How do you stay connected as a couple, when you are surrounded by work all the time?
If your business is one where the two of you physically are in proximity to each other, it can feel suffocating sometimes to be so close and yet so far away.
Relationships are sticky sometimes – how do you keep the spice alive in your personal relationship when, frankly, you are tired of seeing the same face all day, every day.
Four simple ways that we stay connected when working:
- We go for a walk together. We have a dog, and because we have to get out to walk him throughout the day (no yard), we choose to take that 10-15 minutes to walk together and chat over the news of the morning, what we are having for dinner, or just enjoy the antics of the dog.
- We stop for lunch. It is easy if you are working to just breeze through and eat at our desks while continuing to work. But most days we make a point of making our lunch and sitting down for a break in the workday. Or we go out for lunch, and it gives us a chance to get away from our desks, even talk about something other than work. Which happens sometimes.
- We do not work weekends. This has been our policy from the time we began our business, and especially as we have moved into traveling while working. The weekend is the time we take to unwind, go hiking or biking, see friends or just be tourists where ever we are. There may be occasions where a ½ day of Saturday work is necessary (for server maintenance, or concentrated, uninterrupted focus is needed), but we keep our weekends, especially Sundays separate from work.
- We purposefully schedule time apart. Not necessarily because we are tired of each other, but more because we have found over the 35 years of being married that ‘alone time,’ ‘girlfriend time,’ or ‘biking time,’ benefits both of us in our appreciation for our relationship together.
Bonus tip: Everyone’s relationship tip usually includes ‘Date Night’ – which we are not opposed to in any way! Yes, Date Night! It’s a given! But everyone can’t always afford the time or money to do Date Night. And we focus on daily activities as well as weekly when we can. It helps our attitude every day.
If you are working together on a daily basis, how do you stay connected without suffocating one another? Let us know in the comments!