Calendaring Your Companionship

 

How do you maintain a strong, intimate relationship when you and your partner both have busy lives? In today's podcast, hosts Dr. Chris and Alisa Grace discuss four common barriers that prevent couples from spending quality time together, and offer practical, fun solutions to overcoming them!

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Speaker 1: Welcome to another Art of Relationships podcast. We are grateful for listeners like you. Let's get right into it.

Chris Grace: Well, it's good to be back for another podcast, Lisa, and how fun. It feels like we've been away for a little while, even though the podcast just came out last week and because we've been on vacation, that was kind of cool. And we were able to go and speak in New York and then in Indiana. And then in between, we took a little bit of time to go to New York City. That was really fun.

Alisa Grace: Yeah, that was my first trip to New York city, and it was a really cool birthday gift, a birthday surprise from Chris.

Chris Grace: Yeah.

Alisa Grace: So making my dreams come true.

Chris Grace: That's right.

Alisa Grace: It was really fun and it was really cold. Makes me glad we live in California.

Chris Grace: No kidding.

Alisa Grace: Oh, man, like 17 degrees with the wind blowing. I can't do that. It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Chris Grace: No. And then we went to upper state, like Rochester. What a great group of people we met out there. And even before that, even Pennsylvania and Hershey, we did some fun things, too.

Alisa Grace: Tell them what we were doing.

Chris Grace: Yeah. We were speaking for a couple of different groups, one at a university out in Bethel. We were speaking with growing healthy relationships.

Alisa Grace: To college students.

Chris Grace: Mm-hmm (affirmative). With college students, talking about healthy relationships, engagement, dating, and how to have a good foundation for marriage, on starting with the idea of communication. And how do you navigate hard discussions and then conflict? How do you navigate even harder conversations?

Alisa Grace: Yeah. And then in Pennsylvania and in Rochester, New York, this last weekend, Chris and I have the privilege of being on the speaking team for Family Life's Weekend to Remember. And so we had a conference this weekend when we were in Pennsylvania. We actually had, gosh, there were almost 2000 people there and 18 people came to Christ.

Chris Grace: Wow. That's amazing. That's so cool?

Alisa Grace: Isn't that cool? So we don't know about Rochester, we haven't gotten the report on that yet.

Chris Grace: Yeah.

Alisa Grace: But we are trusting that the Lord was really moving through those couples and through the weekend. So what an honor, what a privilege. We're living the dream, it feels like.

Chris Grace: Yeah, it was so fun. It's cool to see people get a new understanding and take a weekend away and invest in their marriages, and people just respond.

Alisa Grace: It's so important. Yeah.

Chris Grace: People respond by just loving, first of all, being away, sometimes it's just being away from the kids, man. They're like, "Get me away from my children for three days and I'll listen to anything."

Alisa Grace: That's enough. You don't have to do anything else.

Chris Grace: Yeah. And then others just get a chance to come. And I think especially they get a chance to pour into their relationship. We like to talk about it as marriage sabbaticals, right, or even something called calendaring. You know, oh, go once a week to maybe a date night once a week and once a month have a little bit of extended time, maybe even a weekend away. And then of course, maybe even once a year, going to a conference like that.

Alisa Grace: Yeah, we always counsel our newlyweds that they really need to build in a weekend away at least for a marriage retreat, a marriage conference, at least once a year. That's awesome. And then just a weekend away separately for just the two of you to reconnect, play, have fun, but we call it calendering, I can't even say that word now. Caller, help me.

Chris Grace: Think of the word calendar.

Alisa Grace: Calendering your companionship. That's what, oh my gosh, I couldn't get it out. My tongue's still asleep. But really, the point is time together like that doesn't just happen. You really have to schedule it. You have to be intentional about it. Maybe it's something you need to be build into your budget to be able to do a weekly date night, or once a year, a weekend away. Or if you're in a place where maybe you're later on in years and in your marriage and life, and you need a tune up, that's a great reason to go to a marriage conference, not because you're having problems, but it's just like doing maintenance on your car, you change the oil, right, every 3000 miles. And our relationships are the same way, they need that kind of little tuneup. And maybe that's even something like a gift card or a wedding gift that you give to a younger couple.

Chris Grace: Man, what a great suggestion, too, because we had people come up to us that said, "I really didn't want to go." And not all the guys, but a couple of the guys would come up and say, "I just really wasn't excited." We did have one wife come up and say, "He drug me here. I didn't want to come."

Alisa Grace: Yeah.

