Author: http://www.AskDoctorMax.com
If you describe the perfect day together, what does it include? Is it a trip to the spa, a ball game with great seats, a quiet evening without the kids (or maybe one with the kids), or maybe it is just a day where you don’t have to do anything and can just lie in bed. If you asked your partner to answer the question, what would he or she answer as the way to spend a perfect day? There is no right or wrong answer, and if you ask a hundred different people, you may very well get one hundred different answers.
Discussing fun and free time can get some couples really aggravated, while other couples want to reminisce about their weekend hiking trip or painting the kitchen together. Why do you think that is? If you add up all the time that you are at work, sleeping, taking care of the children (if you have any), running errands, cleaning, or doing something that you don’t want to do, it ends up being the majority of our days. Let’s face it; most of us don’t have a lot of free time to ourselves to do what we want, and most of us don’t spend a lot time with our partners.
David and Selena
David and Selena are a couple that has been married for two years. Selena and David both work full time, and Selena just started to go back to school part time for her master’s degree. Because of this, she doesn’t have any free time anymore. David feels a bit lonely and wants to spend more time with his wife. He realizes that this situation is temporary, but he just wants a couple of days here and there that they can spend together.
What do you think about this couple’s problem? If you don’t have a lot of time, can you still make your marriage work? If your partner is doing something to better themselves, can you fault them for not spending a lot of time with you? If you don’t have a lot of time, is there anything that you can do to keep your marriage happy?
Fun and Friends
Having fun in our life doesn’t just mean having fun with our spouse. Most of us have several close friends that we like to spend time with, and that we get along with because we have things in common. When we are just starting out in our adult life, we usually have friends that we like to go out with on the weekend or people who went to the same college as we did. When we are a bit older, we find friends that have children that are the same age as ours so we can compare notes.
What happens when your partner doesn’t like the friends that you are hanging out with? Do you ditch your friends for your partner? Look at this couple and see if you can give them good advice.
Mike and Andrea
Mike and Andrea have been dating and living together for about five years. They like to go out with their friends, and Mike has two friends that he likes to see after work or on the weekends a couple of times a week. The problem is: Andrea hates them. She has valid reasons for not liking them, and just doesn’t want Mike to hang around them anymore.
Mike and Andrea are always fighting about this. Mike has been friends with these guys for a long time. If Andrea doesn’t want to go out with them, he thinks it is ok, but he doesn’t think that she should be able to tell him not to go out with them.
What would you do? Do you let your spouse go out with his or her friends alone? Do you have many friends that your partner hates? How do you work around this problem?
In my newest book, I give couples a chance to learn how to get a great marriage . What this entails is accepting your spouse 100% for who they are and at the same time accepting yourself 100% for who you are. I call this the Intimacy Paradox, because it is the key to getting a great intimacy. Do you think that this paradox can help Mike and Andrea? Could it help your marriage?
Your Marriage Blueprint
Another thing that I discuss in my book is the marriage blueprint. What does your marriage blueprint say about what you like to do with your free time? If you don’t know about marriage blueprints, it is something that I have my clients that come to me for private sessions. I am now sharing these blueprints with everyone, and it is really simple for you to choose what type of person you are. These marriage blueprints are based on the way that our beliefs are formed from the time that we are young. Our beliefs are then changed over time, by observations that we make from watching our friends, and how we behave and act in other relationships. Finding out your marriage blueprint can be the first step on getting your marriage back on track.
If you or your spouse is a Wild Thing, you love your free time, and practically live for it. You are adventurous and want to try new things whenever you can. If you do the same thing over and over again, you are probably going to be very bored. Keeping your fun time fun and adventurous is the most important thing for you, even more important then spending it with your spouse.
For Blissmates, you also enjoy experiencing a new adventure like wild things do. However, you want to spend this time with your spouse as much as possible. You love new adventures and want to live your life as full and exciting as possible.
Pilgrims have one thing that they focus on during their lives, and spend a lot of their free time concentrating on this one aspect. Depending on their focus, some pilgrims might sacrifice their comfort and spend their free time working on their passion. If you are a pilgrim and your spouse has a different marriage blueprint, it may be very difficult for the other to realize why exactly you are spending all your time on one thing.
If the focus of your free time is backing a batch of cookies for your family, visiting your great aunt in the nursing home or helping your brother-in-law paint his garage, you are probably a believer of the Big Heart Family marriage blueprint. Spending the majority of your free time with your spouse and family is great, if both of you want to do it.
One of the strongest of the blueprint types is the Pioneers. Like pilgrims, pioneers also give themselves to a cause, but unlike pilgrims, they tend to be really solitary people. If you are married to someone who is a pioneer, you probably know that they are fixed on something, and tend to spend a lot of time on doing this.
Visionaries have ideas on how the world should be, and they often spend their free time working towards this cause. If both couples believe in the same time, they are really happy doing it together, but a problem can arise when one of them believes in something that the other doesn’t. Visionaries are passionate, and tend to spend a lot of time following their one passion.
Another of the Marriage Blueprint families is the Golden Rule Family. These families really believe in fairness and what is right; they also tend to want to spend their free time with their spouse or significant other. If one of the partners wants to do something and the other one doesn’t, the golden rule family will sacrifice his or her free time, and do that something with his or her spouse. In return though, the golden rule family will expect his or her spouse to give up their free time sometime in the future.
Finally, the Royal Family usually wants to increase their social status, so any free time that they have, they will usually spend it trying to do that. They might be attending social functions, doing charity work, playing a round of golf or attending their children’s PTA meetings. Anything that will help the network with people and get their face out in the open is what they want to be doing.
Now that you’ve had a chance to look at the eight different marriage blueprints, which one do you think you are? Is your spouse in the same blueprint family as you?
Our blueprints are based on some of the things that we experienced while we were growing up, can you see how your blueprints were developed? What affected them? Are you surprised at how much you are like your parents, or how much you have rebelled against them? Share your feelings on leisure and what you and your significant other do together. Do you have rules in your life about how to spend your free time? ----------- Get Your Own Free Personalized Marriage Blueprint Evaluation at http://www.MarriageBlueprint.com.
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