Every year, millions of adults begin making promises they want to keep in the new year. I am a bit conflicted about whether this is a futile attempt at self-improvement or the perfect reset after a long twelve months.
Most New Year’s resolutions never make it out of the month of January. We’ve all seen how most gyms are at their busiest in January, but the traffic tends to die off by March. My husband and I used to be these people. We would have a list of resolutions, like cutting out sugar, meal prepping, investing more, etc., but when December came around, these wish-list items, which never really meant very much to us, had unsurprisingly fallen by the wayside. Life gets in the way, and the more important priorities of raising children and having a happy marriage took precedence over the surface-level promises.
So we made a change. We don’t do New Year’s resolutions anymore. That is not to say that we don’t work to better ourselves by working out or eating healthy after the never-ending treats that accompany Thanksgiving and Christmas. We also don’t fool ourselves into thinking that we will successfully complete any typical resolutions.
Instead, every year at the end of December, we talk about our marriage. We’ve found that the best way to raise loving children is for us to love each other well, and taking an honest account of how we’ve done in this area of our lives is the best way we can set our family up for success in the year ahead. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)
If you’ve ever read my Good Life newsletter for the Daily Caller, you know that my husband travels a lot for work. The decision to start talking about our marriage came after a particularly long year of constant international travel, after I had just given birth to our fourth daughter.
His travel made me disconnect from him. In turn, he became resentful of my distance. For two people who had always been extremely close and had weathered some pretty harsh storms early in our marriage, this felt like a death sentence for the life we had created with each other. It’s been so long now, but I still remember him sitting me down after the ball had dropped, telling me that we needed to fix this.
This is when the tradition began. Every year we talk about our marriage. We tell each other all the ways we loved each other well, the times we supported each other during moments of weakness or despair, every time we brought joy into each other’s lives when we least expected it or needed it most.
Then comes the hard part. After all the praise is over, we begin to discuss how we think we can improve in the new year.
This is where you have to be the most careful and delicate. We never accuse each other or play the blame game. This isn’t a moment to air your grievances or demonize your husband or wife. It’s a time for self-reflection. Which is why he never tells me what I can improve; instead, he tells me what he sees about himself — and I do the same about myself. (ROOKE: Raise Your Children With True Love Before It’s Too Late)
By avoiding the finger-pointing trap that couples sometimes fall into, each person must take an honest look at their own actions and make a renewed promise to love, cherish and protect the other in the coming year. The exercise has brought us closer together. This also doesn’t have to be a strictly December/January activity, either. Couples should do this at various times throughout the year to ensure their connection stays strong.
New Year’s resolutions can often be surface-level wants that don’t mean much for personal improvement. This year, I encourage you to find something you can do that will enrich your life in a way that makes the other resolutions tend to happen organically anyway.
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