Marriage Meetings

Episode Summary of “Marriage Meetings”

Welcome to the Communicate and Connect Podcast, where we delve into practical strategies to enrich your relationships. I’m your host, Elizabeth Polinsky, a seasoned military marriage counselor, and today we’re focusing on a transformative concept that can significantly strengthen your marriage—marriage meetings. This episode is especially beneficial for those who are newlyweds, contemplating marriage, or even couples who’ve shared many years together but are seeking ways to deepen their connection.

In the latest installment of our relationship series, we explore the powerful concept of marriage meetings, inspired by the Relationship Radar Meetings I encountered before even embarking on my journey as a marriage counselor. These monthly meetings have been a game-changer for me and my husband, providing a structured approach to discussing unresolved conflicts, planning future goals, and ensuring we remain on the same page. By setting aside dedicated time for these critical conversations, couples can alleviate anxiety and resentment, allowing them to fully embrace and enjoy their quality time together.

This episode unpacks the numerous benefits of marriage meetings, such as planning your finances, discussing family matters, resolving conflicts about parenting, and even addressing sensitive topics like intimacy. With an organized agenda, your conversations can be more productive and lead to a more harmonious relationship. Plus, I’m sharing a downloadable meeting template designed to help you initiate this practice in your own marriage, providing a clear roadmap to foster communication and connection.

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Episode Transcript for “Marriage Meetings”

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:00:02]:
This podcast is sponsored by Communicate and Connect Counseling, where we have a team of therapists who provide individual, couples, and family therapy services, all tailored to meet the needs of military and veteran families. To learn more about our services, visit www.communicateandconnect.com.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:00:28]:
Welcome to the Communicate and Connect Podcast for Milit Relationships with your host, Elizabeth Polinski, a military marriage counselor. If this is your first time listening to the Communicate and Connect podcast, please take a second to go, rate, review and subscribe to make sure you get all our future episodes. We also really want to know what it is you love about our podcast. And if for some reason you’re not loving it, we want to know that too, because we’re committed to providing the best quality content to help you improve your relationships.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:00:58]:
Foreign you’re listening to episode 23 on marriage meetings. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Communicate and Connect podcast. If you have not been listening or like, if this is your first time. My name is Liz and I’m a military marriage counselor in Norfolk, Virginia currently. That’s where we’re stationed and I’m in the middle of doing a series on getting ready for marriage and how to start your marriage off.

Well, this is really helpful if you are considering getting married or if you are newly married, but I think this can be really helpful if you are already married as well this entire series because so many people kind of skip some of the foundational building blocks for marriage. And these are, you know, my top tips for getting ready for getting married. And a lot of them are great things to start implementing even if you’ve been married for many years.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:02:08]:
And so today I’m going to talk about marriage meetings. This is maybe the number one like tip that I could give couples. And it’s really interesting because even before I was a marriage counselor or even started my training to do marriage counseling and couples therapy, I was given My friend sent me a link to a podcast episode.

The podcast was called Multi Amory and they went over something called Relationship Radar Meetings. And I just loved the idea of doing monthly relationship meetings. This was really important to me because in my previous relationships prior to that, I was always somebody who really couldn’t let things go. Especially if I was feeling anxious or worried about conflict between me and my partner, I would be worrying about it. It would be hard to let it go in my mind and so I would end up bringing it up over and over again to talk about it.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:03:20]:
But of course it was never a good time to talk about it. And then it also made it really hard to just enjoy the quality time with my partner because things felt unresolved. And so I was really grateful when my friend sent me this podcast episode that talked about these radar meetings. And when I first started dating my husband, we started doing these monthly meetings just a few months into us starting to date, and we still do them now, and we have kind of a modified version that we are going to use during his upcoming deployment.

So I can let you know how that goes once we’ve tried it a little bit. But we still, we still do these meetings now, and it’s one of the most important things that we do together that I think helps make our relationship work. Let’s start off with why would you have a relationship meeting? I tend to think that it’s really important to have a dedicated time to discuss things. This allows you to put topics on the back burner, which is something I couldn’t do in previous relationships.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:04:33]:
But if you know that there’s a dedicated time where you guys can talk about how things are going in your relationship, then you can be more present and in the moment and just enjoy quality time together and know that there is a time set aside to talk about difficult topics. The second reason why I think these are just amazing is because a lot of topics in relationships are actually really difficult to discuss.

