Why You Don't Need Date Nights
Small and often rather than big and expensive will keep your marriage strong.
Dear Friends,
“Date night” can be loaded with almost unbearable expectations. You’ll have a wonderful meal in an elegant restaurant, the conversation will be erudite and won’t touch on the kids at all, and it will all be topped off with spectacular sex.
Unsurprisingly, it can feel like hard work and leave us feeling like we’ve fallen short. For Valentine’s Day a couple of weeks back, I wrote in the Daily Mail about a different approach: micro-dating. Find out here how to spend short periods of time really connecting with your partner, hopefully doing something low-key that you both genuinely enjoy.
Over on The Meaningful Life podcast, I spoke to Amanda Seyderhelm, a play therapist, author and expert in children’s grief. We talked about:
How to help your own children navigate grief
What to do if you were left alone and lost with grief as a child
how to unpack your own “backpack of grief”.
You can listen to the conversation HERE.
Amanda was also kind enough to offer podcast supporters a 20% discount on her book, Helping Children Cope with Loss and Change - find the book here and use the code FLA22.
If you’re going through the pain of discovering infidelity, you may also wish to listen to my conversation with James Lumumba from the Don’t Be Afraid to Talk podcast. We discuss the reasons people make the choice to have an affair.
It is also often the case that your partner will tell you they have no idea why they had an affair, although, as I wrote in my blog on this subject:
He probably has some clues. For example, ‘I was unhappy’ or ‘I was stuck in a rut’ but these don’t even begin to explain how he could do something so horrible. So it seems safer to to keep quiet and hide behind ‘I don’t know.’
Other reasons partners may say they don’t know why they did it include:
They are scared of how you’ll react
They are closed down utterly due to guilt and shame
They have poor communication skills and struggle to understand themselves or their own emotions.
Read more here on my blog “My Husband Does Not Know Why He Cheated”.
As always, if it feels like the right time to start marital therapy, send an email to Tricia (tricia@andrewgmarshall.com) for a virtual or in-person appointment with one of my team of therapists in London, or with me here in Berlin.
With love,
Andrew