3 Types Of New Year’s Resolutions For Couples For 2021
2020 was a pretty difficult year with a pandemic, home offices, homeschooling, lockdowns, quarantine, and isolation. It was a very difficult year for individuals, couples, and families. Even though the pandemic is still not behind us we want to start 2021 optimistically. We want to be happy. To be happy, a couple needs to set up a few goals every year. There is no happiness without progress and growth. Even in relationships.
I want to focus on how to create New Year’s Resolutions for couples today. And let me tell you if you don’t have goals as a couple, the chances are you won’t be as happy as if you know what you are after.
Maybe you are thinking that creating New Year’s resolutions for individuals is pretty difficult, right? So isn’t it going to be even more difficult to create the new year’s resolutions for couples? It’s actually pretty easy.
- Start by creating new year’s resolutions from your perspective
- Share them with your partner one by one, discuss them and align them
- Give them deadlines and put them in your calendar
- Take action
1.) Create New Year’s Resolutions For Couples
The New Year’s resolutions should be made of short term, midterm, and long term goals. The short term goals are your daily rituals, and they are pretty obvious. Set up your morning routine, your after-work routine, and your evening routine.
The midterm goals are all about fun.
The long term goals are bigger goals that cover different areas of your life.
I will suggest to you some rituals that you can adopt but, of course, you can also make up your own.
The Short Term New Year’s Resolutions For Couples: Daily Rituals
The Morning Ritual For Couples
If you’ve got children, in order to create the couples’ morning ritual, you need to get up at least 30 minutes before your kids. Talk to your partner about how he/she wants his/her morning ritual to look like. You can start with a kiss or a hug, you can talk, if you like to talk in the morning. One of you can prepare breakfast, or you can prepare breakfast together. You can go for a run together, you can have a shower together. Each of us behaves differently after waking up. The truth is, that research shows, that the first 17 seconds after you wake up can influence your whole day. If you’re having positive thoughts straight after waking up, your whole day will be better.
The After-Work Routine For Couples
It’s important to acknowledge each other after coming back from work or after finishing the work if you are running a home office. The simplest thing I recommend is to greet each other properly. I like to recommend Tony Robbins’ greeting habit he has developed with his wife Sage. Whenever they don’t see each other for at least an hour, they run to each other like they haven’t seen each other for weeks. They hug, kiss properly, saying, “Honey I’ve missed you so much…” What this habit does is that it bridges the gap between you and it brings you immediately closer to each other.
It’s much easier to start talking to each other after being touched, kissed, told, “I love you.”
Try it. It works! Don’t worry about exaggerating at the beginning and feeling inappropriate. As with any other habit, it takes up to 21 days to establish it. If someone sees you, he/she will envy you the passion you still have in your relationship. There is no risk here, but there is a lot to gain.
The Evening Ritual For Couples
This ritual is a game-changer. I call it also a “No Screen Just Talk” ritual because that’s exactly what it is about. It doesn’t have to take you long. I’ve found out that even 20 minutes a day will make a huge difference in the relationship.
What should you do? Every evening, have 20 minutes dedicated just to talk to each other.
A gift of communication
We are having the gift of communication. Unfortunately, sometimes we’re forgetting how it was at the beginning of our relationship. Do you remember? It was all about dates and it was all about talking, wasn’t it? It was also about sharing and listening.
Later on, when we are in a relationship for a longer time, we are taking everything for granted. We are assuming that we know what our partner wants to tell us, that we know what he/she is thinking about. And, let me tell you, that’s rather disrespectful.
Be present
Especially women are having a major problem with understanding why their spouses are not listening to them. I mean, her partner is listening. He’s nodding. “Yes. Okay, honey. Yeah. All right“. However, every woman can say when her husband is listening and when he is not. She knows when he’s present with her or when he’s somewhere else in his mind.
So that’s what this ritual is all about. Create 20 minutes a day for you and your spouse to talk. And it’s no screen time. No distractions, no TV, no cell phones, mobile phones, no tablets, and no screens.
And it’s about being present. It’s just 20 minutes. It’s not too much. You can do that.
A bucket list of the desired topics to talk about
The last time when I was coaching a couple, they told me that after so many years together without talking, they didn’t know what to talk about. If this is your case, I would also challenge you to create a list of topics you want to talk about. It doesn’t have to be anything serious.
Remember that fun is the major part of a happy relationship. If you don’t have fun in your relationship, the relationship will die eventually. You might create even silly topics, ex: “What if the aliens would land on our garden?“ “What if we would build a 5-floor family house together. Would we have an elevator?“ “What if we adopt an elephant. Would we go and visit him every day?“
It might also be something you want to discuss. However, let’s stay on the positive side. Don’t put in your bucket list of topics unsolved infidelity issues. These must be solved another time. This is your nice, play, talking, and sharing time.
