How to grow your marriage every year
Today I want to give you one practical tool that has had a great impact on our marriage. As I shared last week, Kristen and I just celebrated our 13th anniversary. We had an awesome date-day celebrating our anniversary, including coffee at a trendy, new coffee shop, an incredible tour of the Bush Library and Museum, and one of the best burgers I have had in a long time at Grub Burger Bar. While on our date, we took some time to work on our annual marriage review.
My friend Adam is the first one who suggested the annual marriage review and journal to me and Kristen.
Your wedding (or dating) anniversary provides you with a good time and opportunity to reflect back upon the last year. When you think back and discuss the last 12 months, an annual marriage reviews gives you time to celebrate areas of growth in your individual lives and in your marriage. In addition, you get the opportunity to identify areas of weakness in your marriage where more growth still needs to take place.
There is no set, right way to do this, but here are a few practical suggestions:
Put an annual reminder in your calendar two weeks before your anniversary so that you can make sure you block your calendar for your marriage journal review. Schedule a date night and sitter if needed so you can complete your marriage journal.
Better yet, schedule a night or weekend away to celebrate your anniversary and plan on using part of the weekend to work on your journal.
Be creative on your date: go someplace new and fun, but make sure it’s a place where you can sit for a few hours and have good, honest conversation. (Some couples may be able to do this at home - this doesn’t work for us because we tend to get distracted by email, television, housework, etc…).
Take turns writing and discussing. Hopefully this marriage journal will be something you will complete and keep for many years. You can always complete it online in digital format, but I think there is something unique about having a hard copy.
On your second year (and other years moving forward), begin by reading through your journal from the prior year. Where have you grown? Where do you still need to take some ground as a couple?
Make sure you make some notes about how you will grow in the next 12 months. Post your goals/areas of growth someplace where you can regularly review and come back to them. More than likely, you will put your journal away or on a shelf until the next anniversary, so make sure you capture your goals someplace you look on a regular basis (I.e. Mine are posted on my desk at home and in my task software on my computer).
BONUS: Here are the instructions for the journal. Click here to download the PDF.
This year, Kristen and I finished our journal over two different date nights. One on a date day to Mudsmith Coffee and the other a few days later on a date night at the Coffee House Cafe in North Dallas/Plano. To give you an example, here are a few goals/areas of growth for us as a couple in the next 12 months.
Discuss more often what the Lord is teaching us in our time in God’s Word and in prayer. Practically, we will add this to our weekly communication/schedule meeting and will also discuss when we grab a lunch date (we do this one time/month during the week).
We need to better lead our kids when it comes to finances. We are going to read Dave Ramsey and his daughter Rachel Cruze’s book, Smart Money Smart Kids.
Participate in physical activity together as a couple. Now that our kids are older, we would like to take short bike rides and walks at night together. Maybe we will run a 5K together as a couple.
Kristen wants to complete a triathlon. We need to figure out how to sync schedules so she can train for this.
We recently completed spiritual inventories for each of our four boys. We need to set aside some time to discuss these with the boys.
We desire to know all the families on our block. We have done a poor job of this in the past. We are becoming block captains of our street, largely so that our family can get to know the other families around us.
Your Turn:
How about you? Do you have anything you intentionally do every year in order to evaluate how you are doing in your marriage? Do you celebrate the wins over the past 12 months?
We had a great chance to celebrate all the growth over the past 12 months in our marriage. I can’t recommend the annual marriage journal and review strongly enough to help you grow in your marriage!
Thanks to my friends Taylor Beam and Adam Tarnow for their help in putting the guide together.