Couples Retreat Weekend

This weekend was DH’s church’s couples retreat weekend. To be honest, I wasn’t planning on going. In fact, we had something else planned for that very weekend and had a good excuse for not going. Eventually, those plans were botched and we had no choice but to attend the couples’ retreat. My weekends are very precious to me and there wasn’t too much that was appealing to me about spending a weekend with other couples in a marriage counseling-like setting. Or so I thought. To my surprise, I actually enjoyed it a lot more than I thought. I was arrogant enough to think that we didn’t need it especially since we haven’t been married long enough to have really messed up the institution. Well, I was wrong. I learnt quite a few things and enjoyed the company of other couples.

Time management is one of the things I will take away with me. We learnt about allotting time for each of your roles. For example, my roles, in no particular order include, wife, student, employee, sister, daughter, individual, business person. I put together an hourly schedule for each day based on those roles and found that in my role as wife on Mondays, I can only spare one hour. What an eye opening exercise. I can’t really do anything about it but make sure that one hour is quality time for the two of us. When I think about it, we workout together so there’s more than one hour of quality time on Mondays. However, I know that with kids, there is the possibility of that hour being a lot shorter. I don’t know that for sure, but that seemed to be the consensus from the parents in the room.

We also talked about love languages. I learned that what I thought was DH’s love language was really not and what he thought was mine was not at all. A love language is a form of communication that really speaks to your partner, child, friend, etc. A love language is something you do/say to show another person that you really love them. He thought mine was physical touch - hugging, PDA, etc. I like, but it is not. Then he guessed gifting – the display of affection through gifts – but it’s not. I thought his love language was words of affirmation – verbal communication that makes the individual feel good about him or herself - but it’s not. Eventually, after talking through it, we discovered that we both have the same love language, service. Yikes! Service involves showing another person you care by doing something for them. Yikes again! Here’s an example of how it works for me, I’m sleeping on the couch and DH wakes me up to go to bed and I go to the bedroom and right before I get into bed, I notice that it’s perfectly done up the way I like it, with an extra blanket underneath the comforter on my side. Yup, we don’t make our bed as soon as we get up each morning, but that’s a different story. Another example is him doing the dishes because I hate doing dishes. Or making dinner before I get home. That is not such a great example, but something along those lines works for me. From his point of view, fixing him a plate when I’m fixing myself one is me showing him love. Double yikes because our love language involves WORK. For some people, it is physical touch, quality time, blah, blah, blah. I could do that all day long but service? That requires actual work that we are not naturally predisposed to even though that’s what we want from each other. We’ve got homework now.