Building Good Marriage Relationships

A Lot to Learn From a Motorcycle Couple

Building a good marriage relationship takes time investment. This was clearly demonstrated in a recent trip to the urgent care center. My wife dropped a heavy object on her foot and was in a lot of pain. We decided to get an x-ray to make sure it wasn’t broken. The pain turned out to be nothing to worry about, but we had an encounter with a young couple that showed a true investment in relationships.

The couple were motorcyclists with his and her bikes. They were telling us about riding to an “extended family” gathering at a park in the mountains. They have a yearly commitment a few weeks before Thanksgiving to get together for a family retreat. You might wonder what’s notable about having a family retreat at a park.

A Week in Mountain Cabins

The family specifically goes to the mountains to stay in a cabin for a week. Each of the two cabins has a kitchen, 4 bedrooms and a living room with a fireplace. The location has limited electricity, no telephones, no cell-phone reception, and no WiFi connections.

Spend Time Together to Reconnect

They reconnect with each other through spending time with each other. Why? So they can appreciate each other as people and interact on a personal, social level. Even the children will have to play games, talk, and be a part of the larger family.

How is this helpful to bring the family closer together? Let’s see…There would be so many opportunities to connect with each other. There would be the great outdoors, hiking, chopping wood, playing games like hide and seek. There would be meals to cook together, helping each other, talking and cooking. Sitting around the fire with a glass of wine or a beer, in the evenings telling stories, playing charades or reliving family history. The opportunities for a good time are endless.

My wife and I were both impressed with this couple’s dedication to maintaining real-people skills and figuring out a way to pass the skills down from generation to generation. What good is a social gathering of family if everyone is on his cell phone or playing games on a tablet, computer or phone? The electronics would take the “social” out of a “social gathering.”

Spend Quality Time Together

Apply this commitment to your marriage. Start spending quality time together. This idea can be applied to your marriage. Building a good marriage relationship takes time and commitment to spend quality time together.

Interact Person-to-Person

I encourage you as a couple to interact person-to-person without electronics and to spread the personal connection to your family when you can. This idea might be difficult to implement. You can start off to improve your marriage by establishing one night a week as a date night – without electronics – and build from there.

After all, isn’t that what marriage and family are really all about? It’s the person-to-person connection that counts.

I hope you have very personal relationships with your spouse and with your family.