Chris Grace: But some of them, I was surprised at the number said that, "My parents, or my friends, or my church bought this for us."

Alisa Grace: Yeah.

Chris Grace: "And we went kind of reluctantly, but now we're just so happy to go." So at least why is taking, whether you call it a marriage sabbatical or just calendaring, which it's easy for me to say, maybe not for you, why is it that's so important to do calendaring? What happens in a marriage that requires that?

Alisa Grace: Yeah. Well, one thing we talk a lot about is that in a marriage relationship, your marriage is not static, right? You're either moving towards oneness and emotional connection or you're moving towards isolation. Think of it as a pendulum, right. You're moving one direction or the other all the time. And so our natural inclination, I think, with the busyness of life is that we are just always going to be naturally drifting towards that idea of isolation and living separate lives and being drawn apart by the world. We're busy. A lot of us have kids. We're working full time. We've got volunteer activities, church activities, ministries, other family issues. Maybe some are dealing with medical issues with their kids and are just overwhelmed.

And so that really drains time away alone together with just the two of us, right. And so we've got to be intentional about calendaring that time together, getting it on the calendar, making sure we have the time away, even if it's just to go run some errands together or maybe grab lunch or just going on a picnic. Man, we're making peanut butter jelly sandwiches, a couple apples, throw the chips in, grab the blanket, and we're going to go sit at the park for a little while.

Chris Grace: Right.

Alisa Grace: And, but it helps us to reconnect, because we're naturally going to be drifting away. And so it's an intentionality of coming back together and debriefing, "How are you doing in life? How's your heart? What are some of your dreams going on that I don't know about?" What do you think?

Chris Grace: Yeah. No. I think there's probably a sense that most couples don't realize that they've drifted. They don't realize that they're heading towards isolation, because that's an easy path. The world starts to take over, you start to slide down this experience where all of a sudden it could be a couple of weeks maybe, and you're like, "Golly, I haven't even seen my spouse. We've only talked for like an average, I don't know what the average is these days, it seems like it's only a couple of minutes a day that people actually connect."

Alisa Grace: Yeah. It's like less than 20 minutes a day.

Chris Grace: Yeah.

Alisa Grace: Probably closer to 10, I think is the average.

Chris Grace: And so think about this. If you're newly married or you're married right now, one of the perceptions that people have when they're dating or engaged is that, "Oh, finally, when we're married, we're going to be together. And finally, when we're married, we're going to have all this time together. Finally, when we're married." Well guess what reality does? Reality kind of kicks in, and a lot of married couples lost and have lost that kind of hope and dream because now they're working, they're at school, they're starting to raise kids. And like you said, Lisa, I don't know what the numbers are, we'll have to look it up, but it's clearly less than just a few minutes, I know, on average a day. So it seemed like it was in the 10 or 12 minutes a day that they actually-

Alisa Grace: Yeah, it was minimal.

Chris Grace: Yeah. So okay, so now they're married people listening to this people that are engaged and they're thinking, "What do we do now? I recognize I've been writing down or thinking about, or I mentally went over my list of how often we've been together, and I just simply miss the connection. I just want to be with my spouse more, but how were we going to do it?" So that is the idea of calendaring. It means just being intentional. So, researcher that we always talk about, John Gottman, since couples that were struggling, he followed them for about a year, and they just checked back in a year later. And half of the couples were doing much better because of one thing, they found five more extra hours in the week, right, to be able to do something together as a couple. And he called it the magic of five, five hours. That's all that separated them out.

So Lisa, you and I, frankly, we've decided early on, we're going to date as often as possible. And I think we aimed for once a week, and probably were effective and stuck to that for many, many years. I think once the kids came, we might have ended up doing it every other week. But I think we're back to the once a week.

Alisa Grace: Yeah. And I think that's a good point, what you were saying that it was a lot harder once we had kids, because just the claim on your time, you just have so much less time once you have kids. And frankly, we just didn't have a lot of money then. So it was a significant financial investment and sacrifice for us to do those date nights. Do you remember that? Just paying a babysitter was like, "Oh, my gosh." So sometimes we had to temper what we would do on that date night because the major outlay was paying for a babysitter.

Chris Grace: Yeah.

Alisa Grace: But you know what? It was worth it.

Chris Grace: Yeah.