Triggers
I would also like to encourage you to create ritual triggers. Things and actions that, when you repeat them, will guide you in the right mood. Something that will help you to look forward to spending this time with your spouse and it will work as a trigger or reminder of the upcoming event. It might be a glass of wine. It might be a scented candle or aroma lamp with a pleasant aromatic oil. It might be a nice music or a delicious meal.
Later on, when, for example, your spouse is pouring you a glass of wine, there is a candle on the table, you’re already knowing, what’s coming. You are going to talk to each other. Undisturbed. 100 % present. You are going to have your 20 minutes “No Screen Just Talk Time”.
Try to remember the energy you put into the relationship at the beginning of your relationship.
You thought your partner was so interesting. You couldn’t wait for him/her to share whatever it was. It could be about football. It could be about cars or ballet. It could be about his/her friends or a job. And you would be like, yeah, tell me more, tell me more. I’m so interested. And he/she would love sharing that…Remember? Just bring that energy back. It is not that difficult. You can do it.
The Midterm New Year’s Resolutions For Couples: Have Fun Together
Fun. It’s so underestimated. Fun is so often associated with young and irresponsible people. Let me tell you, that if you don’t have fun in your relationship, you are probably missing passion as well. Without fun, there is usually no polarity, no passion, no spark.
When you remember the beginning of your relationship, it was all about having fun together, wasn’t it? Wouldn’t you want it back? Start with adding fun to your relationship.
Why did I put it under the Mid Term New Year’s Resolution? Because if you are in a long term relationship and/or if you are having kids, it’s clear you also have a lot of responsibilities. It’s not that easy to have fun whenever you see your partner. That’s why you need to plan it.
You can have a date once a week and that will help. If you can’t go out because you don’t have a babysitter or because you are experiencing lockdown due to the pandemic, check my free ebook with 30 activities you can do as a couple even if you have to stay at home.
However, if you really want to step your game up, plan some fun activity at least once a month. Something you want to do. Something you will be looking forward to doing. Something bigger than a date.
The Long Term New Year’s Resolutions For Couples: The Wheel Of Life
Here I would like to encourage you to go through different areas of your life and find out which areas are going to become your top priorities in 2021. Don’t try to solve everything. That’s impossible. Also, if you feel you have most of that covered but you need to work mainly on your relationship, you might want to take a 30s-Relationship Quiz and figure out what’s the main struggle in your relationship and what to do about it in the future.
How to work with the Wheel Of Life?
- Go one by one and mark on a scale from 0 (the lowest value) to 10 (the highest value) where you are right now.
- Take a different marker and highlight 1–3 areas you want to focus on in 2021.
- For each area, write down 3 steps that will lead you to improve your score in 2021.
- Set a deadline for each of those steps
2.) Share Your New Year’s Resolutions With Your Partner
Share everything you’ve done so far with your partner and discuss each of the resolutions one by one. Ask your partner to create his/her own new year’s resolutions following the steps above.
Try to align the resolutions so that they will be both on the same page. Remember, it’s about alignment, not about fighting. If your partner doesn’t agree with you, try to understand why and respect him/her.
In a couple’s communication, it’s always crucial to step in your partner’s shoes and try to understand his/her point of view.
3.) Assign Deadlines To Your Resolutions And Put Them In The Calendar
A goal without a deadline is just a dream. You need to take your couple’s resolutions as seriously as you would take your business goals.
· Assign a deadline to each of the resolutions except the daily routines
· Break your goals into smaller steps, assign deadlines to those smaller steps, and put them in the calendar
· Dedicate time to work on your goals. This is one of the most important steps. Don’t skip it. It will make a difference between talking about what you want as a couple and actually achieving it. You need to work on your goals on a regular basis. Decide if you want to dedicate a two-hour block every week or every second week. Ideally, you would sit down every week and work on your goals for at least those 2 hours. And remember, working on your couple’s goals is actually fun! Moreover, if you are working on them together. It will bring you closer together and connect you on a deeper level.
4.) Take action
If you don’t take action, all that time spent on planning your dreams is wasted. Moreover, the difference between expectations and reality is what makes people unhappy. Take action. Start with the daily rituals. Don’t be too hard on yourself. When you don’t succeed, don’t beat yourself up. Instead, try again. It doesn’t matter how fast you move forward as far as you move forward. If you need to know how to make things happen, check my article here.
