Here is an “easy” exercise that you can use to make sure that you and your significant other are actually communicating on a day to day basis. This is one of the ideas that Dr. Chapman gave at the conference yesterday. The sad part was that he told us if we do this each day (and it’s not much) we’d be talking more than 50% of married couples do. That’s sad. Stu and I like to talk to each other, but we’re still going to put this into practice. Some days when he comes home from work, and I’ve been busy with the babies, we’re tired, and even though we missed each other all day, we sometimes struggle to find something to say. So this is what you do. Each person shares 3 things that happened in their day (apart from each other) and, here’s the important part, how those things made them feel. 🙂 It doesn’t have to be all deep and difficult, just something simple like, “Sweetie, today the baby barfed all over the carpet and I had to spend an hour cleaning him and the mess. I felt irritated and grossed out especially when the carpet cleaner wouldn’t work right!” See? That was easy. 😉 Plus it can bring up other discussion items like “the broken carpet cleaner” ha ha! So if you do that each day you’ll learn lots of things about your spouse and also feel like a part of what they were doing while you were away from each other. Happy talking!