Alisa Grace: Because I would also say that when the kids came, that was some of the most stressful, hard times, I think when I look at the ebb and flow of our relationship and our marriage, introducing the first baby, he was pretty easy. He was pretty laid back and chill. And we were like, "Wow. Yeah, this is great." We just took him to the movies with us. We still went to the movies, right. As a baby, he went with us. But when our daughter was born, woo, we, she was just on fire, wasn't she?

Chris Grace: Yeah. She was on fire, we just didn't think she was finished cooking, man. We're like, "I'm not quite sure this child is ready to come out into the world and is fully cooked, man."

Alisa Grace: Oh, she would cry. And it would sound like a siren going off, right.

Chris Grace: It was bad. Yeah, no, we really had a wake up call the moment she popped out. It was like good night.

Alisa Grace: Yeah. And so if any other time in our marriage that we absolutely needed time away alone together just for an evening, it was once our kids came. They were a year and a half apart. So life got really busy, really quickly, really stressful for us. And honestly, that was a time we needed it the most. And so it was worth every penny that we had to sacrifice to make it happen.

Chris Grace: No, I think that's a good point, Lisa. You need to think of this as an investment. It's intentional. No investment is easy. Think about if you're going to save, put money into a savings account or you're going to save for your retirement, any investment is hard work, because there are other things that you would either are easier, well, investing in your marriage, guess what? You have to sacrifice. So it always involves some sort of work and sacrificial work.

And I would just suggest for any couple out there that is thinking about ways to enhance or increase their marriage happiness, to just reconnect, to feel an emotional connection. Do this. Start by being intentional, going out once a week, if possible, even if it's for one and a half hours, two hours, all you got to do is get your buddies to babysit the kids. Or if you don't have children, take time off from the books, take time off from work. And for two hours, put the phone aside, go to some cheap, buy one, get one free drive through, go sit at a park, doesn't matter. And do that for two hours, man. I think that investment is a sacrifice that pays off.

Alisa Grace: I love the word that you used, though, to think of it in terms of an investment that you have to sacrifice money to save to put into that investment account. And why do you do it? Because it pays dividends. You actually get money back, you get more out of it than you put into it.

Chris Grace: Right.

Alisa Grace: And so that's the same analogy that works with your marriage. You actually get more out of it than you end up putting into it, and it's going to reap dividends for decades in your marriage, decades in your marriage.

Chris Grace: It does, man. And so we could just even give a personal example where for us, we just determined we were going to take date nights. We were not going to fall into the trap that so many couples were where they disengaged, where they found themselves heading towards the scale on the left side is isolation, on the right is this idea-

Alisa Grace: Of oneness.

Chris Grace: Yeah, of oneness. And so couples that we had been around, they didn't want to go into the isolation. They didn't want to be disconnected. In fact, they wanted just the opposite, but somehow they found themselves there. So Alisa, what would you suggest for young people out there that are planning their wedding, that are newly married, or maybe they've been around for a long time and now they're in the middle of work and children, you would say, "Okay, first of all, try for an hour or two special each week, couple of hours just to reconnect. Sometimes that could just be 30 minutes a day. Maybe everything technology turns off."

So here here's mine, and then I'll ask you yours. If I had to give any piece of advice, it'd be this, take a two hour, take your phone with you, but you put it away. And during the week, you find a certain time that's tech free. And for many couples, I would say maybe let's say from the hours of 9:00 to 10:00, you're not doing anything on technology, you put it aside, or maybe just a half hour. And you use that time to a check in with each other.

Alisa Grace: I love that. Yeah.

Chris Grace: So what do you think? What would be some other advice you'd give for couples that want to be more intentional about doing this? You've already mentioned the month long and even the year thing, give some meat to that one, like talk about marriage conferences, how important that might be, let's say?

Alisa Grace: Yeah. Well, I love the idea of marriage conferences, going at least once a year, right, to make a significant-

Chris Grace: By the way, I'm sorry to interrupt you.

Alisa Grace: That's okay.

Chris Grace: Yes, that sounds like a lot people. How many people came up to you when you asked them, "How many times you've been to a marriage conference and how long you been married?" They'd say, "Oh, this is our first one. We've been married 16 years. This is our first one. We've been married 11 years." So I think the average was like married 10, 12 years, and it's their first conference.

Alisa Grace: Mm-hmm (affirmative). But then you also had couples that had been married for decades and they're like, "We go every year, this is our 15th one in a row. This is our eighth one in a row." And you're thinking, "Wow, if you come eight years, 15 years, 20 years in a row," we've heard some of them, then gosh, you must be getting something out of this. There's a reason that you keep coming back. And if you've been married that long and you're this happy, I think I've got to pay attention to that and I'm going to do what you're doing. It's a great role model.