Like, sex is a difficult conversation for a lot of couples. I have worked with some couples where one partner has never had an orgasm, has never felt like their partner was concerned about their sexual satisfaction, and they had never had a conversation about it or had a conversation about what that person liked sexually. And so this can be kind of a. For some people, sex is a very taboo topic. So setting aside a time to talk about things like sexual is important. Other difficult topics might be unresolved fights.

Resolving Conflict: Keep Relationships Strong

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:05:47]:
So often people want to move on from the conversation. They don’t like fighting, but because it was unresolved, it’s still lingering emotionally for them. And so it just kind of builds up inside, builds up resentment comes out later in unexpected times. And so when there is a dedicated time, when you both are not in the heat of the moment to talk about unresolved conflicts and fights, that is really helpful to know that there’s a time and a place for you to come back to that. The third reason why these are amazing is because it helps keep the two of you on the same page together.

And so other things that you might cover, not just like difficult topics, but might be like financial planning, which I’m going to do a whole episode on couple finances here In a couple episodes. But, you know, do you want to buy a house? Do you guys need to save for a down payment like this? You guys can be on the same page together around how much you want to spend on a house, planning for, saving up for that, and it kind of is just a time for the two of you to get on the same page regarding whatever it is that needs to be talked about.

Another great one where these are helpful for being on the same page is when it comes to kids, to do we want kids? When do we want to get pregnant? Those types of things to also, how do we want to handle teaching kids chores to how do we want to discipline kids together? And trying to get on the same page with aspects related to parenting.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:07:37]:
So those are just a couple of examples. So when we do our relationship meetings, this is kind of the agenda that we go through. We first start with a recap of what has happened since the last meeting. So if we went out of town or if we traveled, we would kind of just talk about that.

It’s mostly to kind of refresh our minds about what has happened in the past month. If we had a date night that we really liked, we might talk about it. If something else really big happened, like our dog died, we might mention that. But we just do this kind of like, recap of things from the last meeting.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:08:25]:
We also check in on progress on any goals that we had set. So in talking through all of these topics, which I’ll go over in just a second, we end up setting goals of things that we want to accomplish over the next month. Sometimes they’re really small, like, our microwave just broke, which is, you know, really annoying because, well, for me, it’s because I can’t heat up my coffee.

So I guess that just means I have to drink my coffee faster. But it’s really annoying. While microwave is out of commission. So. But that maybe would be something that would end up on one of our goals would be like, okay, Liz, can you figure out what we need to do to replace the microwave or get it fixed? Other things, like when we were.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:09:18]:
When we were getting ready to get married and we were planning our wedding, these were really helpful too, because we could delegate between the two of us who was going to do what, and then a month later, we could check in about the progress towards those goals and getting ready for the wedding and be on the same page together about that. So we do a recap and then we talk about progress on any goals that we have set.

And then we go through and we Create our agenda of things that we want to talk about. And so we have some standard kind of broad topics that we go through. And then we go in and we fill in like if there’s something specific in that topic that we want to talk about. And then after we create our agenda, then we go through and we discuss everything. So let me talk a little bit about some of those broad topics. We always talk about quality time because that is my love language.

Quality Time Planning & Vision Insurance

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:10:15]:
So we talk about how is, how are we doing with the amount of quality time we’re spending and how is the quality of our quality time together. And then we sometimes use that for planning for the next month. What are some things that we think would be fun date nights or things to do for quality time together. Another category we have is health. So like I have to get new glasses soon and I realized that I don’t have vision insurance.

There is a way for military spouses to get vision insurance, but when I got set up with Tricare and I got the, and I got set up with the dental insurance also, they never told me and they, they actually said, oh, we don’t offer vision insurance. And I just recently found out, okay, actually there is a way for spouses and dependents of active duty military to get vision insurance through, through benefeds, which is the insurance that is done for federal employees, civilian employees, in case you’re curious. So like this is something that I would talk about me personally under a health category.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:11:33]:
I suppose it could also be under a financial category. It might fit either way. So quality time, health, family updates. If there’s stuff going on like with my mom or my dad or my siblings, or if there’s something going on with my husband’s family, this is where we give family updates or family who’s going to come visit if we’re going to go visit them, things like that.

