The 1% Marriage Habit: 100 Minutes a Week for Lifelong Intimacy

To lose my soul or my marriage soul means I no longer have a strong center to what organizes and drives my life toward a healthy inner life and definitely a healthy marriage. A soul without a center finds its identity in meaningless externals and a marriage soul without a center is constantly searching for an external to bring it toward health. So how do we apply these thoughts to our marriage. That’s what refreshing your marriage is all about this year…Doug and Megan… Doing the work it takes to build an intimate marriage hour after hour, day after day. There are no “instant success” cures. An intimate marriage takes constant care and making those small changes to create remarkable results. You **choose** a healthy marriage. Are you doing marriage by *circumstance and chance or on purpose with a plan*? Good marriages follow a road map with a plan and purpose. You deepen your marriage soul together by repeating over and over again the positive steps it takes to have intimacy in your relationship. You do it and then you do it again until it becomes second nature. “Nothing is particularly that hard if you do it over and over again. I asked a couple married over 60 years what made their marriage successful…Show love, grace, kindness, forgiveness and affection today and then repeat the process on a day after day for the next 60 years. Practice makes perfect. And it takes patience and perseverance. Did you know that people who have been married 60 years say that the number one trait needed is perseverance? Creating healthy marriage goals are important but that’s less than half the way there. Goals without a system to reach your goal is not going to work. That’s why we are big at RYM on challenging you to spend at least 20 minutes a week working on Spiritual intimacy and 100 minutes a week on a date and regular times of physical intimacy. You can’t reach your goal without developing a system to make that goal a reality. - I know a couple who both commute to work. They leave at the same time every day and call each other and talk for 20 minutes from their cell phones. A healthy dialogue with your spouse isn’t dealing with the day to day responsibilities of a marriage and a family. A dialogue is deeper, more open, drawing your together as a couple. Dialogue is sometimes sharing your dreams and hopes. It’s definitely giving your spouse plenty of empathy and openness. There should be no one else in your life that shares as much meaningful dialog with you than your spouse. Couples don’t often fall into an adulterous relationship because of sex or sex appeal. They often fall into the temptation because someone else is getting more of your heart in dialogue…Sharing at a deeper level.

Here’s our slant: Justin was 100 percent wrong to lie to his wife. Behavior like this will eventually erode the relationship and had already eroded Jenna’s trust. We asked Jenna if this was something Justin did all the time, and she responded, “No, not really. But I don’t think I can trust him ever again.” We knew we weren’t going to resolve this issue during the fifteen-minute stretch break at the conference. They had multiple communication and trust issues that were already deeply rooted in their new marriage. We suggested that they talk through this problem with a counselor or a pastor who could spend time getting to the core of their issues (fear). As they walked back to their seats, we looked at each other and said, “He was wrong, but she’ll need to find a way to forgive him, or that relationship is doomed.” Jenna may need to learn that forgiving and forgetting are two different actions. Ultimately, by holding back forgiveness, Jenna is punishing herself more than hurting Justin. The more she learns to genuinely forgive him, the easier it will be for her to forget his infraction. But even if she never forgets the offense, she needs to stop bringing up the same issue, which conveniently ignites her anger. Like so many other important marriage principles, forgiveness is a choice—a divinely motivated one at that. It doesn’t just happen. It’s an action you must consciously practice if you want to win in your marriage. It has to become part of your script of relating to each other. It’s essential to understand that forgiving your spouse isn’t dependent on him or her being worthy of forgiveness. Forgiveness has very little to do with justice. Jesus illustrated this type of forgiveness during His interaction with a woman caught in the act of adultery.[^10] The townspeople brought her to Jesus and referenced the Old Testament law that clearly said she should be stoned for her sin (justice). Jesus looked at the guilty woman with eyes of compassion and then spoke to the gathered crowd: “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” After hearing those words, people slowly walked away, admitting their own sinfulness and tossing their rocks of judgment aside.

You’ll need to develop some new time patterns if dating hasn’t been part of your weekly routine. You’ll also have to face your excuses honestly and come up with rational responses that shatter each one. We’ll help you get started, because we’ve heard all the excuses couples give for not dating. Here are the top three: 1. “We’re too busy.” We know busy! We’re both busy people who live full and active lives with kids, grandkids, speaking engagements, book deadlines, companies to run, consulting, and more. We get it. We acknowledge you’re also busy, but we’d ask you to remove the word too from your excuse. When you do, it changes from an excuse to a statement of fact: “We’re really busy, but our busyness isn’t more important than our relationship.” If Doug and I were sitting across the table from you and your spouse at a restaurant, and we asked, “Could you agree to giving each other 1 percent of your time on a weekly basis?” we hope you would say yes. (If you didn’t, we might “accidentally” spill our water on you.) Come on! It’s only 1 percent. One percent of your weekly time equals only one hour and forty minutes. In math lingo, that’s 1,440 minutes a day x 7 days = 10,080 minutes a week x 1% = 1 hour, 40 minutes. Yes, you’re busy. Maybe even very busy. But if you want a healthy marriage, it will require learning to discern what you do with your time, how you invest it, and what time investments will give you the best returns. Dating weekly is a very wise investment of your time. (By the way, it doesn’t have to be a date night; it could be a date morning or afternoon.) 2. “We don’t have the money.” There is no rule that says your date must be fancy or expensive. You may have gone that route when you were dating or engaged, but don’t allow finances to become an excuse now. The biggest expense will usually be your time. You can go on a walk together, watch a Little League game of five-year-old kids trying to play baseball, or take a cup of coffee into a fancy hotel lobby and sit there for free. Go on Pinterest.com, type “cheap dates” in the search window, and you’ll discover hundreds of ideas. Money isn’t what makes a date special. If having money guaranteed a strong marriage, we’d never see professional athletes divorce. It’s not the money; it’s the time. Get rid of this excuse and begin thinking of free and cheap dates. Someday you may be able to afford fancier dates, but we think the low- or no-cost ones will always trigger fond memories.