Chris Grace: Yeah. So you would say go once a year. Other ways you couples could be intentional about this, so maybe if you say once a week, once a month, what do you do? Well, you just decide to, we would try for once a month. Sometimes you'd say, "Chris, let's just go have lunch down at the beach." And so that once a month, which we do, not every month, but we go kind of away. It's more than just McDonald's or Taco Bell on a Friday night.

Alisa Grace: Yeah.

Chris Grace: It's actually going away and being intentional about a full afternoon.

Alisa Grace: Yeah. I think one of the benefits that I see that comes from these date nights is because they're calendared, we've put them on the calendar, we know when they are, I think what it does for me personally, is it builds a sense of anticipation throughout the week that I'm going to get to be with you.

Chris Grace: Right.

Alisa Grace: We get to get not hugely dressed up, but I'm not wearing my sweats. I'm throwing on my cute jeans and my cute top, my high heel shoes, and looking cute for you. So we can go to dinner, or go to a movie, or go do whatever, go walk up and down Burch street in Braya where it's near us. We love doing that. But it's that idea of building that sense of anticipation of being with you.

Chris Grace: Yeah.

Alisa Grace: And it just gives me something to look forward to. It creates a positive environment in my mind for you. And I'm just looking forward to it.

Chris Grace: Right. Well, just some other suggestions, then. I would say this, a date night could be a date night, but if you're readers and one of you loves to read, then join a book club together and read a book together. That counts. If one of you loves activity, then maybe get tickets to the local college games and go once a week and sit there together and go watch a sporting event. If one of you just loves going on Saturday, flea shopping at flea markets, well join them and go and do that for a couple hours. That counts. Make an intentional investment. We joined a book reading club. That was awesome. We did a dance group with some other couples where we went once a week and went and learned how to do square dancing. Good Lord, that was painful.

Alisa Grace: No, that was salsa dancing.

Chris Grace: Well, you called it salsa. I looked like I was square and dancing. So it was some ugly moves, but we did that because that's the intentionality that we're talking about. Be intentional. Find some way, something to connect. By the way, some couples found out that service every month, they would go and work at a homeless shelter, or they do something-

Alisa Grace: Go pick up trash at the beach, something like that.

Chris Grace: Yeah. They do something that they invest in, where they feel loved or they feel connected. And the other person makes that happen. So another one, Alisa, you love walking on the beach and going to the mountains. So we try and intentionally get down there every couple of months or go up to the hills and walk, and so that's [crosstalk].

Alisa Grace: Yeah, there's just, there's so many different ways to be creative about how you connect.

Chris Grace: Yeah.

Alisa Grace: Just think about your partner, where does their passion lie, and then be willing to join them in that. And then where does your heart, where does your passion lie? And invite your spouse into that with you. And then maybe you want to find new things together. I took golf lessons to join you and enter your world.

Chris Grace: Yeah.

Alisa Grace: And say, go hiking kind of enters my world.

Chris Grace: Right.

Alisa Grace: But then maybe we do something completely new that neither of us have ever tried, like what if we took some kind of cooking class or something? I don't know. That's just something that we've never thought of, we've never talked about doing, but who knows? We might actually really enjoy it.

Chris Grace: Yeah. So for all you couples out there that are struggling about finding time, here's the thing. Don't make it too complicated.

Alisa Grace: Yeah.

Chris Grace: It could very well be that you join your spouse when they-

Alisa Grace: Work out.

Chris Grace: -when they go to Home Depot or they maybe go to Lowe's, you join them or you come with them, like you were saying, working out, right. They love to work out and you go and join them. But that is just finding 30 minutes, 40 minutes, 50 minutes a day. You do that, and pretty soon you're at five hours a week, which seems to be a magic number that you've intentionally invested. That is the difference between couples that strive and couples that are struggling and striving versus those that are thriving and reconnecting just by doing simple things. Don't over-complicate it.

Alisa Grace: Yeah. So grab your spouse today, get your calendars, get your cell phones, and get your calendars out. Maybe you still do a written calendar. That's okay, too. But just sit down together and figure out, "Okay, over this next week, where are we going to grab some time alone together, just you and me? And then let's look at the rest of this month coming up for March or April, whatever month it is. And then where's our one weekend away that we're going to get away this coming year?" And maybe you need to give up your Starbucks for once a week for a couple months to put that money into your weekend away so you can afford it and not be stressed out about it.

