One of the many challenges for a husband is the process of maintaining and growing the relationship between him and his bride. There are so many things that are vying for your attention that you can so easily slip down the slope to find yourself in a different place from your wife that you cease to know her. I often wonder where people get the notion that “she just never changes”. I’ll agree to the thought that your wife, or anyone for that matter, have things about them (character-wise) that remain consistent. However, people are always changing. We can’t help but change; especially if we claim that we are growing and maturing as individuals.
Your wife is someone who, like you will face many things around her that will change. Her body, her family structure, her career, her mental state, and even her aspirations will change over time. Knowing all of this, it becomes quite essential as a husband to go back with a certain amount of regularity to rediscover your wife. Marriage takes work; and just as you’d expect to do routine maintenance on your vehicle to keep it as close to how it was when you first brought it home off the showroom floor or off the lot, you have to do things to keep things between you and her current.
Even if you don’t have deep pockets to whisk her off to some tropical island every three months or so to get away, there are so many things you can do in the process of doing your own bit of rediscovery. Here are just a few to start with:
Working Out Together:
Taking some free time together to do something that you may already be doing, such as walking, jogging, swimming or some other form of exercising can be a great time to strike up a conversation that allows you to find out something new about your wife that you didn’t know. When I’m with my wife walking around our neighborhood or through a mall, it’s a time in which I’m always learning things or even recalling things that I might have forgotten.
Date Nights:
There is nothing like a dinner or movie night with just you and your wife, without the children or anyone else, that really gives you the alone time to do things like staring into her eyes and seeing what she’ll say. My wife always finds it an interesting thing that I still gaze into her eyes. This opens a conversation that enables me to see where her heart is and what’s on her mind.
New Activities:
My wife loves new and interesting things. One way of discovering and rediscovering your wife is to find something that is new and different that you haven’t done before. See if there is a side to her that you might have overlooked.
Love should be an adventure. One of the things I can say with some level of certainty is that men and women are explorers by nature. We were designed that way. There is a natural inquisitiveness to us. The worst thing in life is to become so settled into a certain place that life becomes monotonous, boring, and blah. Life was meant to be abundant with enjoyment and fulfillment. You only get there by stretching your limits and learning more than you knew the day before. If you want your marriage to have drive and fire, learn to rediscover her.
