early romantic love era, that wild-ride time of exhilaration and obsessive thoughts about a new love. Several experiments show that novelty — just doing something new together as a couple — might help bring back the butterflies by recreating the chemistry of courtship.

Researchers warn that novelty alone isn't enough to salvage a marriage in crisis, but for solid partnerships in a dullness ditch, novelty may be just the ticket out.

So . . . got a unique date-night idea? Share with the rest of the class, please!