Chris Grace: Man, and I love that. That's exactly the way to do it. You just sit down. And second idea. Ready? Just take advantage of those moments by being thoughtful and paying attention, for example, about two weeks ago, I'm getting ready to go to Home Depot, and I just happened to say, "Alisa, I'm going to run to Home Depot. Do you need anything?" She goes, "Oh, I'll go with you." Well, Alisa, I know that wasn't necessarily your favorite place to go, but it was so cool, because you know what it did? It turned into, we went to Home Depot. We went to Lowe's, and then we decided, "Hey, let's go grab something at Sonic." And now all of a sudden, an hour and a half later, we're driving home talking about things because we did an activity side by side.

And sometimes just doing that, by the way, Lisa, this works with kids. If you talk about all of the time connecting with kid by finding their activity and just doing it with them. So, washing the car together, or maybe they're going off, like you said, to work out and you're just going to go and hang out or whatever it is that you could do, you join them in that side by side activity. I remember Lisa, you saying for Drew or for one of our kids, you would oftentimes say, "We talk more when we do an activity with each other."

Alisa Grace: Side by side. Yeah. When we have a project we're working on, maybe it's working out in the yard, doing something in the house, working on something, rather than just sitting face to face across the table.

Chris Grace: Yeah. And so those are really good examples of intentionality. Lisa, let's end this by talking about things that kill it, things that are connections or oneness killers, what drives people towards isolation that they need to be very careful of. And I'll start with this, first of all, the lack of intentionality. So you just don't do the calendar. You don't sit down, and all of a sudden life starts getting in the way. That's a big killer. So number one. Another one to me, people who put too much investment, emotional energy into their work, or their service, or their church.

Alisa Grace: Yeah.

Chris Grace: I talked to a couple this weekend who said, "Oh, my wife, she does everything with these pregnant moms that are single. And she invests in their lives. And she does all those things. And then I do my own little ministry here on top of work. And then we're like, "We never see each other." And we've been doing this." I said, "How long has this been going on?" And he says, "Oh, it's been going on, man. She's been doing this ministry for like six, seven years. And I've been involved in mine for about that long, but we just never see each other." So here's what I told him. I said, "Wow, man, farmers, leave fields fallow for a seventh year. They don't farm them every year. Why? Because you take all the nutrients out if you keep planting crops every single year." I said, "People do this all the time."

I said, "Here's what I'm going to suggest for you, buddy. You are drifting towards isolation. You're the one that came up and asked me this question, and here's the answer. Stop doing the ministry for a year, six months, or a month. They're going to be fine. Take time. And in that time that you take away, if you can't give up the ministry, then drop one night, don't lead a Bible study, don't do this, don't do that group. Don't go off and take that extra work. Instead, capture that time and use it together. If you save two hours a week, then use it with your spouse." So that's one way you could go towards isolation without thinking about it.

Alisa Grace: I love that. So maybe so you're talking about maybe curtailing some of your volunteer activities?

Chris Grace: Yeah.

Alisa Grace: Whether maybe you're volunteering, you're the room mom or room dad at school, and you're taking on all those volunteer activities for the fundraisers, for the cheer team or the baseball team. And you're just pouring everything into your kids, into those volunteers. And then you have no time, no energy, no space or margin for each other in life. And so you're talking about, maybe you need to drop one of those volunteer activities or at least, "Hey, I'm not going to be in charge of it. I don't mind participating during this next year, but I'm not going to be responsible for it. And my involvement's going to be curtailed, because I'm going to use that time and take it and invest it in my marriage."

Chris Grace: Yeah.

Alisa Grace: Because it doesn't matter, all the activities your kids are involved in, all the benefits they get, all the opportunities, if your marriage is falling apart in the process.

Chris Grace: Yeah. So there's a drift towards isolation that occurs when people get busy, when they don't think about this, when they're not intentional, here's another drift. Ready? All of a sudden you allow your date nights to be hijacked by the need to connect with other people at work, or your kids, or your family, or your Instagram post, or how well your Facebook thing is, or what you did that day, or you're waiting on a package, or you're waiting. And all of a sudden, now you have two hours, but the whole time you're at this two hours, we watch people at restaurants, and for the whole time they're looking at their phones, because first of all, now the menus are on their phone. But they're sharing things from their phone with each other. That's awesome. But they're really neglecting a little bit of this eye to eye, let's just talk, what's going on in life? And so I think another drift is technology gets in the way.

