Couples Journal for A Long Lasting Relationship

"Keep a couples journal for better communications"
Marriage is a long journey that needs two people to nurture it in order to make it work. Before you know it, three years has passed, and then five years, ten years... Most of the couple's time is spent on making a living, sending kids to school, running errands, events and holidays, you know, the normal family stuff. My marriage is nothing too different from the normal path. At the moment when I wrote this post, I've been married for over four years, and many major life events have happened in those four years: career changes (for both hubby and me), purchase of our first home, arrival of our first baby... We experienced many many highs but also went through some lows in our relationship.

One day during a movie night (a weekly thing for us), my husband and I were watching this comedy called Happy Anniversary. One scene in the movie was about this quirky couple sharing top 3 moments in their 3 years of dating life. It was a very candid and meaningful scene, and I was laughing how different their answers are in terms of which moment should be the No.1. So I asked my husband, "what are the top threes for us in our relationship?" He was very intrigued by the question and took a deep breath thinking about it. Then he came up with one very quickly, "having our first baby is definitely one of the biggest!", which I totally agree. However, we were stuck at trying to pick other top 2 worthy moments that we could both agree on. You know that feeling when all the memories start surfacing out at the same time, and your brain suddenly overloaded with lots of not so well-organized moments?

That really hits me! We try very hard to fill our marriage life with events, gathering, family stuff so it doesn't have to be about work and errands all the time. We plan things to do for next week, and really just focus on the future, but rarely actually look back at what happened or reflect on our thoughts/emotions in those major moments. It is kinda sad that sometimes we need Facebook to remind us what major moments happened last year. It was that moment I proposed the idea to my husband: we should record our journey of marriage, journal our thoughts and ideas to help us better organize memories in our relationship.

I'm not totally new to journaling. I have been writing about my personal growth and life experience ever since my career coach recommended it to me. It helped me a lot with self-reflection and confidence and I can't believe it took me so long to use the journaling idea for my marriage! Anyhow, my husband and I finally started this new routine at the end of 2018: we write something together every week, look over what we have achieved (top 3 moments), then list new things that we tried together, and sum it up with appreciations of each other. Though it's only been a month, we have seen some improvement to our relationship, especially in bonding and communications.

I highly recommend you to try the journaling experience with your other half. There are so many ways to journal your own couple's stories: you can share something that you are grateful of each other,  jog down a bucket list for next month, think of a challenge for both of you to work on, or just use it as a dairy recording events and experience. It doesn't matter which journaling style you choose. You can even mix them up a bit for different weeks, as long as it keeps the communication going between you and your partner. So if you are intrigued by this couple's journaling idea and want to take your relationship to another level, how about starting by picking up a notebook, and get ready to share journaling with the person you love!

"No matter what journey it is, I'm glad that I shared with you" -- Almost Nomadic

Popular Posts

Insta@shanna.jin