For busy married couples
Two free guides to help you stay close in your marriage.
Your team has a standing meeting. Your marriage can have one too. Melissa and I use two guides: one for a meeting every other week and one for a retreat once a year. Both are free.
Is this you?
Your leadership team never misses its weekly meeting. At home, you catch each other in the hallway.
The year gets reviewed at work every January. At home, nobody asks what this year was.
Date night turns into the meeting you never scheduled.
You’re not fighting. You’re just running two calendars.
What helps is a set time to talk, on the calendar. These two guides give you that.
Where to start
The Marriage Meeting
Forty-five minutes to an hour, every other week, with an agenda. Something good first, then the check-in, then the logistics. The small things stop stacking up.
Eleven pages. The agenda we run. Free.
The Marriage Retreat
One night away a year. Look back, dream a little, then get practical, until the trips and the date nights are on the calendar instead of on the list.
Twenty-nine pages. The worksheet we bring to ours. Free.
What I’ve written about marriage
Some of what I’ve written sits right next to this. The dance I missed, 4am on a Wednesday, a van and a yellow pole in LA at 2 AM.
Short posts from our own marriage, on the blog.
Some things are a job for a counselor. And if the thing you want to work on is you, that’s what one-on-one coaching is for.
How we do it
The year we got married, I was on the road more than three hundred days. We didn’t have a rhythm. We had a calendar that belonged to the band. Years later we were running companies and whole teams on standing meetings, and the relationship that mattered most still ran without one.
So we borrowed from work. Not the jargon. The rhythm. A standing check-in every other week, and one night away a year to look back and decide what’s next. That’s it.
Eighteen years in, it’s the one thing we’d keep.
When the logistics and tension are handled here, connection time can just be connection.
What couples tell us
We’re great at running things. We’ve just never run us.
I could tell you our fourth-quarter numbers. I couldn’t tell you what she wants next year.
Every plan we make happens in the car on the way somewhere.
We did a whole retreat for the team. We’ve never done one for us.
How it goes
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Start with the meeting.
Every other week, forty-five minutes to an hour, the agenda in the guide.
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Add the retreat.
One night away, once a year, with the worksheet. Look back, dream, get practical.
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Keep the rhythm.
Miss one and book the next. The point was never a perfect record. It’s coming back to the table.
Twenty-six meetings and one retreat, every year.
What makes it work
It’s not romantic. It’s not glamorous. It’s practical.
Thursday’s plans come up on Monday.
Money is a conversation, not an argument.
Plans stop getting made in the car.
January has a plan, and both of you wrote it.
Without a set time to talk, another year goes by and you drift a little further apart.