Alisa Grace: Distractions.

Chris Grace: And distractions.

Alisa Grace: Because we let it distract us.

Chris Grace: Yeah.

Alisa Grace: I think another something that can draw us away from those date nights or that time alone together can be just issues with kids.

Chris Grace: Yeah.

Alisa Grace: Wayward kids, a kid that's struggling.

Chris Grace: Yeah.

Alisa Grace: And maybe even like we talked about, some medical issues that they have going on.

Chris Grace: Even have parents, or brothers, or sisters that are struggling, right?

Alisa Grace: Oh extended family, yeah. You're taking care of your elderly parents. Absolutely. So, you know what? I think what we're seeing is that there's going to be any number of things that you can choose and allow to take the place of time with your spouse if you let it.

Chris Grace: Yeah.

Alisa Grace: There's a, 1,000,001 things that could come up, we can't even cover them all in this podcast. But I think what we're trying to communicate is you have to be intentional and you have to set boundaries in place. Basically, it's a choice that you make to say no to some things and even good things so that you can say the best yes to your spouse and your marriage.

Chris Grace: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. And so Alisa, so we talked about things that get in the way and that drive us a little bit towards isolation. Here's a final one. I think a final one, Lisa, is that we fail to do one small little thing on our date nights that can lead us to isolation is that we just simply talk at a cliche or at a surface level about life, about, "Okay, how was work?" "Fine." "Oh, how's that?" "Fine." And we never get down into a deeper level conversation with our spouses and we begin to miss what really attracted us to them at the very beginning is that we could talk all night. Well, why? Well, we weren't talking about football and we weren't always talking about these surface things, "How you doing? How's your family? How's this?" That was great at first. But we started talking about what? About dreams, about hopes, about feelings, about emotions, about what would you like in life?

Where are you? What would you want to do one day? And remember when you're dating and you would just say things like, "So what do you want to do?" And, "Wow, that's so cool," well, you stop doing that when you're married, and you're all of a sudden going to become a stranger to the person you're with, you're going to drift towards isolation. So a fourth and final way, I think, that you have to avoid this drift towards isolation, on your date nights, if you make them, is use that time to reconnect at a deeper dream level. That is, "Honey, tell me about your dream." That's all you have to do. "What are you dreaming about these days? Well, if you could do anything in life, if money wasn't an option, what would you do? If you could have one adventure this year, what would it be? If you wanted to try something new, what would it be? What's on your heart?"

Learn to go deeper with your spouse during this time away by asking questions that you did naturally when you were dating and engaged, because it was just so fun to talk to people.

Alisa Grace: Yeah.

Chris Grace: So that's the fourth one. Don't let a date night just become one which you talk at this cliche, kind of whatever level of talking about things that are going on, which are important, checking in about the kids, but use that time to go deeper. What do you think, Lisa?

Alisa Grace: I love it. I love it. In fact, we actually have a list of what we call 32 questions to intimacy that you could take on a date night that gets you to those deeper levels of conversation that are really fun. So we'll actually include the link to it in the transcript for today's podcast. We'll get that to you. And you can just print it out and take it with you on your next date night and have a lot of fun with it.

Chris Grace: Yeah. So don't go out there doing things just by rote. Sometimes we just get in the car, we drive, we check in, we go to church, we hang out, we do this without really responding and connecting with that person next to us. And so that's why we talked about it today on this extended version of a fun podcast, Lisa, on how do you connect? How do you stay intentional? And what does it mean to actually put down something in a calendar for a date night so that you can make an investment in this relationship so that you are no longer drifting towards isolation, but moving instead to oneness?

Alisa Grace: Reaping those dividends for decades to come.

Chris Grace: Hey, let's do this. On our next podcast, I think we need to talk a little bit about how do we create oneness, the physical sexual intimacy is an easy way to do this, but what are some other ways? And maybe we should talk about that.

Alisa Grace: I love that.

Chris Grace: And moving towards more positive ways of moving towards oneness, what do you think?

Alisa Grace: I love it.

Chris Grace: All right.

Alisa Grace: So thanks for being with us today. Check out our website at cmr.biola.edu. I'm Alisa Grace with my sweet husband, Chris Grace. And we'll see you next time.

Chris Grace: Yep.

Alisa Grace: Bye, bye.

Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the art of relationships. This podcast is only made possible through generous donations from listeners just like you. If you like it and want to help keep the podcast going, visit our website at cmr.biola.edu and make a donation today.