We also have a category for updates for other relationships. We tend to use this category for like just updating each other on how our social life is going. Like what friends we’re really clicking with, who we want to invest more in either as a couple, for having couple friends or individually who we’re connecting with or hobbies that we’re getting into, things like that. But if you were in a non monogamous relationship and had other partners, then this would be maybe an area to talk about that as well.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:12:42]:
We have a category for sex and physical intimacy to talk about how that’s going. We have one for travel because we, we decided like we want to travel and one of the things we really love to do together is go visit national parks. And there’s like a little passport book that you can get to go visit national parks and you get like a passport stamp in your book when you’ve gone to visit. So we’ll just talk about, like, our travel plans and plan out which places we want to prioritize and things like that.

We have a category for finances. So just for us personally, the way we decided to do this is we actually decided to have two meetings, our relationship meeting and a finance meeting as a separate meeting where we go through and we balance our budget. You certainly could add that in to this meeting or use it for any quick updates regarding money that’s not actually balancing the budget. And then we have a category for needed discussions.

Resolving Conflicts and Future Planning

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:13:46]:
And this is where you could talk about unresolved fights in terms of can we get to a resolution, come to an agreement on something that we want to do or how we want to deal with the fight. And then we could also talk maybe about how did the fight go? Did we do good at fighting? You know, did we both feel respected and cared for even though there was a disagreement, or did it get kind of ugly? How do we want to fight better in the future? What could we have done differently?

So sometimes we’ll talk about the process of how a fight went, but also we’ll talk about just other things that need to be discussed. Maybe family planning for us falls into this category. Our timeline for having kids. It’s, you know, it’s, do we want to wait before? Like, do we want to wait until after I’m done with my PhD program or not?

That’s something we might talk about and, you know, yeah, just any sort of needed discussions. Like, I think when we. When Bella, who is my therapy dog in training, she’s a goldendoodle and she is a year old this month in July of 2021. And when we first got her, we needed to get a fence put in.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:15:08]:
And so it took a while to find somebody to put a fence in. And we talked to different fence companies. And so, like, that would have maybe fallen in this category of a needed discussion. So if you want the full list that we use for our marriage check in meetings, you can see the show notes where there is a downloadable form for that. But then after. So we. So let me just recap. So we do a recap, actually, in our meetings.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:15:38]:
We start with a recap and then we talk about progress towards any goals. Then we set our agenda. Then after setting the agenda, we Go through and we discuss all the topics, we set our new goals, and then we end on a reconnect, which is where we go on a date together, basically. Sometimes that’s maybe it could be like cuddling and watching a movie.

It could be going out on a walk together. It could be going out to dinner, going to see live music, going to a festival. There are lots of different ways you could reconnect, but we make sure to end on that because sometimes these meetings, especially if they have a lot of emotional content to them, they can be kind of draining. And it’s nice to be able to end on a positive note where you guys feel closer together.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:16:38]:
And so that is the idea behind the reconnect. You want to be ending in a way that brings the two of you together, especially if it was a harder meeting emotionally. So sometimes these might take us an entire afternoon or an entire morning. So we usually plan for maybe three hours and then at least an hour for reconnecting. And so we have had meetings that take. Take that long. If there is a lot to discuss and plan for, like when we were planning for our wedding or when there were a lot of emotional things to talk about. But we just had one, like, less than a week ago.

Download Marriage Check-In Template

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:17:28]:
And I want to say it took us an hour to get through our agenda. There are some times where it goes really quickly and then other times where it takes longer. But your action item for this episode is I want you to go to this episode’s show notes and download the template that that I use for marriage check in meetings. Because again, this is, I think, one of the top things I like to recommend that couples do.

And it’s one of the top things that I think has contributed to why my husband and I’s marriage is going so well and what allowed us to start things off really well at the beginning of our relationship and that we’ve just continued doing. So you go to communicateandconnect.com and look for episode 23 and you’ll be able to download the template that we use. So, yeah, I would love to know if you end up using this and you do a check in like this. I’d love to know how it goes for you.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:18:33]:
You can find me on social media, send me a message, tell me what you thought about it. All right, Have a great day.

Elizabeth Polinsky [00:18:48]:
I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If so Please take a second to go rate, review and subscribe so you get all of our future episodes. Make sure to check out the show notes to sign up for our FREE 10-week relationship email course.

This email course is really designed for people who are maybe having trouble with communication or connection in their relationship and helping them develop some quick wins right away to start improving it. While I am a therapist, this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not considered therapy and it should also not be a replacement for therapy. If you think you need a professional of any kind, you should definitely go find one. Until next time.